by Jason Good
Dad is standing on the ledge of a building. Behind him are the villains with guns, and below him, uncertainty. The transplant will throw his body into entropy, and given how good he feels, it’s hard to agree to a procedure that will certainly make him awful. That is the conundrum: being in remission is the primary requirement for getting a transplant—a life-threatening procedure that, if successful, requires a six-month recovery period during which Dad must take the precautions of a first responder to an Ebola outbreak.
He will be forbidden from going outside, but if he does, he will have to wear a HEPA mask. Not the 3M cotton masks worn by overly cautious Chinese women on the New York subway. No, his will be like a hazmat helmet, the kind that makes people look like human anteaters on a government contract to clean up asbestos.
In the house, he can’t be left alone. Mom can’t go to the grocery store or to Curves for her sweatless workout. Someone will have to be with him at all times, probably me, Lindsay, or one of his siblings. Perhaps the downstairs neighbor who smokes fish in an open oven at all times of the night could help, or maybe a random stranger off the street we pay ten dollars an hour to sit there and make sure Dad doesn’t contract a spontaneous infection or fall and bleed to death while watching CSI: Miami.
He will have to refrain from entering a room for five minutes after it has been vacuumed because of dust.
Oh my God. THE DUST.
He can’t touch meat, fresh fruit, or vegetables because of bacteria. Holy shit, the bacteria. He will be a man to whom the world has suddenly become poisonous.
There are other equally restricting guidelines, all of which I’m sure we will be able to bend eventually, but going in we have to prepare to follow them strictly. At a certain point, it’s hard not to think, “Why the hell would he do this?” He’s already almost seventy years old. How many good years does he have left? Is this any different from giving Mickey Mantle a new liver?
Dad has been deemed healthy enough for the procedure, but the chance that this will cure him is only 50 percent. No wonder he’s tempted to just stay on his current chemo and hope for a miracle. Even if the transplant is successful—that is, if Dad’s and Paul’s immune systems don’t have a full-out bar brawl over who was in charge—where will that put him? He might be cancer free, but at what cost? At what toll to his body and mind? At what toll to us as a family?
The alternative is equally ridiculous: staying on a relatively new drug, keeping his fingers crossed that it continues to work and does so longer than it was supposed to. But how long is long enough? What’s an adequate number of years to wring out of life? Seventy-two? Seventy-five? Some people get half that.
We’re in the casino again, facing people we don’t know and games we don’t quite understand. He has chips in his hand, but there is no safe bet. A 50 percent chance of being cured is also a 50 percent chance of not being cured, which will probably result in death from infection or via the charmingly named “graft-versus-host disease.”
I’ve read about this. The writer Susan Sontag, who suffered from the same condition, demanded a transplant despite having only a partially matched donor. Her son published an essay in the New York Times about sitting by helplessly as his mother’s body ate itself from the inside out. She died covered in sores and pustules, as if stricken by a medieval plague.
Thankfully, with Paul being a perfect match, we are in a slightly better situation. An acute rejection of the new stem cells is still possible but less likely. There is some counterintuitive science involved (I’ve learned that if science were intuitive, there wouldn’t be scientists). Apparently, a little rejection is good. As Dad’s immune system has a mild panic attack over the introduction of a new operating system, his body will kill off any remaining cancerous blood cells, like a startled blind man with a pistol shooting anything that makes a sound. It will be important that Dad’s new immune system not get its hands on a bomb. Doctors manage this balance with drugs, something to calm his white blood cells, Xanax for the immune system, or so I imagine it.
Dad has been thinking a lot about this, too. He and Mom met with the transplant coordinator at Stanford. The team is ready for him; all they need is for Paul to come to Palo Alto and undergo a few tests to determine his suitability. But Dad told them that he had to think about it some more. Sometimes easy decisions are the most difficult to make.
