A Nomadic Family's Struggles to Survive Hard Times
STEP RIGHT UP!
THIS WAY IN TO
THE HOUSE OF MISERIES.
THE END OF THE LINE.
Time telescopes as I grow old.
Time shrinks as my body shrinks.
The past comes clearer and closer.
The future fades from focus.
My child – my only child – is childless.
My “stepsons,”
as their father bids me remember,
are not mine,
are not “blood.”
So, now,
no more blood
to run through time,
to inform the future of the past,
my past, my family’s past.
One might ask, why bother memorializing our meager existence when we know that our sun will
burn out and the universe will collapse and turn to cinders all monuments, headstones, fragile
recorded eulogies, photographs, and memories. Some of us, like Henry Miller, flatter and delude
ourselves that while we are living, we are the center of the universe; that we, the artists among
us, are our own gods. This delusion is what feeds and sustains our grandiose egos and motivates
us now to write memorials and to honor those who made us what we are, for better or worse.
In the past, whenever I thought about my place in the world, I became overwhelmed and
intimidated.
I used to suffer from terminal uniqueness syndrome – according to my ex-wife. No
longer. I’ve discovered that the only way I can deal with the enormity of my search for “my
place in the world” is to focus on the immediate and the personal. I now care less about the world and more about my world. Having reconciled myself to the fact that I am not the center
of the universe, I have embraced as a personal “fact” that I am the center of my universe at least. No grand progeny, no blood line, no descendants, no future, no perpetuation of ego. It all begins and ends with me. Either I am the center of my universe, or I am nothing. So let me declare: I remember, therefore I am.
To paraphrase Henry Miller at the opening of Tropic of Cancer: This then is a chronicle,
an odyssey, an explanation, a journey, an apology, many apologies, a funeral, a eulogy, a
grieving, a vitriolic purging, the product of my long delayed but increasingly urgent need to
“rage against the dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas), a desperate quest to end my restless and
rootless wandering, to become and remain a part of something – family? community? and not to wither to a desiccated husk of a man and die alone, unknown, and unappreciated -- like my
father.
I am now in the withering season of my own life, but before the stem dies and snaps, I feel
compelled to reveal, to share, some of the blooms and weeds from the garden of my life. As I
grow older, I am more interested in the past than the future, quite simply because I have more
“past” than future. As William Faulkner reminds us, “The past is never dead; it isn’t even past.”
But for many folks the past no longer exists or is important, neither tangibly nor as an idea,
merely a quest for immediate gratification from myriad shiny things readily available in a world
of crass materialism.
I feel, therefore I believe, and therefore I think, in that order, that my origins are unique.
Exceptionality is not unusual in my family. It is an attribute, an attitude that has been imprinted
on the characters of successive generations and to me from hearing and learning about it,
especially from my mother, but also, and in more subtle ways, from my father.
Beginnings, middles, and endings are illusive and faulty. Fragments of lives do not lend
themselves to an orderly narrative, and in memoir it is fragments that remain, some more potent
than others. Rootless lives, wandering without purpose (in early childhood I dreamed of being a
saddle tramp after reading a book of that title), an unsettled non-pattern which was characteristic of each of my parent’s early lives, and which continued to characterize the life of my family. I acknowledge that I was not the only kid who grew up poor and in despair. My wife grew up in a slum in Brooklyn where danger was ever-present: Puerto Rican kids running the streets with shotguns, murdered kids showing up on the steps of her high school. The redeeming grace of her childhood was that her parents endowed her with the gift of the value of learning and education.
But my childhood was my childhood, and that, in part, is what I write about. Two voices spoke to me during my childhood and formed my character and values. One voice, my mother’s, taught me Southern: manners, civility, and that history matters. The other voice,
my father’s, was that of a genteel third generation northern Californian in temperament and
values. As a result, this is a story between bookends, from my father’s last illness, death, and
burial, to my mother’s death. This memoir is structured as a series of vignettes, not as a book.
Word count, appx. 124,000.
Chapter 1: Pop's Final Journey, Death And Burial (Partial)
Mom said, “Terry, your father told me that if anything happened to him not to take him to a
hospital; to just let him die at home. Your father wanted to die happy at home.”
“At least he got back to Lake County where he got a room in Lakeport for a while,” I
replied.
Yes,” Mom said, “your father often spoke of going back to his boyhood home in
Kelseyville where he could be happy with his memories and feel independent while he was still
able. He wanted to die in Kelseyville. I’m sure he was thinking about his mother. He was very
close to her and was heartbroken when she died. That was before you were born, Lonnie.”
“But he did come back to us to die, Mom.”
The Charnel House, July 1963.
Pop stepped off the Greyhound bus in downtown Los Angeles, opposite Union Station, feeble
legs barely holding him steady. “Watch those steps there, grandpa,” said the impatient and
annoyed driver, who had been tolerating Pop since he relieved the previous driver for the final
run to LA.
I hadn’t seen Pop since Mom drove him to Lakeport, where he lived alone in a single
room for several months. Pop almost fell as he stepped off the bus. I caught him as he reached
the bottom step. Pop was in a stuporous fatigue. Grey janitor’s pants drooping from weight loss
and added weight from being soaked with urine. He was wearing a faded flannel shirt. A
pathetic sight. The end was moving closer. He had come home to die.
