My brother, Lew, had cancer.
He died on the evening of July 8th. He was sixty-eight.
It still feels unreal.
He was only diagnosed in April of
2011. I know, many others go much
faster. Our oldest brother, Larry, was
gone suddenly in a matter of weeks back in 2004, at sixty-four. If this were a hundred years ago, both of
them would have been considered old. But
it isn’t and they weren’t.
Untimely death. Maybe
we call it that because when someone is taken too soon, it scrambles our sense
of time.
Today is 1955. The
latest national event is Fess Parker playing Davy Crockett on TV. Our father, a New York City journalist,
manages to arrange for us to meet him. I
am eight. Lew is ten. We walk into a hotel room in New York and
there he is, all six foot five of him, in buckskin and a coonskin cap. We sit on his knees. He shows us the enormous bowie knife. He tells us that the Georgie Russell
character played by Buddy Epsen wasn’t a real person, but represents a number
of sidekicks that Crockett had. We feel
as if we’ve been initiated into special information from a larger-than-life
figure. He gives us each a coonskin
cap. We have our pictures taken, sitting
there on his knees, in our caps. We are
going to wear them for the next several months, go to sleep with them on our
pillows. We are going to be celebrities
in our neighborhood because we got them directly from “Davy Crockett
himself.” We will spend the summer
running around the little town of Highlands, New Jersey, where our grandfather
lives, with coon tails flying—flags of boyhood.
This is today. It
walks with me. If I take a quick step in
the right direction, I can be running up Bay Avenue in Highlands, a mile from
the ocean with Lew beside me.
****
It’s also today that he is asking me again about our
mother’s final days. He wants to know
the mechanics of going to sleep until the end comes. She had morphine pills placed under her
tongue. She slept for five days and
died. He is going to ask Nancy, his
oncologist about methodology. He
continues to have breakthrough pain at night and he and Nancy continue to
adjust the medication to combat it. Cancer
not only consumes the body. It consumes
the mind. Beyond a certain point there
is nothing else to think, feel, talk or learn about but this treatment, that theory,
this drug combination, the quality or personality of this doctor, nurse, lab
tech, survival rates, the fate of others with similar afflictions and, above
all, pain and managing pain. The joys
and interests of a lifetime are utterly upstaged. Lew has thought hard about
the courage it took our mother to say, “I’m there. No more.
This is it. I want to sleep now
until the end.” He tells me, “This isn’t it, yet, but it’s getting close. I want to be prepared.” There are discussions
of “the sublingual approach” being “a general part of the hospice comfort pack”
and “fentanyl lollipops for immediate control of pain.” Fentanyl lollipops. Could the inventor of lollipops ever imagine
that phrase? All at once, things are
moving faster than any of us have foreseen.
I’m booked for a return visit.
I’ve been convinced he’ll still be alive and awake when I get
there. Now I’m not so sure.
Then, suddenly, this email from him: “This IS it Bob. The combination of pain, fluids, and this and
that over the past 2+ days has reached the point where Anne and I have this
very evening to stop the dance…this has happened very quickly. Where does this leave you? Staying home?
Trying to have one last visit when I don’t know what the situation will
be? It leaves you and me forever in one
another’s arms in ways that I’m sure neither of us would ever have
imagined. I want you to have as much
time as possible to think about what you might want to do (to come or not to). No matter what happens, what events unfold, know
this: I love you tremendously and thank
you once again for your blog and so much more.
I will give Mom, Dad and Larry a big hug from you and confirm that we
hope it will be many, many years indeed before we are all together again.”
I call as soon as I read this. He is sleeping. I ask Anne to try to read a final email to
him if he awakens: “Lew, I love you. I love you. I love you.
That is all I can give you to take with you. I am so grateful for the love we have shared
over a lifetime and over these last few years but especially these last few
months. You did not run. You did not hide from what was coming. You opened your eyes and your heart to all
around you so they could receive the last and fullest measure of your soul’s gifts. Thank you, my precious brother, thank you! I
am walking with you to the threshold and waving you across. Bob”.
