What Is Left

Buy Me a Coffee

The mug was the first thing I noticed this morning. It had a chip on the handle, where my thumb often fell, but the chip had long since stopped being an irritation, it was just the shape of the mug. I wonder, as I often do, how many objects in my lifetime I’ll get so used to that the places where they were once damaged no longer feel like they were damaged at all, the shape of something I’ve learned to hold.

This year, on my sixty-seventh birthday, September eighteenth, nothing much will happen. No cake. In fact, Trish knows better than to ask. It’s sort of our private joke, one of many. After twenty-nine years we’ve learned to communicate in silence.

Trish asked me once what I wanted for my sixty-fifth. I told her I wanted her to stop asking me what I wanted for my birthday. She laughed so hard that she had to sit down at the kitchen table, and then she made me a card out of a cereal box, saying Happy Birthday, You Impossible Man. That’s still on the refrigerator. I catch myself reading it at times when the coffee is going in the mornings.The big days, the birthday.The cereal box, that’s the whole marriage.

The world seems to feel a little slower these days. My legs have tired of rising when the alarm clock goes off every morning, and they have their own way of letting me know. It’s no big deal, really.Another set of numbers, a date, that adds up the long list of things I’ll never do.

See, I figured the end would be dramatic. Something would happen, a lightening of the air, an ushering in of the final mile, only to realize it’s not so easy saying good-bye. It’s all in the day-to-day things, the smallness of them, and it’s hard to tell if it’s wisdom or clocking time because there isn’t any more.

Maybe that’s the trick of getting old. You spend so much time looking for the meaning of things that you miss the thing itself.

I keep a short list in my head of the things that keep me going: how Trish hums when she thinks no one can hear her, the smell of rain on the gravel two counties over on a summer I can’t quite place, my grandson’s writing, which is already like his daddy’s.

It was a Tuesday, four-fifteen in the afternoon, when the nurse told me, with her particular brand of efficiency, as she eased me into a chair where it was safe enough to say there was no reason I should get up in any great hurry, that there was a spot on my scans.

Dr. Alba wanted another one, and that would be on the eighteenth, two months from my birthday. I wrote it on the calendar with my usual steadiness: Follow up - 9 a.m. Trish was with her sister in Gillette,and I didn’t call her right away. I figured there wasn’t much to tell anyway, that there was no reason she should worry.

But I lay in bed that first night, the empty place beside me as far from me as the ceiling fan’s slow rotations could make it, and I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. I couldn’t stand the thought of watching her hear it, because I’d never in sixty-one years seen my father afraid of the end, not once, not so much as a word about it.

Thursday rolled around. I called her at nine in the evening.

”What’s wrong?” she said before I could say anything at all. Because it was Thursday, and twenty-nine years of marriage will teach two people each other’s silences, she already knew.

There was a spot on the scan, I said to the wall. They want to look again on the eighteenth anyway, I added.

There was a pause then, and the distant murmur of the television in her sister’s living room from where she’d finally settled.

”Tom,” she said finally.

”Why did you wait four days to tell me?”

I said something about not wanting to worry her, and she let it hang there the way she always does when it’s not enough but it has to be.

”Come home Thursday,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”

In the end there was only a spot where old scar tissue had long since vanished, Dr. Alba telling me as he laid the two film strips side by side on the table. The only thing that kept me from telling Trish outright was the fact that she’d held my hand for as long as she could in the waiting room after that.

Her thumb kept moving across the back of my hand,the way it has for years when she knows I’m scared and doesn’t know what else to do.

It didn’t matter that it was only the two of us, but somehow it felt like more than that. Like all the years we’d had together were sitting there with us.

Whatever I lost in those nine days, it showed me that my instincts were pretty much right after all. I didn’t come back from the hospital the same man I was when the spot first appeared, but I kept some of it with me, too. Because in those nine days it would have been a whole lot easier, and a whole lot worse, if Jack my son,went on remembering me as some disembodied voice at the end of a phone line.

Some men my age are already counting the days, waiting to be done with this whole thing. I feel those moments when it’s all too easy to slip into that recliner and wait for the end to come.

I do it anyway.

My knee complains about the half mile down the street and back as I pass the familiar houses on my walk every morning. The man who decides things is still here.

