The View From 72

My mother lived to be over 100, my father dead of a heart attack at 58. I am balanced somewhere between the two, 14 years older than my father (which brought strange feelings when I went zooming by his last benchmark), and I am more than twice that many in years from my mother right now. She was three decades older than her youngest son when she died a couple of years ago on Christmas Night.

I can use facts and now something new called “alternative facts” to list why the three of us made it to the ages we did. My father drank too much and smoked all his life, having one of his Kent cigarettes to calm his nerves while walking into the emergency room where he would die a couple of hours later. By the same mixology of real facts, until a couple of years ago, I was following my father’s footsteps and drinking too much and smoking a pack a day.

My mother had an amazing life free from major illnesses. Oh, there was the time at the family camp on the Amite River when my father was rebuilding the rotten back steps, warning her they would be gone, and she stepped out the back door anyway and broke her arm after crashing to the ground. The flu, colds, her teeth pulled early in life. Older, during Jen’s illness, my mother had arrhythmia and a pacemaker was installed after shocking her old tumbling heart back into normal rhythm. Late in life she took a handful of pills morning and evening: one for her heart, one for blood pressure, others for memory and blood-thinning and to keep her bathroom visits regular while clumping down the hall and grunt-sighing. But all those pills and infirmities, spread out over the course of her long years, a century of them, revealed a graph heavier at the end, sure, but plenty of white space for all the good health during the years of putting up with my father and raising three sons.

Despite all my drugs and drink and nicotine and unprotected sex (in the early days), knock on wood, I have followed more at this point along my mother’s trail that I must have blundered along while ignoring any signposts. A tonsillectomy and a few broken bones early on, I have battled the more serious RA and diverticulosis since I was 33 years old, the latter finally catching up with me in a big way. So cruising along, ignoring the healthier route usually, I had my first scary detour two years ago. Mild discomfort for a day and a half and I drove myself to the hospital (not recommended by the experts) and in thirty minutes I was being wheeled down the corridor to the cath lab. The hands of nurses pulling at my shirt, I emerged sometime later with three stents in an artery that had a 99% blockage. Waking after an emergency or suddenly being free of long aggravating pain is like being a goose in the morning in a new world, everything fresh and the clear absence of what came before. I was glad I had more time.

Seven months ago a backdoor check of the plumbing revealed a 6” stricture in my colon, a  crisis, scary, the abdomen pain and discomfort during the previous decades blooming into emergency surgery and again emerging, glad to be alive, thanking young Dr. Cook for saving my life. Now all vanity forever gone, hanging for only moments from a colostomy bag, the first abhorrent thoughts of carrying a bag of shit around at times. It was a worse nightmare coming true. But eventually I traded the dropping away of the horror for being able to watch my granddaughters continuing to discover their world.

Five months in and looking forward to reversal surgery and the pain was back, scary again, enough so even after dealing with severe daily arthritic pain for 40 years, I had to walk the floor during the night. Blockage in the colon again? The pain radiating from stomach to bowels perhaps diverticulitis, or the pain now higher in the chest perhaps the old once-blackened heart sending broken signals from a life made hard? A week in the hospital having chest x-rays and CT scans and blood work and sonograms and urine-checking and eating what passed for a liquid diet: bad Jello, watery grape juice, rancid coffee. Another test, a MCRP (Magnetic Resonance Cholangiopancreatography), and I had a “nasty, diseased gall bladder.” Unsure until the surgery began, it was touchy but the surgeon was able to operate laparoscopically. So only a few more puncture scars joined the foot long scar from the colostomy that insures a t-shirt on the beach to avoid stares at a never ever very firm six-pack.

So here I am, recovering still, from both operations, my daily walk now limited to the end of the driveway, the reversal surgery for the colostomy delayed for now, but the idea (like my mother) that my more severe health tumbles are coming on this far end, and I am still here to enjoy family and friends. And after a long year of nothing, just reading, reading, reading, whether only okay or otherwise, these finger taps left on cyber paper are the first impressions left outside of myself in too long a time, with more to come, I hope, the spark of being driven to open a hardening vein over the keyboard never quite dimming out.

No profound lessons here, folks, you are free to move along to the next post. These musings at age 72 are the same as experienced by millions: old age is a tough journey with a payoff kick in the ass like no other. But one of the good things is that most of the useless shit continues dropping away and you are left with more appreciation for the good times, the times the granddaughters do “sleepovers” here like my two daughters did at my mother’s house when growing up. Old age and you do learn the old circle is unbroken, and you learn the circle certainly does grow ever smaller every day. 

