by Mark Miller
I had barely walked through the hospital doors when I saw the curly head and glasses turn toward me. He was standing there with the same awful woman he’d been holing up with for a year, the one who kept calling on the phone, who had accompanied him to Father’s Day the year before, his enabler. Colin was so lost. Maybe some part of him was there to connect, to feel close to family, some buried, barely alive fragment of his spirit that hadn’t been burned away, but mostly he was there for his own selfish reasons. Junkies only know how to support their own habit, not other people. He was primarily there for personal gain, and he knew what we all thought of him, which made him mean and caustic. I was maybe two steps in the door when he made a crack about my heart surgery and asked, “Did they finally fix that weak heart of yours?” He dropped a hand on my shoulder, which I threw off with such force it made everyone in the lobby gasp. His girlfriend stood up and stretched an arm across him as he offered up the most ridiculous attempt at hurt feelings.
“Come on, Mark, I was just busting balls, you’re my brother.”
Cheap shot. It worked. Hearing him use what I had always wanted him to find important as a dagger to get at me was intolerably painful.
“Colin . . . You stay the fuck away from me.”
His girlfriend opened her mouth to speak and I immediately held one finger up in her face and shushed her. I hadn’t stopped walking.
I entered the room to see my dad, his face furrowed in anger.
“You don’t let that sneaky bastard or that trashy woman with him anywhere near the house, do you understand me? Keep them as far away from the house as possible. He gets nothing.”
This comment hit me like a wrecking ball. “He gets nothing” meant my father was referring to the divvied-up property after he and my mom were gone. . . .
“I won’t, Dad. I won’t.”
I wish I could tell you we had a heart-to-heart conversation, my father and I. I wish I could tell you that we shared a tender moment. That he apologized, or that he even hugged me. But he didn’t. We shot the shit as per usual, and I walked out. I hugged my mother and left, ignoring my brother and his tears, which could have been genuine, though I doubt it.
That was the last conversation I had with my father. By Wednesday, April 18, the doctors had been saying that the end was on the horizon. All he really did anymore was lie there and utter these terrible guttural groans, like some great dying dinosaur. That night I sat by his bed. I had been doing as he asked, keeping Colin out of the house, though he had tried to come in so many times. My mother was already on a medication to reduce the amount of ammonia in her blood, a by-product of her lifetime of drinking. I had been trying to remind her to take it. I told my dad this. I told him how the Yankees were doing, his favorite team. The team he used to tell me stories about, how he used to sneak into games as a kid. He loved Joe DiMaggio. I told him about Ben, Patrick, and Ronan, his grandkids. How they were doing. How they missed him, how he had been such a good grandfather to them, strangely enough. Then this surge of something from deep inside of me welled up. I wanted to hug my daddy, but I couldn’t, so instead, I leaned as close to his ear as I could and I told him . . .
“Dad, I want you to know. I know you didn’t mean it. I want you to know that I forgive you, Dad. I forgive you. It’s okay, Dad. I forgive you.”
I had pieces of the speech he used to tell me he witnessed in person floating through my mind. The speech that Lou Gehrig gave when he had to retire. The speech that he made me memorize. I whispered a piece of it. . . .
“ ‘Today . . . I consider myself to be the luckiest man on the face of the earth.’ . . . Three forty career lifetime batting average, four hundred ninety-three home runs, he drove in one thousand nine hundred ninety-five runs and he played in two thousand one hundred thirty games consecutively, Dad. He only stopped because . . .”
I wish I could say that he opened his eyes, that he reached out his hand, that he let me know he heard me. Instead, he let out a terrible sigh, and Harry “Moose” Miller died.
I buried my father in St. Vincent Cemetery in the plot he had for my mother and himself. My mother was already making comments about how we should just go ahead and dig hers up, because she didn’t want to live anymore. She had totally given up. I had to plan the funeral, pay the hospital, the mortuary, etc. etc. . . . All while telling Colin to keep away, when all I wanted was for him to get his shit together and help me, be the brother I needed right now. The show he put on at the funeral with that woman was Oscar worthy. He made sure to shake everyone’s hand, cry on everyone’s shoulder, and talk about how he had always been so proud of his dad. More than half the people he laid this sad-son routine on came to me later to say, “I had no idea Harry had more than one son.” Little did they know.
I didn’t shed one tear. I couldn’t. Something inside me locked up when my dad died.
And 2007 was just getting started.
chapter eleven
Drink to me.
—PABLO PICASSO’S LAST WORDS
I have become a caretaker of last words. I wish I could say that more often than not, final words are meaningful, and relevant, and infinitely quotable, but they usually aren’t. Oscar Wilde’s reputed last words, “This wallpaper will be the death of me—one of us will have to go,” are probably fairly accurate and completely accidental. Dying people who take any amount of time to die usually know they are dying, but they don’t tend to know when exactly. Sometimes they get lucky enough that they pepper each encounter with amusing allusions and therefore get lucky, so that when the hammer finally falls, their last words are seen as deep and mournful. Something that lets us, the living, feel as though we have been privileged with a glimpse at the bridge that crosses between the planes of existence. That somehow we know by their words that they knew they were going and dug deep into the troughs of their collected knowledge and experience to gift us the real diamonds of a life lived. The truth is, more often than not, the final words are something like “Grab the bedpan” or “Can you ask the nurse for more water?” or “You know, I think I should rest, I don’t feel well.” The final words of a loved one aren’t usually the most important. What is, and what will keep you awake at night, is what your last words were to them.
