Home Is Burning (41 page)

“This is really about Dad,” said Tiffany. “What do you think, Dad?” He just shrugged again.

“Okay, I'll think about it,” my mom said.

My mom mentioned that the pastor would be a woman named Erin, and that she would give a brief introduction. Chelsea, who had been a silent observer, picking fur balls off our cat Pierre, finally interjected.

“No, Mom. We're not having Erin do it,” said Chelsea.

“Why?” asked my mom.

“Because Erin is a slut,” Chelsea said.

“She's a pastor. How is she a slut? Please explain,” I said with a smirk. Chelsea's weird comments always amused me. Part of me thought she'd say weird shit just for my entertainment.

“She thinks she knows God personally and talks to him and we don't know if there is a God,” said Chelsea.

“So that makes her a slut?” I asked, trying to see where this logic was coming from.

“Yeah, that makes her a slut,” Chelsea explained. She then began laughing uncontrollably, so I'm not sure how serious she was, but I was proud of her for being skeptical of God and for blindly attaching the word
slut
to a near stranger—it was a very Marshall thing to do. Chelsea's handling of the whole Lou Gehrig's shitshow had been really bizarre. She'd cry without warning sometimes, and then at others she'd just make these odd jokes. Whenever I'd ask her what she thought of anything related to Lou Gehrig's disease and what our dad was going through, she would just pinch my arm, say, “He'll be fine,” and change the subject. I think she was just trying to block everything out. Made sense.

We started discussing what to do after the funeral. I suggested that we all stand out in the parking lot smoking cigarettes and kicking the gravel while talking about how dark and horrible life had gotten. My dad finally piped in with a suggestion.

“It shouldn't be sad, but rather a celebration,” he said.

“I think it's going to be pretty fucking sad, Bob,” my mom said.

“No, everyone should get drunk and be happy,” my dad said. He was tired of his disease bumming everyone out. He wanted his death and his funeral to be a turning point back toward the good life. He didn't want to pull us through any more shit.

I was all for a celebration after the funeral. This had been a hard year. The thought of getting shit-faced while friends and family comforted me and told me how great my dad was sounded like a dream. No one can judge you if you're in mourning. You have the ultimate trump card. So I could get as drunk as I wanted to.

“You probably shouldn't have any more,” a guest might tell me after my tenth drink.

“Fuck you, my dad just died,” I'd tell them as I chugged from a jug of wine like some sort of drunken pirate.

Chelsea offered her own suggestion on what we should do after the funeral. “How about we do a campout?” she said.

There was a long pause in the room, the in-out of the respirator the only noise. “A fucking campout, Chelsea?” I said, finally breaking the silence.

“Yeah, up Millcreek Canyon,” she said.

“That's about as weird as calling a pastor you've never met a slut,” I said.

“Erin is a slut. She thinks she can talk to God,” she said.

“Chelsea, now's not the time to act weird,” Tiffany said.

“Yeah, Chelsea, shut up,” Jessica said.

“At least I'm not pregnant like a loser,” Chelsea said.

“So we're going to play ‘Over the Rainbow,' right?” my mom said.

“Mom, we're not playing ‘Over the fucking Rainbow,' so just drop it,” Greg said.

“But there's a new version out. Have you even heard it?” my mom said.

“Don't you think a campout would be fun?” Chelsea said.

I thought about the campout for a minute—us going up into a canyon and grilling hot dogs after celebrating my father's life. It might be fun. Janet could strum on her guitar and sing songs, and everyone could drink cheap beer, and piss in the river, and make s'mores. It might be worth doing just so we could see the expressions on everyone's faces. I pictured a husband slapping a mosquito on his arm and saying, “This is fucking weird. A campout after a funeral?”

“Yeah, really bizarre. But they've been through a lot, so maybe they just weren't thinking,” his wife would say.

Then I'd approach and say, “Hey, thanks for coming. Did you guys get enough s'mores?” Then I'd look around and take a deep breath of mountain air. “This is great, isn't it? What a dream. My dad would love it up here. Sure wish he wasn't dead.”

