Kick-Ass Kinda Girl

by Kathi Koll

  Dancing on the veranda

  “Don, what do you think we do this again in February?”

  “Yes,” he quickly mouthed. Our new normal was at its best.

  I called my brother and said, “How about you fly down here and spend a week with us before all the family commotion starts?” He was never one for change or flexibility, and the thought of quickly jumping on a plane was a stretch, but I convinced him. I could always convince my big brother; I had him wrapped around my little finger. At the same time, a friend and her daughter-in-law asked if they could spend a few days with me. I didn’t tell my brother until he arrived that a bit of his time was going to compete with two other guests. He wasn’t happy about it at first, but when they arrived, he fell head-over-heels for the daughter-in-law. I don’t mean in a romantic way, but he just adored everything about her. It was sweet to watch, and she was a good sport paying a lot of attention to him. The night before he left, he hosted all of us for dinner at the One and Only Palmilla. Don sold the hotel years earlier, and to his dismay, the words ‘One and Only’ were clunkily attached. I hadn’t seen my brother having so much fun in a long time. There was lots of laughter, and the conversation was flowing from one topic to another. The next morning as he was leaving the house, he wrapped his arms around me and said, “This was one of the best vacations I’ve ever had.”

  I assumed he was going to have Thanksgiving with friends, but learned later he didn’t. Rogelio, who had worked for me and Don for years, picked him up from the airport. A year later, Rogelio told me that when my brother Don got in the car, he went on and on about how fun the week was but turned serious when he said, “I’m worried about my sister. Living with her for the week opened my eyes to how truly difficult her life is. What will happen if I die before Don? Who will take care of my sister?”

  I understood exactly how he felt. My biggest fear was what would happen to my husband, Don, if I died first. Who would take care of him? Rogelio tried to put my brother’s mind at peace, reminding him I had loving and involved children who would always look after me. He wasn’t convinced. He was worried he wouldn’t be there. “I’ll take care of Mame,” Rogelio assured him.

  Why is the last day of a vacation always the most beautiful? The day that makes you feel like you haven’t done nearly what you’ve wanted to do and every last idea needs to be squeezed in as if it’ll never happen again.

  I awoke earlier than usual. The lace curtains were drawn, but through them I could make out the silhouette of palm trees swaying in the cool Baja breeze. The sun was just coming up. Don’s dialysis had already started, and as I opened my eyes, he was staring at me. I wondered how long he had been looking at me and what thoughts were going through his mind. Once he knew I was awake, he simply smiled and mouthed, “I love you.” I pulled myself closer to him and slowly kissed his lips. Over his shoulder I could see the sun floating on the horizon with moored fishing boats bobbing in the water. How could a day start out any better? The silent minutes of the morning were always my favorite, and the knowledge of other people in the room had long ceased to bother me. I knew how to blank them out of my mind and give us stolen little moments that were our treasured little secret.

  Leaving the house in Mexico was always bittersweet. There wasn’t time for therapy or lounging by the pool, but there was time to sit together on the veranda until the transport ambulance arrived. My daughter Jennifer her husband, Rick, and their children were still at the house. Together we lingered after breakfast. Don seemed to savor every last moment.

  I could barely hear the telephone ringing in the background, competing with the waves crashing on the rocks below. Yolanda, who has worked for me for many years, came out of the kitchen and said, “Señora Koll, your son, Kevin, is on the phone.”

  “Hi, Kevin, how was your flight home?” I asked.

  “Everything was fine. When are you coming back?” he questioned with an urgency in his voice.

  “The ambulance is outside, and we’re just about to get Don on the stretcher and drive to the airport,” I answered.

  “How long do you think it will take you?” he asked.

  “I guess door-to-door we’ll be back within four or five hours, why?”

  “I was just wondering,” he said, but I sensed something wrong in his voice. It just wasn’t a normal conversation and quickly became apparent he was trying to keep something from me.

  “Kevin, is everything OK?”

  “Aww, Mom, Uncle Don tripped and has gotten hurt,” he answered with a noticeable quiver in his voice.

  “Not again. I keep telling him he needs to use the cane you gave him. The neuropathy in his feet is causing him a lot of trouble, and he’s going to break a hip or something. Put him on the phone.”

  “He can’t come to the phone, Mom.”

  “What do you mean he can’t come to the phone? Put him on the phone. I need to talk to him.”

  “The paramedics are here checking him out, so he can’t talk to you.”

  “What?” I was getting an uneasy feeling in my stomach. “Well, put the phone up to his ear.”

  “Mom, he’s in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Please hurry home, Mom. I think you need to hurry.”