Lizards
Under the spell of the evil spirit that convinces people to make big changes at odd times (one that seems to have possessed Dad when he was my age), Lindsay and I decided, during all this, to leave our little New Jersey village. It was a town for people who worked in Manhattan, not for a comedian-turned-writer and a modern-dancer-turned-full-time mom. Lindsay and I had discussed this move for months, and over the summer of 2013, we hired some brawny dudes to pack our East Coast life in bubble wrap, and move it to Minneapolis.
I would have pushed harder for Oakland, to be closer to Mom and Dad, but it was too expensive, and after dozens of visits I still didn’t understand what people did in the Bay Area. It seemed like they spent most of their time parking, recycling, and determining the source of odd street smells.
Lindsay’s sister, brother-in-law, their two kids, and Lindsay’s mom all still live in Minneapolis. Lindsay went to high school in nearby Long Lake and has friends in the area. It’s affordable and has good schools. Plus, it’s a four-hour flight to Oakland, instead of the dreaded six from Newark. I saw Dad’s illness as a temporary situation for all of us, anyway. I figured if he died, we’d move Mom to Minneapolis, at least seasonally. She wouldn’t want to. She’d argue that she likes being alone. But I promised Dad that’s what I would do. It’s also possible that choosing Minneapolis over Oakland was a way for me to maintain some distance, to avoid becoming further consumed by Dad’s illness. My parents are in charge of their lives. I am in charge of mine. They try to be supportive. “Sounds great to us! You’ll have family around all the time,” Mom says. “Of course, you’d have that here, too, but we understand.”
“Do you have snowshoes yet?” Dad asks.
Mom updates her Facebook status to “Loving the sunlight and year-round 70 degree weather here!” I can’t take it anymore, so I text her:
Jason
I saw your Facebook post about how beautiful everything is
there. Are you trying to make me feel guilty?
Mom
Oh, God no! I was just really enjoying the weather! How’s
Minneapolis? Getting ready for winter?
Mom is unstoppable. When she emails me a real estate listing for a house near theirs, I respond, “Why did you send me this? We’re not moving to Oakland.”
“Oh, I know that! I just thought it was a pretty house.”
“This one looks nice, too,” I write back, attaching an advertisement for a villa in Spain.
She ignores it. “We’ll have to come out for a visit before it gets too cold.”
“It’s July,” I tell her. “You have plenty of time.”
I can tell that Mom and Dad are unhappy about all this, but they would never say so out loud. They rarely expressed any forthright concerns or negativity about my decisions. In movies, there are often strange scenes where fathers and sons have tender, contemplative moments. These usually take place on a boat dock, in a wheat field, or on a baseball diamond—someplace manly and trite. The father gives his son a piece of sage advice that the son finds difficult to understand. Years later, when the boy has become a man, he faces a predicament, and summons that wisdom and perseveres. We’re supposed to be touched, but I suspect we’re all rolling our eyes because nobody’s father ever does that.
I don’t believe Mom and Dad are intentionally passive-aggressive. It’s simply a side effect of holding in one’s opinions. They released me into the wild when they moved to Italy in 1990. They tagged me and watched my movements, but never intervened. Perhaps, for them, my life has been one long, ongoing anthropological experiment.
Twenty years ago when
I was distraught over the end of a five-year romantic relationship, Mom said, “Well, if it makes you feel better, Dad and I never liked her.”
“I thought you loved Amy,” I said. “She was so funny.”
“Really? You thought she was funny?” Dad said. “She was mentally ill.”
“What?”
“We were terrified you were going to marry her,” Mom added.
“You should have told me that!”
“Would it have changed your mind about her?” Dad asked.
“No.”
“Well, then, there you have it.”
Maybe in addition to the setting, it’s watching a son actually listen to his father that makes those movie scenes seem so absurd. Instead of telling me what to do, Dad learned it was more fruitful to plant seeds that made good choices easier to make.
