stubborn

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I don’t normally like to photograph kids after they reach the age where they’re aware of the camera and what it does. They tend to respond too much to the camera. Too much or too little.

This is a fairly controlled smile. This is the face she was determined to present to the camera, and nothing I could do or say could crack that control. She’s a smart kid, stubborn as can be. But she wasn’t being stubborn out of mule-headed intransigence. She was being stubborn because it amused her. She made stubborn seem charming.

thorn

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You learn something new every day. Today I learned about this: þ. This is the letter ‘thorn,’ which I didn’t even know was a letter. And in a way, it’s not–at least not in modern English. It was used in Old English, Old Norse and is apparently still in use in the Icelandic alphabet. It’s pronounced like the digraph ‘th’ (as in either ‘theory’ or ‘then’).

Now, why is this cool? I’ll tell you why. Because over time þ began to be written as Ƿ, which eventually became indistinguishable from the letter ‘Y’.

Okay, it’s still not clear why that’s cool, is it. It becomes more clear when you see the letter thorn in use. As in ‘Ƿe Olde Pickle Shoppe.’ Which is now generally written as ‘Ye Olde Pickle Shoppe.’ And which is always pronounced ‘Yee’ when it should, in fact, be pronounced ‘The’.

All right, then–maybe it’s not all that cool. But hey, I learned something new.

the moon, the fence, and the dog’s bladder

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So it’s just after midnight, right? And the brother’s little dog demands to be let outside to pee (how such a small dog can contain such an astonishing quantity of urine is a mystery to me; I think about a third of its body weight must be urine). But it’s a beauteous evening, as Wordsworth would have it–calm and free and all that. So I wander outside as well.

The moon is absurdly bright, and it’s illuminating the fence in a particularly charming way. So I go fetch my gear to photograph it. Camera goes on the tripod, tripod legs are extended, camera settings are adjusted, lens cap is removed, remote shutter release is ready. Then everything went pear-shaped, as the Brits would say.

In order to get the composition I wanted, I had to set up the tripod in front of the brother’s garage. But when you move in front of the garage, a motion sensor turns on a light. Of course, the light turns itself off after a few minutes, which would have allowed me to shoot the photograph IF I stood very still. Which I didn’t do three times in a row.

But the marvelous thing about a remote shutter release is you can stand off to one side and trigger it. So all I had to do was set up the shot, move out of range of the motion detector, wait for the light to go out, then press the remote release. It would have worked like a charm but for the little urine-filled dog, who repeatedly wandered into sensor range.

So I had to corral the wee beastie and put it in the house. By which time the moon had gone behind the clouds, leaving me with nothing whatsoever to photograph. Except the model of greatest convenience.

So here’s me, sulking.

chores

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I need to mow the brother’s lawn.

Despite not taking any nourishment or liquids for the last three or four days, despite blood still being suctioned from his stomach, Jesse Eugene’s body continues to remain alive. We keep thinking that this must be his last day–and yet each day his body carries on.

The world doesn’t stop, of course, just because my brother is very slowly dying. It doesn’t even slow down. And yet all the little mundane chores and errands that take up so much time every week seem weirdly out of place. Yesterday I went with my oldest brother, Roger Lee, to replenish his supply of his favorite tea. We had to visit three or four shops before we could find one that carried the tea. At one point we were near a big box sporting goods store, so we stopped and went in. We looked at kayaks, we looked at golf equipment–and for a short time we stopped thinking about Jesse Eugene slowly dying in the hospice.

So this morning, instead of heading off to the hospice, I’ll be cranking up the brother’s aging lawn mower and making his lawn presentable to the neighbors. When I get to the hospice later, I’ll tell him about it. It won’t matter to him. It doesn’t really matter to me. The neighbors might appreciate it.

It’s just another of those many things that have to be done. All over the world, the lawns of dying people are being mowed.

update: The lawn is mowed. I can’t say it was fun, but it was a nice distraction. I’ve decided to do a yard chore every day until the brother checks out. Tomorrow I’ll power up his weed-eater and clear out this mess:

What I like about yard work is that there’s a clear, visible indication of how much work you’ve done. It’s oddly satisfying when you finish.

a little quiet time

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Over the years I’ve grown accustomed to quiet. I like it. More than that, I’ve come to need it. If stillness was a drug, I’d be a junkie. My body demands the periodic injection of solitude and silence.

I haven’t had it for the last couple of weeks.

You’d think sitting around a hospice room for hours with somebody who is heavily medicated against pain would be quiet. It’s not. For ten thousand reasons, it’s not. The hospice staff are always in motion. Visitors come and go. There’s always the sound of the hospital: the trundling of med-carts, the alarms, the clang and shuffle of housekeeping crews, the hiss-thwok of suction pumps. And, of course, even though he’s heavily medicated the brother still requires attention. There’s not much left of him now. His body is wasting away; his voice is just a thin, papery whisper; he sleeps most of the time. But now and then he opens his eyes and looks around—and when he does, I want him to see somebody who loves him.

