Call Me Charlie

Issue 329

You guys,

When we arrived in New Jersey after three months in Uruguay, I saw how much my dad’s ALS had progressed. His legs, which were always skinny, were now dangerously so. We had called him chicken legs for years but now when I looked at him I thought of toothpicks. His right hand and arm, which were mostly useless, limped against the side of his body so that he didn’t look proportionate. What I noticed most, though, were his eyes. They looked gray and glassy, slightly off.

The next day, Sam and I took the kids to my friend’s house to go swimming. My three oldest friends were there, whom I’d known since grade school. Last year we took a girls trip to New York City with just the four of us. While the kids played with the other kids, I asked my girlfriends for advice. They knew my dad as well as I did, and they had all lost loved ones in their lives, while I had lost no one except my aunt, who I only saw once or twice a year when she was alive. I wanted to have a conversation with my dad but I didn’t know how to navigate it.

“What do you want out of it?” Lonnie asked. Her aunt recently died of brain cancer and she was with her until the end. Her dad died years ago and while she was very close with him there were times she was also frustrated by him. “Like what do you need from him? What do you want him to know?”

Lonnie sat in a chair by the pool while I stood, getting ready to leave. A massive umbrella shaded us from the Jersey summer sun. The day was beautiful. The heat wave wouldn’t hit until tomorrow, and I didn’t know the answers to any of her questions.

The next day, I strapped George and Layla in the car and said goodbye to them and my mom. She was taking them to my sister’s house for a few hours so they could play with their cousin. I knew this time had been carved out for me when my sister suggested it yesterday adding, “so you can spend some quality time with dad.”

Spending quality time with Dad meant sitting in the same room as him watching TV, or eating dinner, or drinking cocktails. Conversation was typically light: sports or pop culture or random gossip. When I lived in LA for six years, if I ever saw a famous person, my dad was the first person I called. Orlando Bloom once sat in my section when I was waiting tables. “What did he order?” my dad wanted to know. Herbal tea and a cheese board. He ate all the cheese and none of the bread. He was very polite and every time I came to the table he said, “Thanks, Love.” Dad especially loved stories of people making fools of themselves or getting physically hurt. As long as they survived it was almost always funny.

I sat in the living room next to my dad. I wondered why initiating a real conversation with a family member always felt like I was eight years old jumping off the high dive for the first time. A part of me wanted to change my mind and descend the ladder. I could put off the jump until another time, until I was ready. But I rarely came home to visit. And I didn’t know how much longer my dad had.

The night before, as Sam and I laid in bed, he told me that the most important question would be the first one, because it would be an opening for my dad to talk about the rest. It had to be open-ended enough for him to say more. He was changing the channel on the TV until he landed on Deal or No Deal.

“So how are you feeling about everything, Dad?”

The question felt wrong but I was nervous and needed to start somewhere. My dad’s eyes flickered away from the TV.

“I try not to think about it,” he said.

“Like what are you thinking about every day? What’s going through your head when you wake up?”

He looked straight into my eyes and said, “I hope I can still stand.” For the rest of my life, the thing I will remember from this conversation was the eye contact, how long he held it.

When I first found out my dad had ALS I’d been holding a lot of anger towards him. I felt like he didn’t know me and never cared to ask about my writing. Lonnie wanted to know if that was something I wanted to talk to him about but I didn’t think so anymore. His diagnosis suddenly made it all seem different. I knew my dad loved me. I had always known he loved me in the way he looked at me. His eyes smiled. It was that simple. I’d wanted more from him, much more, but I’d never told him that.

“What do you want out of the end of your life?” I asked. “What do you want it to look like?”

“I want to not be a burden.”

It seemed like no one he lived with was asking him what he wanted. My mom and youngest sister were being the hardest on him, pushing him to try harder and do more. I had no business coming in with my infrequent visits to tell everyone to take it easier on him. They were with him every day. Mom was responsible for everything with the house, and soon she would be responsible for taking care of him, too. She didn’t want to do it sooner than she had to.

At some point I started crying. “Well I don’t like that,” my dad said. His eyes watered but he didn’t cry. “I’ve had time to reflect on my life and I feel like I had a good life,” he said, looking off into space. “I have five great kids, four grandkids… had a good job for forty-three years, a house, …”

He continued staring in the distance. Or was he watching the television?

“And??” I said after a minute.

He pulled out of his trance and looked at me. “And?” he said with a chuckle. “What was the last thing I said?” I repeated back his list, the one he’d just told me about kids and grandkids, job and house.

“And, that’s all.”

When my dad turned fifty we threw him a birthday party and he told every person he spoke to, “It’s all downhill from here.” He’d made comments about getting old for most of my life, and now those comments were stuck in my head. “If I ever get that old, just kill me,” he said more than once, always with a laugh, as if the possibility was so far away, maybe even impossible.

“Is there anything you look forward to besides the end of the day?” I said. I knew he was drinking more than usual. The last time I was home he’d said it was all he looked forward to anymore.

“Watching the Phillies,” he said.

My mom had been saying recently, quite often, that my dad was a quitter. He was always a quitter and he never had any ambition. I knew that, but hearing my mom say it was surprising. It was the way he had always been and she didn’t seem to mind so much before, but now she was saying it all the time. Watching baseball did not seem like a good enough reason to live. Was my dad ready to die? Was my mom mad at him for it?

The next morning I hugged him goodbye, and he hugged me longer than usual. When he pulled away he said, “So, do I look better or worse than you thought?”

He said it with a smile. All weekend long I noticed his physical decline but I was relieved that his mind was all there, that he still made jokes and I could laugh at him. He always said that the best reason to have kids was that they made you laugh.

After all my hangups and disappointments about my dad, it’s the same thing I say about him.

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Until next week,

Charlie