  Kevin caught me off guard. It couldn’t be that serious. It just had to be my brother’s urgency for me to get back. He never let the doctors do anything on him without my OK. Once, he was in recovery after a surgery, and the morphine was causing problems. He wouldn’t do anything for the medical staff until I arrived. He was insistent that I sign off on everything while he wasn’t in peak condition.

  I didn’t know what to think or which way to turn. Jennifer and Rick had been intently listening to my conversation. By the time I got off the phone, Jennifer was crying. “Mom, has something happened to Uncle Don?”

  “Something’s always happening to him. I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said, “but Kevin says we should hurry.”

  I didn’t want to think anything had happened, and sounding confident made me feel like it hadn’t. Jennifer and her family were about to leave for their flight home, and I figured we’d land in LA near the same time to go to the hospital and see what was going on.

  Don had also witnessed my conversation. “What’s going on with your brother?” he mouthed.

  “I’m not sure, Don. All I know is I need to get home.”

  I called Dr. Shpiner at UCLA and asked if he could call the emergency hospital in Orange County my brother had been taken to. The ride to the airport in the ambulance was much different this time. Normally, I sat next to Don, reliving the fun weeks we had just enjoyed, trying to get his mind off his uncomfortable and bumpy drive. This time there was a silence and uncomfortable thickness in the air. The ride seemed like it was taking forever. Thoughts were going through my mind that had no business being there. Thoughts I didn’t want and thoughts I never believed would really come true. Dark thoughts that couldn’t be true. Nothing bad could happen to my brother. I felt so helpless. The other part of my soul was struggling, and I wasn’t with him. I had to get home; he needed me. I knew he was scared without me being there to let him know all was OK.

  We got to the airport and through security in record time. Just as the door to the plane was closing, my phone rang. An aching feeling pulled at my stomach, a feeling so painful I didn’t want to answer the phone. “Hello?”

  “Kathi,” Dr. Shpiner’s voice rang in my ear, “I talked to the doctor at the hospital. For all practical purposes, your brother is gone. He’s still alive, but won’t be for long. I’m so sorry.”

  “No, no, no,” I cried. This couldn’t be happening. “No, God, please don’t take him from me. Please don’t take him from me.” It was apparent to everyone within eyesight of me that what I had heard wasn’t good. I didn’t want to share this with Don. He was too fragile to hear such devastating news. I didn’t know how it would affect him. At the same time, I was falling apart in silence. I couldn’t let him see what was happening to me, but the
reality was that it felt like I was trying to hang on to space by the tips of my fingers. A space that wasn’t there. There was nothing.

  The DK medical team sat motionlessly looking down at the floor, and I felt so alone. Every once in a while I caught the eyes of one of them glancing towards me, and they passed a slight, comforting smile my way. No one talked. There was nothing to talk about. I couldn’t ask Don for strength as I sat next to him in his fragile condition. I couldn’t call my brother for help. I didn’t know where to turn, other than to look straight ahead and think, try to make sense and reason out of what I was living. There was no sense. There was no sensibility. Why was God taking the other most important person in my life away from me?

  Don and Kathi in Cabo

  The flight home was the longest flight I’ve ever experienced. The normal two hours felt like a detour through Purgatory. When we finally landed, my cell phone started ringing. It was Kevin. “Mom, hurry. Mom, you have to hurry.”

  I drove down the freeway as fast as I could. It was the same freeway I had driven my entire life, the same freeway I had driven in the same state of mind six and a half years earlier trying to get to my husband. Time had become a time bomb. Kevin stayed on the phone, giving me updates and directions. Softly and with a true sense of sorrow in his voice, he repeatedly said, “Are you almost here, Mom? You need to hurry, Mom.”

  I was confused about why my brother had not been taken to Hoag, the hospital near our home, until I found out it wasn’t a critical care hospital, so he was taken to the one that was. I had never been there, and I was overcome with frustration having to find my way to a completely foreign place. I was tearing through unknown streets, scared I wouldn’t get there in time. But in time for what? My mind was racing with all sorts of thoughts, mostly that what was happening wasn’t really happening. I needed more time. He couldn’t leave without a proper goodbye.

  When I reached the hospital, Kevin and his wife, Melissa, were waiting for me on the front steps. They were visibly shaken, and the severity of what I was about to see was written all over their faces.

  We hugged tightly for a brief moment before they led me into the hospital, down the corridor, and through the tightly secured ICU doors. As we walked into my brother’s room, Kevin softly said, “Uncle Don, my mom is here. I told you she would get here.” The lights were dim, and other than the melodic hum of the respirator, there was a deafening silence. My brother was on life support.

  I laid my head on his chest as tears welled up in my eyes. I loved him so much. My entire life with him passed in front of me in slow motion. I felt his hand walking me into my new school. I saw him swimming towards me in the pool. I saw the smile on his face when I got my first car. I saw him at the hospital for the birth of my first baby. I saw everything in a matter of moments. I raised my head and squeezed his hand as I whispered in his ear how much I loved him and thanked him for the life he had given me. His breathing changed. He was trying to say something. He knew he was loved.

