Dog Medicine (7 page)

M
A
Y
1996

A few hours after I threw the pillow at my mom, she returned from her lunch and found me still in bed. She walked into my room, opened the windows, and left without saying a word. I appreciated her silence and the fresh air, the sound of the wind in the trees, the birds singing. Nature thrived in the forest outside my bedroom window, and life could go on while I slumbered. It really didn't matter if I was there or not. The earth would turn, the sun would rise, the moon would wax and wane. I found the continuity consoling and further proof that I need not be alive.

Hunger eventually pulled me out of bed and I went to the kitchen to pour a bowl of cereal. I ate sleepily at the kitchen table, and my mom sat across from me. The clock read 1:30 p.m. She had a cup of coffee and the newspaper. I didn't know what day it was, whether my mom had called in sick or it was a weekend.

“Lynn says hi,” she said, before taking a long sip of her black coffee. “She's glad you're home. She lived in New York for a few years and said she couldn't leave soon enough.” I stared blankly at the wall, swallowing a pang of defensiveness for Manhattan. Part of me loved New York—the energy, the potential, the noise. “Oh, and Dad called,” she said, holding the newspaper in front of her face. “He's looking into taking you up to Lake Beauchêne in a few weeks.”

Lake Beauchêne was a remote fishing preserve in Québec that my dad loved. He had taken Clay there every summer for the past few years. Sometimes my parents went with friends. I'd never
been. The last time my dad and brother went to the lakes, they took my brother's friend and his terminally ill father. This man, who had only a few weeks to live, wanted to spend some of his final days on these sacred waters in a boat with his son, to say words only the two of them and the loons would ever hear. I thought this was so beautiful and tragic, and I understood Lake Beauchêne to be the kind of place for special conversations.

I also knew that this would be my dad's attempt at an
I'll Save Julie
trip, but I didn't care. I was up for being saved. It was a thirteen-hour drive, and I wanted thirteen hours alone with my dad. I needed some time with him on a boat. I needed to be in a remote place with no interruptions, no work, just trees, birds, fishing gear, and my father's ear. I longed to hear the loons calling through the morning fog.

“Do you think fishing might be something you'd want to do?” my mom asked. I noted her overly careful wording.

“Sure, whatever,” I said. She pulled the newspaper down, squinted at me over her reading glasses, smiled slightly, and offered to take my empty cereal bowl. “Thanks,” I said, as I heaved myself up out of the chair and to the couch, where I disappeared into the television. I spent some time with MTV, then looked for a cheesy movie to watch. I stumbled upon
Some Kind of Wonderful
and curled into the couch, blissful at the escape.

The next several days resembled this one. I slept past noon and my mom tiptoed around me offering food and silence as I lay on the couch, watched television, and slept. I was grateful for her patience and quiet with me. She was the one who rescued me from my urban demise, and the next day I threw a pillow at her. She had every right to be angry with me, but she wasn't.

Dad booked our fishing trip for the next week. For at least a few days I could escape my suffocating bedroom. Early the following Saturday morning, Dad and I packed the car while Mom fussed over the cooler and its peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,
chips, apples, chocolate chip cookies, and soda. I was having another tough day, my thoughts running dark, but I managed to put enough underwear in a bag and get into the passenger seat of the car.

After pulling onto the freeway, my dad and I started talking. Since my returning home, aside from the night he held me as I cried, we hadn't spoken much. He was mostly working; I was mostly sleeping.

So in his car, on Route 71 North, he asked what happened with Will. I told him that I'd fallen deeply in love but that Will was fighting some demons. I told my dad that I would always love Will and that he was a good man. My dad told me he thought the guy was too negative and that I was better off. I smiled and watched the road.