In September, after settling into a new, cheaper, and Midwestern-sized home, the lizards come to see us. Thankfully, they make it before the temperature falls below fifty degrees, the point at which their trident-shaped tongues turn to icicles. Dad has been practicing his Minnesota accent, and uses it to quote Garrison Keillor ad nauseum. “So, are the men strong, the women good-looking, and all the children above average here?” He sounds more like Rick Moranis in Strange Brew than a Minnesotan.
Despite it being wonderfully crisp (warm enough for a light jacket in the evening and hot enough for short sleeves during the day), Mom and Dad pay the weather no compliments. Mom wraps herself in a shawl at 2 PM in silent protest. The leaves are orange and red, the maples still green. Our block is packed with kids named Beckett, Whitaker, Bennett, and so on. A few are already in their Halloween costumes, riding Razor scooters, and shooting each other with water pistols (and water semi-automatics). It’s like the 1950s, but in color, and no one is named Gary or Patty.
Halfway through their two-week visit, I slink up from my office lair in the basement to make coffee. I hear Mom and Dad arguing in their room. It’s technically the “master suite,” but Lindsay and I have yet to use it because we sleep upstairs with the boys like a litter of kittens.
Mom and Dad sound tense, and I strain to hear specifics, but can only make out tone. As I put milk in my coffee, I hear Mom yell, “Get out of here! Just get out of here!”
I leave the milk on the counter and dash back to the stairs, but Dad walks in before I can escape. “Your mother’s having one of her fits.”
“Yeah? About what?” I answer in a fake, carefree voice.
“Oh, who the hell knows? She says she wants to be alone, so I left her alone. You should go talk to her if you’re feeling brave.”
I find Mom pacing the bedroom, and walk past her to sit in the chair underneath the window. I’m a sit-first-and-ask-questions-later kind of man.
“Hi,” she says. “Sorry you had to hear all that.” Her face is red, hands trembling a bit.
“I didn’t hear much. What’s going on?”
“Every time we come here I say we should stay no more than two weeks. Then your father makes the reservations himself and it’s always for longer. I know you guys don’t want us here for that long. I’m sure Lindsay doesn’t want us here for longer than two weeks, but your father just thinks we can stay as long as we want, and I just don’t like it. There’s nothing for me to do here. I can’t go to Curves, and I can’t even go for a walk because I don’t know the neighborhood very well . . .”
Dad was right, she is having a fit.
“Mom, you guys can stay as long as you want, but I totally understand if you don’t want to stay this long.”
“You do?” She seems pleasantly surprised.
“I live here and don’t want to stay for two weeks sometimes. It’s chaos. Come back here to your room and read whenever you want. Everyone needs a break now and then.”
“See, Dad doesn’t get that. He doesn’t understand that I could want to be alone. He made me promise not to read while I’m here because it’s antisocial. But he watches so much TV! Isn’t that worse?”
“Well, he grew up in chaos. You and I didn’t.”
“You’re right. He likes it when everyone is talking over the TV. That’s exactly what his house was always like.”
“And nothing makes us more uncomfortable.”
“Yes!”
These meltdowns happen once or twice a year. Mom holds a lot in. When I try to talk with her about Dad’s condition, ask her how she’s feeling, she always turns it back on me by asking how I am feeling. Then she agrees with whatever I say. Dad has always argued that he and I are complicated and weak, and Mom is simple and strong. He means it as a compliment to all of us (I’ve argued, unsuccessfully, that he and I are indeed weak, but also simple). Maybe Mom doesn’t need to talk about things so much. I remember how stoic and focused she was when her father died. It wasn’t until she saw him in the funeral home—still and waxen—that she broke down. Her reaction was intense but short, like she’d decided to somehow let her emotions build up, release them in one ninety-second burst, and then never speak of it again.
I map out a couple of walking routes for her to our local downtown area, where there’s an Anthropologie, a Sur La Table, and a few boutiques. “I’ll deal with Dad,” I tell her. For the rest of the visit, she chooses when to play with Silas and Arlo. That is, she appears only when the kids aren’t being a pain in the ass. That is the advantage to being a grandparent: you can disappear when the screaming starts.