  Monsignor Baird from my church in Newport Beach arrived. Surrounded by my three children, Jennifer, Kevin, and Brook, and my daughter-in-law, Melissa, whom Uncle Don adored, he was given his last rites. I know it was just as he would have wanted it. Prayers for the repose of his soul and the closest, most important people in his life with him. Within minutes he was gone.

  When I look back, I think about how much I would have changed. I would have given my brother a consistent slot of time every week, written in ink on the calendar. The intention was there, but time slipped away so quickly with all that was going on with my husband, Don. I did talk to my brother almost every day and see him most weeks, but I’ve learned that consistency for someone ill or lonely is much better. That standing date is always there.

  13

  THE NEXT ROOM

  “I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was.

  I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.”

  —Henry Scott-Holland

  The five of us walked out of the room. It was so hard to leave him there all alone. He couldn’t be gone. He was just sleeping. No, he was gone, and the deep sorrow we all felt was indescribable. We huddled together in a circle in the hallway with our arms tightly wrapped around each other. The tighter we hugged the harder we cried. I don’t think I ever felt closer to my children.

  None of us could bear the thought of leaving him in this strange place. I don’t think we believed the reality of what was happening and were waiting for something miraculous to take over. We couldn’t lose him like this. We needed more time to tie up all the loose ends. We had so many questions for him, now forever unanswered. We wanted to spend more days just focused on him. He needed us; we needed him. My brother, their Uncle Don, the strength of our little family. We walked down the long corridor and out into the cold wet air, shivering. I’m not sure if it was from the weather or from the unfathomable sadness chilling us to the bone.

  Jennifer and Brooke said they’d come home and stay with me to help with the next steps. A funeral was what they meant. My next step was breaking the news to Don.

  I wasn’t sure how this would affect Don emotionally. I walked into our home around 1:00 AM, took a deep breath, and headed straight down the hallway towards our bedroom. All the lights were on, but the house was very quiet. Everyone there had been waiting for my news, hoping it wasn’t what they feared. I peeked into our bedroom and saw Don still awake, looking up at the ceiling.

  “Why isn’t Don asleep yet, and why is he still in the clothes he wore coming home from Mexico?” I asked the nurse.

  “He refused to change. He doesn’t want anyone near him,” she answered tearfully. “He’s been waiting for you, Kathi.”

  I slowly walked into our room, dreading the difficult task ahead of me.

  I lay down next to Don, put my arms around him and whispered what happened into his ear. I held him tightly, as tight as I ever had, and quietly cried myself to sleep.

  Within a few short hours, the morning light filled our room with sunshine and warmth. I was still clinging to Don and thinking about how the room had always been so cheerful with its soft yellow walls and view through the trees towards the mountains and the Pacific beyond. I closed my eyes and thought about the first morning Don and I had lived in the house.

  “You’ll never sit in the garden,” I could hear Don saying. “You’ll think it’s too cold out there with the westerly wind blowing off the ocean.”

  “Don, there’s a mountain range in between. I don’t think we’ll feel the cool westerly.” We never did and spent years in that beautiful garden from sunup to sundown. I didn’t see the beauty of anything this day. I was numb from a reality I once again found myself having to face. A reality that was creeping in and filling my heart with a pain that felt like a thousand needles piercing its core. It was a new day to live, a new day to challenge never-ending obstacles with newfound successes, but I didn’t have the courage to face the day this time. Don was once again staring at me. I watched him through my barely open eyes, hoping he’d think I was still asleep. I couldn’t let him see me falling apart.

  I sprang out of bed and quickly ran into my small bathroom. My only refuge. I sat on the floor, head buried in my hands, and wept. “God, why do you keep doing these things to me?” Once again, I found myself in a sea of sorrow.

  I pulled myself together and tiptoed past Don without him seeing me. I found my girls in the kitchen, eyes red and swollen. Neither had slept.

  The three of us sat around the kitchen table in disbelief. I don’t know what I would have done without them. Their presence was the force that helped me start the torturous exercise of planning the funeral.

  I knew the one spot my brother would love to have his funeral would be at his alma mater, Loyola High School. I made a few calls, and within a couple of hours, we were in the rectory planning the last celebration of Uncle Don’s life. T
he school didn’t look like one would expect in California. It could have easily been in the middle of Connecticut.

  By the time I got home, I was exhausted. The adrenalin I had been running on was completely out of fuel. Even collapsing onto my bed was too much energy.

  I could feel Don’s eyes watching me. The moment he caught my glance, he mouthed, “What happened to your brother?”