The truth was, Will had started calling around the second week I was home. “I miss you,” he'd say. “More than I thought I would. I miss your skin. No one has skin like yours. So soft. No one else kisses me the way you do.” Of course I knew that he'd been with other women both while I was in New York and since I'd left, and I was aware enough to recognize that he loved me partially because I'd made myself unattainable. But I desperately needed to be wanted. I needed to feel adored and part of me still loved him, so I answered his calls late at night in my bedroom. I told him that I missed him and didn't understand why things hadn't worked out between us. He hinted that maybe some day they still could, but I couldn't ever imagine that.

Each mile out of Ohio peeled off another layer of the malaise. It felt like leaving New York: leaving trouble behind. I made a mental note that I needed to be careful, because I could get used to running away. Somewhere past the Canadian border, as we skirted around the lip of Lake Ontario, our tank nearing empty, we stopped at a gas station, and I started driving. As I pulled onto the freeway, my dad said, “Can I tell you about my parents' deaths?” The question startled me. I glanced at him and nodded.

My father was with both his parents when they died. His mother died when he was only twenty-four, before Clay or I was even born. She had rheumatic heart disease—a result of her childhood rheumatic fever. Her heart was literally too big for her chest. She died in the hospital with my father watching, scared. My grandfather and father loved her so dearly for her unfailing grace, her lilting smile, her gentle demeanor in the face of the harshness of a Depression-era life. My dad was in law school when she died, and he struggled to focus. He and my mom had been married for only two years and they lived in a small rental house in Ithaca, New York. My dad mourned his mom's passing between the pages of law books, trying to wrap his mind around two difficult styles of cognition: the law and how to live without his mother.

After my grandmother died, every now and then, without warning, my grandfather would show up on my parents' doorstep. My dad would open the door expecting a classmate but instead he'd find his father, skin ashen, spirit weakened. He had driven straight from Illinois to New York just to see his son. My dad would motion for his father to enter, and inside, they'd shake hands firmly, then hug for a long while. My mom would whip up a quick dinner and they'd sit down together, around a table, talking. My grandfather would smile at the life his son was building, scratch their beagle behind the ears, and pat his lap so the dog would join him.

My father and his father would sit on the couch and talk. For hours. Grandpa would reminisce about life, about Grandma, about having to put down Marty, his overweight and elderly beagle, soon after his wife died. My father says that these were some of the most loving and poignant times he'd ever had with his father. Grandpa talked, Dad listened, and they cried together. Quietly in one of those conversations, Grandpa said, “You know what I am doing, don't you, son?” My dad listened intently to his father's soft
words. “I am grieving. And I know this will pass, because time heals all things.”

I understood, as I drove, that my father was telling me this story so that I might know that he and my ancestors had suffered too, and we all deal with emotional pain in our own ways. The solidarity I felt with my father's and grandfather's pain was more consolation than anything I'd felt for years, but still—the nagging fact remained. They were sad from death; I was sad from life.

My grandfather had endured unimaginable hardship. His mother told him he was unwanted and kicked him out at age nine. He lived on the streets, worked odd jobs for food, just trying to survive. He fist-fought other homeless boys. A lot. He delivered newspapers in the dead of an Illinois winter with shoes that had holes in them. A woman inside one of the fancier houses on his paper route gave him her daughter's old heeled lace-up shoes. He accepted them with gratitude, not caring that he was a young boy wearing girls' shoes. He was just glad his feet were covered. He never forgot that thoughtful woman.

Despite everything, somehow my grandfather began to learn how to navigate difficult times with love. He understood that focusing on all that was kind and gentle, empathic and wise, would give him strength. His strength turned out to be a gift that would last our family for generations. But I feared it had skipped me.

As we drove through the forested plains of southern Québec, my father tolerated my playing endless amounts of Ani DiFranco. We were in the middle of nowhere, the only car for miles, when he asked, “Can I tell you the story of when my father died now?” I squeezed the steering wheel and nodded.

My grandfather was stricken with lung cancer around 1978. My dad was thirty-three; I was five and my brother eight. My father was already immersed in his legal work, and I wonder now if focusing on work helped him not miss his mother so much. Perhaps his job was a perfect diversion from his loss.