Amy and I officially didn’t work anymore. We had stopped working long before, but right before my father got really sick it became abundantly clear that we were not going to make it work. I had fought it. I didn’t want to be like the man who had built up multiple families, only to skip out on them all, except for me, my mother, and my brother. But I also didn’t want to be like him and be the man who stayed out of obligation and just hated her. I didn’t want to become mean and awful to my children. I didn’t think it was in me to be that way, but knowing that I grew up with that as my option scared me, terrified me. I loved them too much to stay and risk finding out that that was in me. So while I was still in Pittsburgh after my father died, I was not playing husband or father. I had built a sort of cage around my heart. I spent a lot of time trying to handle the affairs left by my father, trying to coax my mother to want to live, and weirdly enough, drinking with my brother.
This was the only relationship I could have with either of my remaining immediate family. My mother was retreating. I hated that Colin drank or did any of the dumb shit he did, but after my dad died, I ran out of strength to push him out of my life. I ached for him. I saw how outside of the family he was, mostly by his own doing, but I found myself incapable of staying angry. For behind that anger was pain, years and years of pain and hurt, and the dam of anger I had walled it behind was cracking. I was exhausted. I just needed a friend. I just needed my brother, somehow. I took him the way I could get him, and even sank to his level to meet him there, and while I deeply regret signing off on his addiction by partaking in it, I don’t regret spending some time with him. It was all I had. It’s fucked up, what you will do for family.
My mother had no will left in her. The medication she was on, lactulose, a pow
erful drug used to treat complications due to liver disease, forced her to pass all the toxic crap in her body fairly violently, so she would just not take it. If she didn’t take it, her ammonia levels would climb sky-high and she got incredibly loopy. Both of my parents had been on a fast track to self-destruction since before I was alive. It’s been mentioned that the myriad of complications that I was born with are quite possibly related to the fact that my mother smoked and drank through her entire pregnancy. After my dad died, she started to wither, and it pissed me off incredibly. I remember one argument we had when I had decided to do some yard work for her and come inside for water, only to find her drinking at the kitchen table, barely able to form a coherent sentence. A lack of real food, not taking her medication, and drinking even more than usual rendered her a mumbling wet brain more times than I like to remember. I lost my temper.
“You know, I get that you never gave enough of a shit about us to fight for us when we were little, but the least you could do is fucking care about yourself enough to not fucking die in front of me. Can you do that, Mom? Can you do me that one fucking kindness?”
I never cursed in front of her. Cursing would earn me a shoe getting tossed at me. But this time I let fly. I wanted to scare her, to shock her, to fucking hurt her. The dirt on my father’s grave was still fresh and here she was trying her best to join him, and I couldn’t handle it. The next step was tying her bony body down and shoveling that medicine into her drawn face. I would have rather had her hate me and try to survive just to spite me, which she was very good at, than just let herself disappear. To my horror, she just turned her head to me as I stood there sweaty, red-faced, and trembling, and just blinked her big black watery eyes, as though she had no idea what I had just said. It wasn’t long before she was entering the hospital herself.
Once she had spent a few days in the hospital and her ammonia levels had been stabilized, it was amazing the person who emerged. She had no memory of my tantrum, or she didn’t mention it, and I was content to leave it that way. While in her hospital bed she called me in to have me sign some papers, giving me power of attorney. She laughed about it. How it was so unnecessary, but it needed to be done. She was released shortly after.
Mother’s Day came. I took her to a steak dinner and bought her her favorite movie at the time, The Notebook (I know, I know). We had a wonderful night. I remember feeling that I wanted for her to be happy. I wanted her to have a good night. I wanted her to have the best fucking night ever. It’s all I ever wanted for her. I wanted her life to be better, for her faith in herself to not have been squashed by a psychotic dictator of a man. I wanted for her to feel that it was safe to have feelings again; I wanted that for all of us. But I was willing to settle for knowing she’d had a nice Mother’s Day. I think she did. I hope so.
Two days later she went to a follow-up doctor’s appointment and was promptly readmitted to the hospital, which she was not happy about. My mother was seventy years old. She was old but not ancient. Up until my father had gotten sick, despite years of hard living, she had looked young for her age. Now, though lines were drawn on her face, she was still relatively full of piss and vinegar. She was angry at being in the hospital, and though she carried herself with a certain level of what she considered to be manners, she made no effort to conceal the fact that she didn’t think she needed to be there any longer. I visited her every day, and every day she let me know that everyone was overreacting and that she needed to go home. On the afternoon of May 18, I visited her and was told that she would be released later that day. We talked about nothing important. Nothing. She was flippant and bored. I had plans for later that day, so I waited patiently by the phone so I could pick her up and take her home before heading out. The call never came. That evening I started calling around, and no one in the hospital seemed to know where she was. I reached out to Amy, who wasn’t super fond of me at the moment but was able to find out more since she was a nurse within the same health system. Amy found out what floor she was on and the name of a doctor I needed to request to speak to. My temper was rising. . . .