My other argument is the garden, although the tomatoes are mostly getting picked and not eaten, going up and down the street with no note attached. My father used to say that was young man’s work, that he never planted a seed in his life, but he always bent over that August sun anyway. I do the same, one knee on the earth, offering it whatever it is that needs to be given, no matter what I feel I might get in return.

I keep a little notebook where I write the names of people I know are gone. Doug Beals.Kevin Feil.My father, 1993, who stood by the window as he always did, but with no cigar, no words to say. Some mornings when I wake up I say them out loud and it’s enough.

Maybe that’s what I learned from him. Not how to talk about the end. He never could. But how to stand there anyway.

What it is that gets to me most is not the usual stuff. It’s two in the morning and everything’s quiet as can be.

Not the hurt feelings or the question of who or what or when or where but something much simpler, a lot more cruel. One day I won’t be able to see Trish’s face at all. It’s not going to be that I miss her from somewhere, but that I’ve completely stopped seeing her entirely. It’s like the sudden extinction of light.

I’ve tried to stop thinking this but I can’t, and it’s made me look at these thoughts plainly, without the door my father always kept shut on anything that frightened him. What I’ve found, looking at them plainly, is that this pain isn’t nearly as bad as the brightness of having seen her at all.

Twenty-nine years is a pretty long time to look at her across a kitchen table, but it’s not as long as I want it to be. I’ve seen her face and I’m not in any way sorry, not for one hour of the happiness, the wonder, it caused in me all those years ago. A man doesn’t get to grieve over the prospect of something that hasn’t genuinely mattered.

I don’t know if that’s consolation but it helps.

I have fourteen grandchildren and seven children. My oldest daughter, Kailey, calls every Sunday from Boise, Idaho, even when she is in the middle of pulling onto a highway. Allie’s husband, who works at the welding shop, started calling me Sir after he learned my name five years ago. Ashley sends pictures, and I try to decipher her communications, just as I once did when she was little. Caitlyn, who is thirty-one years old, still calls me Daddy.

I don’t tell her that I know, because I am afraid she won’t do it anymore

Jack knows us better than that. He knows how much we are trying to say without actually saying anything at all

Jack’s calls always seemed to end with the exchange,Fine, Good, you too, but recently, I have begun saying I’m proud of you. It kills me, but I get it out to him somehow, and I manage to say the same things to the girls when they call, less frequently as the weeks pass. The grandsons come every day. The little one has no idea that his grandfather is taking every opportunity he can to recreate the visits, but he is getting bigger every day.

I add to the list sometimes now, though I never intended to. Her thumb on the back of my hand in the waiting room before either of us knew what he’d said. The eighteenth coming and going without either of us remarking on it twice. Jack’s voice telling me he was proud of me back, the one time I let him. I used to think it was a way to remember things I was going to forget. I think now it may be the opposite. It’s a reminder of what happens to me while I’m still here to remember.

Things aren’t always better, you understand. Some days I still manage to fall for the chair. Some Sundays the calls are quick and unproductive. Some nights I can’t get past the rock on my chest and the realization that nothing will make me sleep until the light comes through the curtains. All I ask is that the thought will leave me alone and let me sleep before the sun rises tomorrow, instead of the other way around.

I choose the porch, the list, the walk, the whispers of my father’s name in the wind. The rock is no longer a problem. It’s a part of me, no different than any other part, and I have no regrets.

It feels like the garden in a sense, harvest time, and no one goes by a bed of ripe tomatoes and says to themselves, “Well, that’s too much to carry.”I think about that sometimes when I’m out there on one knee in the dirt. My father was right about young man’s work, I suppose. Except I’m still doing it. Still planting things, still giving things away, still bending over that August earth even when my knee complains about it.Maybe that’s all any of us are doing. Planting things we won’t always be around to see grow.A man doesn’t get to a harvest like this, to a face this precious and this dear, without twenty-nine Aprils to plant in. My stone on my chest and the tomatoes up and down this street are the product of the same earth. I planted them both, and I’m not sorry for a minute.

Every day without fail I choose this.

The eighteenth will com and go. Nothing much happens. No cake.The coffee cools in my chipped mug. The sun comes up over the Sugar Factory and paints the sky the same way it always has. And I get up, find her, and look at her for as long as I can.

Buy Me a Coffee

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