The hospice has a second-floor balcony. Walls of glass shield it from wind and rain, but it’s open at the top to allow a bit of breeze. Sparrows fly in and out, and nest in some of the beams. They’re a messy bird, sparrows, but cheery and it’s pleasant to hear them.

We take the brother out to the balcony when he’s up to it. He sits and looks at the trees and listens to the sparrows, and appears to pay attention to our conversation. When he’s tired himself out—after fifteen or twenty minutes—and he’s being wheeled back to his room, I like to linger for a moment.

It’s not enough. It’s not enough for him or for me. But it’ll have to do.

little brother

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Family is a weird thing. This is Scott. Technically, he’s my cousin. In spirit, he’s something more like a brother. In fact, a few months ago my actual brother Jesse Eugene said this to me: “Don’t take this the wrong way–but you were gone for years and Scotty sort of took your place as my little brother.”

He’s been a good little brother (though, truth be told, it’s a wee bit difficult to think of Scott as a ‘little’ anything, given that he’s got the bulk and mass of a Sherman tank).

I shot this photograph in Jesse Eugene’s room at the hospice. Scott had just arrived (he’s been there every day) and sat down. The light from the window fell on his face and I sort of demanded he not move for a moment. We hadn’t really spoken at that point, other than to say hello. After shooting the photograph Scott told me he’d just heard that his best friend had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Wyoming.

It’s been a tough few days all around. There he was, sitting in the room where his ‘brother’ was slowly dying, thinking about his friend. And yet when asked to sit for a photo, Scott just quietly went along with it. Which is what brothers do.

in which i meet my daughter and go bowling

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I always knew I had a daughter.  It wasn’t a surprise or anything. I was married for a while, after all, and that’s what happens when you get married. You have daughters. But I was also divorced, and that’s what happens when you get divorced. Daughters move away with their mothers.

And then after a while you move away, and then one move leads to another and you get farther apart and in the pre-internet days the odds for miscommunication (which are pretty high in divorce situations anyway) expand geometrically. Pretty soon miscommunication is replaced by non-communication. So I knew I had a daughter. But she was more a daughter in theory than in practice.

And let’s face it—you adjust to that. You can adjust to almost anything. You adjust to a new city, you adjust to a new job, you adjust to being single, you adjust to being not-a-parent. People ask “Do you have kids?” and at first you say “Yes.” Then later it becomes “Yes, but…” After a while it becomes “Not really” because it’s easier and quicker than explaining all the events that led to that ‘not really.’  And eventually you don’t say anything—you just shake your head, because the cold and ugly truth is you don’t. You may have fathered a child, but to say you ‘have kids’ is a lie. You don’t.

Having kids isn’t passing along your DNA to another living being. Having kids is also them having you. Having you there. I wasn’t there.

Yesterday, at the hospice center where my brother is slowly dying, I met my daughter for the first time in a couple of decades. It wasn’t the most ideal circumstance for such a meeting. And yet, it was absolutely the most ideal circumstance for such a meeting.

To say it was weird is to diminish the term ‘weird.’ To say it was surreal would be to stretch surreality all out of proportion. To say it was wonderful is to turn ‘wonderful’ into a tiny little speck of a word. It was more of all those things than those words could possibly convey.

So I met my daughter. I saw theory become reality. Once again I ‘have kids’ and she has me. Of course, it’s not that simple or easy. It is, in fact, strange and confusing and messy and complicated. And wonderful. Full of wonder.

And then we left the hospice and went bowling.

not what he wanted

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About a year ago my brother Jesse Eugene was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We were told he had maybe six months to live. He exceeded expectations, though it didn’t go easy for him. In the course of the last year he went from being around 235 pounds to about 145. He became increasingly feeble. It wasn’t pretty.

Yesterday we were at the hospital for a routine visit with his primary care physician and a consultation with the oncologist. The lab work revealed that his hemoglobin was extremely low, so they decided to give him a quick transfusion and send him home. After more discussion, the doctors decided it might be best to keep him overnight to see how he responded to the transfusion. Almost immediately after being admitted, he began to vomit blood. Lots of blood. Liters of blood.

They don’t have emesis basins anymore–those kidney-shaped pans you see in the movies. Now they have blue mesh vomit bags. Red blood in a blue bag. It’s another image I’d rather not have in my head. I already have too many of those.

For a while he was vomiting blood as quickly as they could transfuse it. I held the bag, he vomited, and every time the blood hit the liter mark I’d hand it to a nurse to measure and record. Input/output. Blood goes in, blood goes out. Eventually the vomiting stopped long enough for them to insert a naso-gastric tube into his stomach and pump the blood out.

The bleeding seems to have stopped for now. Or slowed to a negligible level. But it’ll start up again. It’s inevitable. With the NG tube in place, we’ll be spared the vomiting, but the bleeding will still take place. We’ve decided to stop any more transfusions. At some point in the near future the loss of blood will make him light-headed, then he’ll lose consciousness and die. It might be tonight. It might be a week from tonight. It probably won’t be as long as two weeks.

Part of me hopes it’s sooner than later. This is not how he wanted to die–slowly, messily, in a hospital. But how many people ever get what they want?