When night approached—just before taking off to our separate tents—we could tell ghost stories and spook one funeral-goer so bad her parents would decide it was best that they not spend the night, that they better get little Katie home to bed.

“Fuck little Katie. We don't need her anyway,” someone might say. “We got a funeral/campout to enjoy.”

We could wake with the sun and fish in the river. I hope there aren't any bears up there, but if a bear did eat one of us, the headline in the morning paper would be pretty classic: “Funeral-goer Eaten by Bear.” A big “ha ha” would fill the world.

We'd need insect repellent.

I loved the idea. The whole thing would be close to priceless. “I think we should do the campout,” I said.

“Okay, so Todd's going to speak for Jessica, we'll play ‘Over the Rainbow,' and we'll think about the campout idea,” my mom said as she scribbled a note into her notebook, presumably about the campout. My dad rolled his eyes, probably wishing he were already in that cloud-covered urn.

 

THE GOOD-BYE PARADE

My dad's death was very unusual because he had a set date for it. It wasn't a fatal car crash. Everyone knew exactly when he was going to go, right down to the hour (4 p.m. on September 22). Consequently, family, friends, neighbors, and total strangers all wanted to see him before he was to be unhooked from his respirator—an event that I started calling “The Big Unhook.” In fact, so many people wanted to say good-bye to my dad that there was actually a line in front of our house. He was like a celebrity.

“Wow, Dad, you're super popular,” Tiffany said as she looked out the window at the line of people waiting to say good-bye.

“God, I wish all these fuckers would just leave us alone,” Greg said.

“Every person is lovin' Daddy,” Stana said.

Chelsea asked me what all these people were doing at her house. “They're saying good-bye to Dad,” I told her.

“I know, but can't they just, like, send him an e-mail or something?” she joked. “I mean, I'm trying to study here.” Chelsea was starting her junior year of high school and was taking several AP classes. She had a near 4.0 GPA and didn't want to fuck that up. And, though she was book smart, socializing was very difficult for her. So suddenly having a house full of people made her feel really uncomfortable.

“Go into his room and fart. Bet that'd scare everyone away,” I joked. She giggled and ran off to her room. Poor Chelsea. I spent my junior year of high school taking Accutane, masturbating, and trying to feel comfortable enough with my body to talk to a girl. I couldn't imagine losing my dad at the same time.

We set Saturday, September 20, as the last day for visitors, so that we would have a little time to say good-bye to the dying fucker, too, but the days before the twentieth were a seemingly endless parade of good-byes.

The visitors ranged from really good friends and close family members to absolute strangers. A few Mormon neighbors and religious nuts also wandered in so they could preach to my dad. The religious people would say their “You're going to a better place” or “Everything happens for a reason” bullshit. After they left, my dad would look at me and say, “Who was that?” and I'd tell him that I didn't know. “Probably just some asshole who used you to feel like they did their good deed of the day.”

My dad wasn't religious, so he didn't like the pious visitors. He had grown up going to church, but religion didn't stick with him and was never a definitive part of his life. He believed that when someone dies, his or her spirit melds with all the other spirits of the people they knew and loved. He believed that your spirit is comprised of your experiences, your personality, the lessons you have learned, your traits, and your ideas. After a person dies, he or she passes on certain aspects of their spirit to people and it combines with the spirits of those others. The exact same piece will not be passed on to everyone. Each is customized. He didn't believe that there was a heaven or a hell. In his mind, a dead person was not sitting with God and eight supermodel virgins deciding which one to screw that night, but rather was alive in the people they cared about, guiding them through difficult times.

But people didn't bother to ask what my dad believed. Instead, they assumed he held the same beliefs they did. So they'd transform him into whatever religion they were. If they were Mormon, my dad was Mormon. If they were Catholic, my dad was Catholic. If they were Jewish, my dad was Jewish. Since Mormons believe that you become a god of your own kingdom upon death, they treat the whole dying thing like it's a positive instead of a negative. So Mormon visitors were especially perky, wearing these creepy smiles. While they labored on about God, and heaven, and kingdoms, and reuniting with dead relatives, and going to a better place, my dad just had to sit there. It wasn't like he could stand up and walk out of the room.