I am planning on going anyway, even if he is in his final
sleep. I can support my sister-in-law
and Lew’s grandson, Ben. And maybe Lew
will sense my presence. But this is not
to be. The day before my scheduled departure,
Anne asks that I not come. “The last 2
days on Lew’s downward spiral have been a free fall… So, Bob, since spirit energy knows no time and
space, you are as much with Lew now and he with you, as you could be here. Save yourself and take a walk to Montana de
Oro (the state park with miles of rustic beaches that are special to us) and
visit with Lew there. Coming at this time would be futile...” She wants to devote all her energy to his
final moments. It makes sense to
me. I stay home. The next evening, before I would have
arrived, he is gone.
****
This is today, too, perhaps a year after coonskin caps. My mother gets a phone call and goes gray in
the face. Lew has had a bad spill from
his bike going down one of our town’s steeper hills. Apparently a dog ran out and startled
him. He is at Overlook Hospital. We rush there. My heart hammers. How hurt is he? I feel my mother’s fear. I see my father grit his teeth. This is the first time in my life that I have
been faced with the possibility one of us could be badly hurt in a
life-changing way, or even killed. I am
shaking inside. I grip my mother’s hand
as we enter the hospital room. At the
same instant, we all connect with Lew’s eyes.
He is sitting up, alert, bruised all over his face and arms but
fine. When he comes home the next day,
he gets to sit out in the side yard on the chaise lounge. His bruises are all dabbed with some kind of
jelly. He looks funny and knows it. Mom and Dad buy him a huge quantity of comic
books. He burns through them.
This is today. I
think about that moment when we walked into Overlook Hospital. I think how wholly unpredictable and unforeseeable
most of life is. I think about how
little time has passed though the calendar says it is nearly sixty years. I think about how the beaches of Sandy Hook,
New Jersey, were playgrounds and holy places in our childhood. There was one beach where our parents paid a
quarter for us to get on. Then we were
given a small yarn—red, blue, yellow, green, brown, gray, purple—that indicated
we had paid that day. We tied it on our
bathing suits so the lifeguards knew we had paid. I think about how the beaches of California’s
Central Coast have become my holy places in adulthood, and certain beaches in
the Rhode Island and Massachusetts area his…and where his ashes will be
scattered. I think that calendars and
clocks are tricks, illusions. They have
nothing to do with time as the heart knows it.
Time is liquid, not linear. I
need to get some yarn in different colors.
****
Another today. He is
retiring from 36 years of teaching at the University of Massachusetts at
Dartmouth. I ask, “Do you think you’ll
do some part-time teaching?” He answers
rapidly, “No. I’m done. I’ve enjoyed almost every minute of my
career. But I’m done.” I ask, “So what do you want to do?” Again, he answers without hesitation, “Spend
time with Anne, read, lay on the beach.”
For the past few years he has been sending me
reading recommendations which we refer to as “Lew’s Book Club.” He has done enough reading in his academic field. These are wonderful novels, all the best
contemporary stuff. He and Anne buy a little place to spend their
winters in St. Augustine, Florida. Anne,
reading, beach (no yarn necessary). All
set up. Perfect. What could go wrong?
****
And this is today.
Our father has just died. We take
his ashes to a special beach at Montana de Oro state park here in San Luis
Obispo County, Larry, Lew and myself. We
each pour some in the sea. When Lew
pours, a little wind tosses the ashes in a swirl around him, almost a
caress. Later, at a memorial service, we
all speak some words about our father, the journalist, the lover of words. Lew’s testament: “He was a man in full.” Yes, not a perfect man, not a perfect father,
but a man in full. This day I can say
the same of my brother. He was a man in
full. A rare phenomenon in an angry time
of half-beings. A man in full whose
bravery was met by the brute pain that cancer visits on its victims…and yet, a
man in full to the end.