I got the doctor’s primary assistant on the phone, who reassured me that my mother was being kept for observation. I pushed on her. I knew what my mother’s floor number meant. You cannot bullshit a person who has spent the better part of the last year in and out of hospitals. My mother was in the ICU. I needed an explanation, and I needed one for why no one had called me. The lady told me that there had been a mix-up, that each person responsible for notifying me of the change of plans had thought that the other was going to call me, so no one actually did. She also again reassured me that my mother was there only for observation, that the doctor would call me the following day.
Colin had been fluttering around all this time. He was mostly in Washington, DC, at least as far as I knew, but he had been calling a lot. I had been trying to make peace with him, but addicts don’t want peace, not while the drug is in charge. The most recent phone call had resulted in my hanging up on him after he actually said to me, “I can’t believe no one told me that she was in the hospital. You need to let me talk to her.” I had been standing right in front of her when I hit “end call.” I just couldn’t tolerate him. The unbearably melodramatic performance he had put on at my father’s funeral, crying on everyone, talking about how great my dad was and how he was so close to all of us, made me feel sick to my stomach, not because of what he had said, but because I knew what motivated him to do it right then. And always with that girlfriend, hovering, watching, picking what she wanted to claim as her own the minute no one was there to defend it, telling him what to say, keeping him sick. It’s like they were shopping for different things, one for goods, one for feelings. Just a pair of vampires. I wanted real interactions, a real connection with him. What he offered up were feelings with hooks attached, expectations attached, an exchange for goods and services almost. His love was the currency he offered up, expecting stuff in return. He was being controlled by a self-serving need inside him that was pushing him to just take from people. It hurt too much. I couldn’t deal with it.
The morning of May 19, the doctor called. I answered the phone and asked about my mother’s condition, how she was feeling, made some joke about her temperament. I was gifted with this gentle gem of a response: “Well, Mark, the truth is, it’s not a matter of if anymore, it’s a matter of when.”
The dam holding back the adrenaline in my body now had a crack in it. I felt like my veins were being flooded with black ice water, like some funnel of ocean was being brought up from the dark deep. I was shaking so hard I could barely hold the phone.
“What are you saying to me?” My voice was quivering and parched sounding. Anger surged and yanked in big oily waves through me as I realized I sounded like I was going to cry, and that couldn’t have been further from the truth. I didn’t want this “doctor,” this harbinger of shit and suffering, to think that I might have been crying. I wanted him to know that I was exactly who he should fear forever. That I had a world of seething darkness in me, a theme park of tentacled monsters squealing around inside my body, and they all saw him as prey.
I cleared my throat for good measure.
“She was being held for observation, that’s what I was told, so who fucking lied to me? And who fucked up exactly? Would that be you?”
“Mr. Miller, I am just trying to prepare you. Her condition is very poor. She doesn’t have long, and I want you to be aware so you can make arrangements.”
Quick side note—when people say “make arrangements,” they really are trying to cover their ass and let you know that maybe you want to schedule a session or two with the local head shrinker, because truth be told, there is nothing to fucking arrange really until that person is stone-cold dead. You can’t prepare the mortuary. It’s their fucking job to take in dead people, and hopefully you have a file that says exactly what that person wants done with their corpse after they are dead, so once that heart stops, it’s really a plug ’n’ play
of lawyers, funeral directors, etc. etc., and you just get to sign a lot of paperwork and a lot of checks. But until then, it’s a waiting game of the worst kind. And I, having done this before, knew this. The extended family were the only people left to inform, and in my family, the ones who needed to know already knew. They’d been watching each other die off for years. My mother had four sisters and two brothers, all of whom, save one brother, had died before she did, and he would pass the following year. She was next in line. This was not a surprise. This was expected. But it wasn’t expected today. There were no fucking arrangements to make. This is what we do. We bury each other. This cowardly piece of shit just didn’t know how to tell me kindly that my mother, the woman who brought me into this world, was slowly fading like the afternoon sun.
“I really appreciate that, doctor, I really do.” There was no masking the venom in my voice. I felt like one giant cancerous seething tooth-riddled bile duct. “Here’s what I’d love to know. I’d love to know exactly when between you holding her for observation and now that you determined that she was this sick. How exactly did you misdiagnose her that badly? You were going to fucking release her and now you’re fucking telling me she’s on her way out? Actually, you know what, fucking forget it, I’m coming to the hospital. If I see you, I’m going to carve her fucking name into your back, you fucking quack. You stupid piece of monkey shit motherfucker.” With that, I hung up.