In August 1978, as my grandfather's cancer progressed, it became clear that he had only a matter of days left. So my father left his office and drove alone to the hospital in Canton, Illinois, to sit next to my grandfather's bed. After only a few days, it was clear the end was near. As my grandfather struggled to talk, the nurses warned that he might not make it through the night. Grandpa was having great difficulty breathing; his skin was damp and gray. All night, my father sat next to his hero, the man who always told him how loved he was, how talented he was, how he could do anything if he worked hard enough. “One more breath, Dad. One more breath,” my father begged. It became a plea. “Please, Dad. One more breath. Please.” My grandfather was laboring terribly, and my father held his hands, clutched them with fervor, the last remnant of his immediate family quickly slipping away. As dawn approached and the top of the sun touched the horizon, my father started reciting the 23rd Psalm. “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want 
.
 . .” He recited the final stanza, his throat constricted with emotion. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, And I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.”

After my father spoke these final words, my grandfather passed. This last breath brought blood, lots of blood, out of his mouth, and my traumatized father walked right out of the hospital room. He told me about how he walked outside just after sunrise, like he didn't know how to go on. But then he remembered his father's drives to Ithaca, and he continued walking. He walked the entire length and breadth of Canton, Illinois, devastated. The sun reached the top of the sky at noon, and he was still walking, unsure how to continue with this day and all the days that would follow. I wonder now if he decided during that walk that work would be his consolation. Work was constant. It would not die. It would not ever go away. It would sustain him, and even provide for his wife and children.

Our car sped along the two-lane Canadian road, and my
father cried. His chest heaved with sobs. I struggled to focus on the road, considered pulling over, but could tell that he didn't want me to stop. He wanted me to keep driving, to keep moving, to keep listening. He wanted me to know that I wasn't the only one who had felt devastating pain.

He told me that his father taught him about kindness, unconditional love, family, and persistence. He'd given him the gifts of music and nature and sports. He'd taught him how to express himself wholly and completely, and the morning his father died, my dad walked along the weedy sidewalks, patchwork fields of soybean and corn in the distance, with a hollow in his chest that he hoped would be filled some day by the love of his new family and cherished memories of his mother and father.

I cried too as I drove, blinking to maintain visibility. The thought of losing one parent when I was twenty-four and the other at thirty-three terrified me. How did my father survive this? I began to understand more deeply his love for my mother, for her steady nature, her ability to wake up each morning with a smile.

We shared a silent few miles, my hand in his. I loved so very much that I had a man in my life who was not afraid to cry. My dad embraced emotion. He felt it deeply. Up surged a pang of regret that when I was a young child, feeling so much, he wasn't home to tell me that my sadness wasn't a sign of weakness. I felt this discomfort, then shut it down. He was trying so hard to help, and there was no way I could tell him now how much his absences had affected me.

Our first morning at the lakes, we rose early in our little brown cabin at the water's edge. As I'd hoped, the loons were calling. It was hard to see them, but their mournful cries resonated deeply. It was as if they were saying, “Come. Come onto our sacred waters. Bring your sadness. We will take it from you.” My dad prepared the rods and lures, grabbed the map, and held my hand as I stepped into the boat. We were pulling away from the dock as
the sun poked the edge of the horizon. He steered the boat out to the narrows between Beauchêne and Little Beauchêne, the two main lakes. The water shone like glass below us, teeming with fish we couldn't see.

We fished without much success, but we didn't care. Our rods resting on the boat's edge, I told him about Brian, my first college boyfriend, and many of the feelings that still swirled around in me about that first love. I told him about Will and about how our relationship had seemed so hopeful before it fell apart. Eventually, I told him about the miserable way I had lost my virginity at age seventeen. I saw sorrow in my father's eyes, and I felt him struggling to understand.