****
Another today. Some
kind of sibling rivalry. He is five
years younger than Larry and only two older than I. I guess I am an unwitting usurper, by dint of
my position. So, yes there are
occasional struggles, a rare fist fight when I am six or seven (he wins with a
fist on the top of my head that sends me crying), and some residual resentment
riding into adulthood. But this is generally
not Shakespearean. It’s run-of-the-mill
jealousy, a peevishness that surfaces from time to time. When our father dies, and I begin writing
poetry in earnest for the first time in many years, he is avidly
supportive. He asks, “When are you going
to start doing the thing you were born to do full time?” Meaning, writing. Meaning, specifically, writing poetry. Meaning, life is short. Who cares if you make money at it? Just write.
I am touched by his enthusiasm and it continues and even grows as the
last sheath of sibling rivalry is shucked away by the death of our brother
early in 2004 and our mother in September of the same year. “Write, Bob.
Just write.”
****
And this is today, toward the end of my visit in April of
2013, I am thinking what a good person Lew is.
He has never done any serious hurt to another human being. He is a good man who has shared his joy of teaching
and the French language and its literature with hundreds of students. He has loved his wife, has been more a father
to his adopted sons than their own, more a father to his grandson than his
own. There is no rhyme or reason to why
this person gets cancer, or that person dies of a sudden heart attack or another
person lives to 95 after being a royal prick most of his life.
****
This is a thought today.
It may be true that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same
time, but that is not the case with memory.
All these moments, thoughts and feelings exist simultaneously within
me. As I said, time is liquid, not
linear. It has depth and breadth, current and cross-current. Conflicting truths
flow together, forming something unforeseen in a new kind of present tense. We are a family of five and yet now we are one. “We
thought we’d be boys forever…” So I wrote
in a poem after Larry’s death and it is still true. We are boys forever. The sandbox will always contain us, the pine
limbs bear our weight. Yet, we are also
reduced to one now…one person to hold the elixir of memory for an entire family. One person to carry the love and the loss.
****
Another today. I am
in my late twenties. I write Lew and ask
him to share his sweetest memories of our childhood together. The first thing he offers is the two of us on
all fours as little boys, probably three and five, playing animals under the
dining room table. I am so grateful for
this, for it has left my own ready-recall file, but the moment I read it, the
memories come back in detail.
More than sixty years later, in this today, I realize he has
always been there, for I was the youngest.
They were all there, always—Mom, Dad, Larry and Lew, each pouring their
own rich memories into the chalice, many of which I could never have reclaimed
on my own. I have never known life
without at least one of them being at the end of a phone call or email. But Lew is gone and I now know life alone,
life void of contribution.
As I try to
understand why the bond is so strong, the grief so deep, I return to that space
between the four legs of our dining room table, a table that protected us like
a mother elephant, and those moments when we crawled around making animal
sounds, so close to each other that his particular five-year old boy smell wrote
its verse in me, and the feeling when our bodies would bump against each other,
and the sound of his breathing and his voice as it manifested growls, purrs,
howls, barks and trumpeting—verse after verse. We knew each other only as little brothers can
in the dawn light of life.
It was a unique bond.
We were animals together, slept in the same room, knew that we came from
the same people, looked up to the same faces, loved the same voices, rode the
same hips and shoulders and were looked after by the same oldest brother. We ran through the same storm door into the
winter snows where snowmen, snow angels and sleds were the kings, queens and
royal carriages of our little land, a land where together we discovered the
neighborhood and friends, games and rituals, hiding places, magical trees,
swinging vines and outcroppings of ancient faces. We also ran through the same screen door into
the bright summer air to dash through backyards and front, ride bikes, throw and
kick balls, climb fences and trees, explore brooks and catch lightning bugs.
And on trips to our grandpa’s, we tanned nut-brown like twins under the same sun
on the same sand and in the same Atlantic waves. There was only one person on earth right
beside me from the beginning, each of us making our own marks on our lives’
first pages of poetry--my brother, Lew.
No words or deeds can fully honor my love for him. But I am heading to the beach today…and I
have yarn.
C 2013 Bob Kamm