He also didn't think praying did anything, other than making the person praying feel slightly better. One religious woman who we didn't know came over and gave our family a little decorative brass sign that read,
WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU MORE THAN YOU CAN HANDLE: PRAY
.

After the woman left, I looked over at my dad. “We really fucked this up, Dad. Instead of doing the respirator, feeding tube, suction machine, cans of Promote, and wheelchair, we just needed to drop to our knees and pray.”

He smiled and said, “Who are these crazy people?”

“I don't know, but I can't wait for them to leave us alone.”

*   *   *

The visits with actual friends and family members were always heartfelt. Lots of crying. Lots of holding hands. Lots of hugs. Lots of sharing favorite memories. Lots of wishing this wasn't happening. These were hard to watch. It seemed like everyone who had ever known my dad showed up. Hell, Ralph even came over from across the street and cried a little. I didn't think I'd ever see him cry, since he had such a tough-guy attitude. I showed Ralph—who also thought religion was bullshit—the
WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU MORE THAN YOU CAN HANDLE: PRAY
thing. He shook his head and said, “Could you imagine if you actually believed that shit?”

His closest friends would do something special when they came to say good-bye. Sam was coming over for the Big Unhook, so he was waiting until then to say his good-byes. But when my dad's other running partners, Donna and Paula, came over, they asked for some time alone with my dad. “Okay, but my mom's already giving him a blow job a day,” I told them as I closed the doors to his room, giving them some privacy. They were in there for a couple of minutes, then walked out with smiles on their faces. I went in and asked my dad what that was all about. He smiled and said, “They flashed me.”

“Oh, fuck, yeah, Dad. See, there are some perks to Lou Gehrig's disease,” I said, forcing a high five on him.

His drinking and ski buddies all came over one evening with beer and wine and threw my dad a party on our house's main level. They all got shit-faced. I actually asked Dr. Bromberg if I could put some alcohol into my dad's feeding tube, and he okayed it. But my dad didn't want to. More for the rest of us.

We even got visitors from out of town. My dad's business partner, Kris, came to say good-bye. Kris lived up in the Pacific Northwest near a couple of the newspapers they owned. Since they'd sold their company, Kris had retired and started walking all the borders of all the states, beginning with Colorado because it was easiest, being square shaped and all. I guess we all need a hobby once we retire or we'll just end up sitting around thinking about death.

“It's a little bizarre, I know,” said Kris. “But it's something to do. And I'm going to write a blog about it.” My dad nodded, always too polite to call people out for being fucking weirdos.

Robin stopped by the house to have a final discussion with my dad and make sure he was approaching the Big Unhook with a positive attitude. I sat in on this one instead of listening from outside the room. My dad basically said he was ready to go and knew it was time, and that it was good that he had a chance to say good-bye to everyone. I was so emotionally burned out at this point that I just sat there, not really listening, but instead just thinking about all the free time I was going to have after this son of a bitch finally croaked. Maybe I'd find a job and make some money. Maybe I'd buy a home and start a garden. Maybe I'd meet a cute girl and fall in love again. The possibilities were endless.

After Robin's last session with my dad, I walked her out of the house to her car. We chatted like pals. She was a friend by now. She asked if I was doing okay. I smiled, shrugged, and said, “Yeah, I'm doing great, actually. I was thinking about getting a house with a garden, or some shit like that.” She then started to cry. She hugged me and said, “I don't know how you're so calm and stable during all this. I can't handle it.”

“There, there,” I said, patting her back, thinking that it was bizarre that I was comforting her, instead of the other way around. “It's all going to be fine. Life goes on. Maybe you should start a garden.”

“I wish I had your strength,” she said.

“Nah, I'm a weak little pussy under it all. I'm just numb and tired,” I said. She gave me one last hug and got in her car, still crying.