In July 1963, we were living in a shabby house in a racially mixed neighborhood in west
Pasadena. Pop’s first stroke came within a few days after he returned to us. For a few days one
side of his body was paralyzed. He tried to speak. Mostly, he mumbled. A lot of what he tried to
say was unintelligible.
As Pop sat on the toilet in our tiny bathroom, I shaved him with an electric razor, a recent
Christmas gift, trimmed his sparse hair, and lifted him into the tub. I walked him back to the cot
where he lay most of the day, sipping cheap red wine which he no longer felt compelled to hide
from us, and which Mom charitably overlooked. It didn’t matter anymore. Pop’s drinking wasn’t
keeping him from doing his part to support the family. He hadn’t done that for years. He was
beyond that now. It was all up to Mom and had been for a long time, working seven days a week
and overnight taking care of other peoples’ kids, holding the family together and keeping us fed.
Then the second stroke. Pop’s sounds were garbled and pathetic. He couldn’t move, though he
tried to. He pissed his pants, soaked the cot. I was facing mortality. I was not ready for this. Too
late now for all that remains undone, unsaid, unlearned, unappreciated.
Mom knew this was the beginning of the end. She had been here before with her parents and
with patients she cared for as a practical nurse. I hadn’t experienced death and dying with a
family member. In 1963, even the charity wards in the Los Angeles County Hospital required
authorization from a physician to gain admission. You couldn’t just drive up and dump. Mom
worked for a psychiatrist caring for his alcoholic wife and their three children. She called him; he
signed a letter and offered to provide an ambulance. We declined the ambulance. Too expensive.
We were broke. You couldn’t get into the county hospital unless you were broke. The county
hospital was a teaching hospital for the University of Southern California medical school. Pop
must have understood that he would have to go to the county hospital — to a ward for the
terminally ill.
We staggered out to the car with Pop. I drove all of us to the hospital. Pop was admitted. I
hoped that Pop would at least receive palliative care to ease his suffering. I even hoped that he
might receive care to ameliorate the effects of his stroke so that he could hear me when I spoke
to him or hear me when I said, “goodbye.” Neither happened.
Pop was there about two weeks before he died. His death was inevitable; the way he died
was not. His death was accelerated by neglect. Whenever I pass or even see a picture of the
immense edifice of the Los Angeles County Hospital, I see a giant tombstone.
I visited, but only three times, glad that Mom was working, and that my brother Jimmy was in
school and unable to visit the charnel house. Visits were painful and exhausting. I made excuses
for not visiting more. I had to work. There was nothing I could do for him. I didn’t think he
could hear me. He’s going to die soon, and all this will be over. He didn’t die soon. He lingered.
On my visits, I had to wind my way to his bed, moving sideways through the narrow aisles,
between beds that stuffed the ward from wall to wall, each bed with a silent, semi-conscious
elderly white male patient. A storage room for mummies.
Pop lay “awake,” dehydrated, and not conscious of my presence. I wanted him to know I
was there. I stood beside him wetting his lips, parched and cracked from unattended thirst. He
responded to the moisture, to the small sips of water that I managed to get into his mouth with a
straw without choking him. I spoke to him. “I’m here, Pop. Move your eyes or hand or nod your
head if you can hear me or feel me.” No response. I wanted to believe that he knew I was there.
Nothing. Just like all the other near cadavers in the room. This was a death ward, where old men
were put and minimally managed until they “expired.”
I was too young and inexperienced to know what to do; to go to the nurses’ station (I
don’t remember seeing one in the cavernous hallway) and to scream for help. Go to
Administration, and yell, scream and flail until Pop got some help, to help him pass with dignity
and to leave me with some peace of mind. I didn’t know that was possible, and I didn’t know
how to do it even if I had known that it was possible. I didn’t make the same mistake with my
mother during her many surgeries and hospitalizations in her later years in Paris, Texas, to the
annoyance of doctors and staff. But I gained their respect and occasionally I saved their asses and my mother’s life for a while.
Back at work at my summer job in the mail room of a bank in downtown LA, my boss put down
the phone, walked over to me. “I have bad news. Your family just called. Your father has passed
away.” I stood there, knowing I would never forget this moment. I left work. I wasn’t crying yet.
That wouldn’t come until days later. I had to take care of business. I went home. Mom was
weeping. I had no idea what to do but felt my way through by instinct and on autopilot. I went to
the County Hospital. In my state of numbness and vulnerability, the staff prevailed upon me to
consent to an autopsy, to assist the doctors in determining the precise causes of my father’s
death, and thereby to advance science. So they said. Sounded good to me. I signed the papers.
Cause of death: Encephalomalacia, old and chronic (which I interpreted as “worn out.”
Encephalomalacia, the softening or loss of brain tissue after cerebral infarction (stroke), and/or
cerebral ischemia, an inadequate blood supply to an organ or part of the body. Arteriosclerosis,
the pathologic process by which cholesterol and calcium plaque accumulate within the arterial
wall. In other words, hardening of the arteries from years of smoking cigarettes and drinking
cheap wine.
At the mortuary, I saw my father’s body, his features were distorted from removal of the brain
and probable replacement with stuffing material. No doubt the pieces of Pop’s brain had already
been tossed out with other medical waste. But I didn’t think that because I had no idea about the
particulars of an autopsy. I knew I was looking at Pop, but I deluded myself that someone had
made a mistake and that it was not my father who lay there. And this was after the mortician had done his work.
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