After his argument with Mom, Dad checks out, and spends the subsequent seven days watching CNN, going to Costco, and using every pot in the house to cook elaborate meals. No one trashes a kitchen like an amateur chef who knows he won’t have to clean up.
I always assumed that responsible “grown-ups” had good reasons for their behavior. By the time I turned thirty, I realized that adults are seldom driven by rational choice, but rather by mysterious forces that only psychologists and psilocybin mushrooms can sort out.
Instead of growing up, we simply become more aware of how ridiculous we are and learn to hide it. Maturing is nothing more than accepting how full of shit you are. A side effect of this is the realization that everyone else is full of shit, too, including your parents. It’s almost frightening that these flawed, ridiculous human beings were once in charge of feeding me and guiding me in the ways of the world.
I spent most of my life emulating Dad, but now, as I’ve limped from his shadow, I realize that I am not as much like him as I thought. I’m simply a combination of two very different people with a handful of miscellaneous, semi-functioning parts mixed in, just like everyone else.
As I transition from the immediate gratification (and sometimes horror) of stand-up comedy, to the delayed gratification (and relentless horror) of writing, I see how similar I am to Mom. In a subconscious, pre-emptive strike in the emotional battle of a future without Dad, my connection with her has grown over the past year. There’s no one else in the world with whom I feel more comfortable being silent. We’ve been emailing each other articles about the power of introverts, as well as various tests to determine one’s level of social comfort. She dislikes people more than I do, but it’s a close contest.
Socializing feeds Dad.
It depletes Mom and me. We’re both only children and value our alone time.
Dad hates being alone.
Mom and I hate small talk.
Dad loves it.
Mom understands when to let me be, but Dad has a knack for wanting to bond or chat at times when I’m burrowed deepest in my hole.
Mom always seems content. “She lives life so perfectly,” Dad has said. Aside from her beauty, Mom rarely makes a lasting first impression. She’s a wallflower, forced from the comforts of solitude by a lifelong partner who wants to party all the time. One must read a few chapters of Mom before getting sucked in, but Dad is an open book with a worn-out binding and Post-it notes smattered throughout: Here I am, everyone. Love me or hate me. Hurry up, I’m waiting!
Many of Dad’s biggest lau
ghs at parties come from repeating something Mom just muttered under her breath. On the rare occasion that she protests Dad’s blatant hacking of her best lines, he argues, “Well, Jody, you should have said it louder.”
This is one of the reasons they’ve stayed together so long. Two socially boisterous people would fight with each other for attention. Mom lets Dad have all of it. When two introverts partner for life, they often end up accumulating too many cats and become buried under trade periodicals.
An hour or so after my talk with Mom, I’m in my office, trying to write, but become distracted by my frustrations with Dad. It’s been over three months since we found out Paul was a match. Had Dad done the transplant immediately, he could be cured by now.
Dad knocks on the door. I know it’s him, because everyone else in my family barges in like they’re reporting a fire.
“So what was going on with your mom?” he asks, perhaps feeling a little repentant.
“She just wants to be alone.”
“But this is her family. How could she not want to be with her family?”
“That’s kind of what being alone means.” I tell him. “If other people are around, regardless of their relation to you, then you’re not alone.”
“Well, as long as you understand it.”
“If you want to be with your family so badly, maybe you should call Stanford and tell them you’re ready to do the transplant.” My nervous system is on high alert now. I probably shouldn’t have said that.
Dad stares at me for a few seconds and then slaps my desk. “Yup, that’s what I’m going to do.” Is this what he’s been waiting for? For me to just come out and tell him what to do. Why did I wait so long?
At the end of Mom and Dad’s visit, we speak briefly about Thanksgiving. They invite us to come out to San Leandro, but given that it is our first holiday in our new city, and we are surrounded—flanked, really—by Lindsay’s family, we decide to stay. Of course, there is no chance of Mom and Dad risking their lives to come to Minneapolis for what is sure to be an arctic November.