A Saga of the Golden Years

After some dental surgery and catching shingles and the pain of that—truly as all say the horrible pain like nothing else—and with her history of atrial fibrillation, Dee got so weak yesterday and her pulse was so thready that we decided to call 9-1-1 and have the paramedics take her to the hospital. I was impressed with the fast response. First the shorter firetruck came screaming down Lobdell and turned on to Sevenoaks, followed by the paramedics in their van, followed a bit later by a supervisor (or two, women) in their SUV. All the emergency personnel around the bed, Dee’s 145 heartbeats and then 80 and then 135 and then 150 was cause for real concern. Did an EKG and started an IV and finally lifted her from the bed to the gurney bottom bedsheet and all. She was scared, naturally, and not even necessary to say that. While I was changing shirts and getting my wallet and such so I could go in my car so I would have a ride home, I didn't realize they worked in the driveway in the paramedic van for a half hour to stabilize her heart before they ever started for the hospital. The paramedics and the supervisors in the SUV and me in Pearl Honda all left at the same time. 

From one in the afternoon and for the next eight hours, and since BR General is now a teaching hospital, we saw a total of nine doctors in various stages of being a doctor, from a whip-smart Chinese woman (Lin Wang) studying at Tulane to a supervising doctor of several other doctors. Throughout the day we began to realize how smart our dumbasses finally were since each told us how dangerous things were for a while with her heart. They even had a second IV in her arm in case , as one said, "things went south." Blood work, saline drip for hydration, potassium chloride drip, and finally after all the doctors had listened to the chain of events, dental surgery, shingles, heart I-got-ya-irregular-rhythm, one said with low sodium (strange) and extremely and dangerously low potassium it seemed to be the perfect storm of events. They couldn’t get her heart back in rhythm even after a dosage of her regular heart meds until they gave her a shot of something else that finally did the trick. I mean in five minutes her heart went from the 100's to 60 and the mid-50's, end of the marathon, you can stop running. Naturally with the slower pulse and the drips her color really improved quickly. We had great service until the late afternoon before the evening shift change. Heard they were three nurses short and it took until 9 p.m. for her to be taken to her room. Even as improved as she was she was still hurting from her bad back and the shingles pain and everything else, so when the ice pack leaked and wet her sheets and blankets, we tried not to complain too much since we were in the ER and surely some people were as troubled as Dee had been earlier and maybe some others also fighting to live.

For once we did the smart thing and didn't worry about calling the paramedics. Dee couldn't even get to the bathroom a few steps away without her heart racing and coming close to passing out. Both of us felt like we dodged a very large bullet. They kept her overnight for observation. Since she was stable and I had not eaten and the cats had been out all day and I had not had my heart meds yet, I came on home, exhausted from the emotion of it all.

Even though I have thousands of adventure stories that turned out badly and could advise what to avoid in life, I have limited my advice to three things: better save for your children’s education, better save as much as you can for retirement, and as imperfect as the people and procedures in health care may still be, don’t hesitate to seek care from someone who knows more than you do. My father died of a heart attack at age 58. At age 69, just some discomfort, I merrily drove myself to the hospital when I was having one. I was lucky. Despite hesitating for a few days with all the potentially deadly signs so visible, Dee was also lucky yesterday. And by loving extension, me also.

The Language of Colonoscopy

   Let’s talk colonoscopy.

   It’s a language most people don’t speak, especially men.

   Three reasons according to me: the self-consciousness of being naked in front of strangers; the perceptions of possible pain; and the paralyzing fear of what the look-see will reveal, the doctor coming in and saying, “Well, Mr. Cothern, you won’t have to buy any Christmas presents this year.”

   Okay.

   Again, speaking for myself, I feel extremely vulnerable when in the room with two nurses who really could care less what my flabby body looks like and with my doctor standing near and putting on gardening gloves. My penis usually shrinks to the size of a two-chamber unshelled peanut.

   No pain. Something akin to Michael Jackson’s doctor sending me to Never-never Land but with no terminal results, whatever they gave me floated me away so quickly I didn’t have time to even think of any lyric to Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me”—much less count backwards.

   Having two brothers who had prostate cancer, one eventually succumbing to Cancer of the Everything for (perhaps) not learning the language of regular checkups, having had glaucoma and going totally blind in my left eye, having had RA for four decades and diverticulosis to go along with that as a steady and painful companion—not until old age avoiding seeds and such and great spicy foods and cigarettes and alcohol and wild women (I wished as a much younger man)—I did fear what the doctor would find. I feared not being strong enough while losing everything. I had put off getting answers for years. Ignoring my pain and stomach problems meant I didn’t have anything serious. My gastroenterologist did find and removed four pre-cancerous polyps, which was good news, but he also found some scar tissue from the diverticulosis that is blocking some of the lower reaches of The River Bowel and no doubt had been causing a lot of my pain over the years. Still, not really horrible news, and after dealing with the blockade, Christmas shopping (online) is still on my schedule.

   So why this public service post?

   Maybe to get one friend to have any kind of checkup?

   Perhaps. But I know how difficult it is to begin language acquisition so late in life.

   But these few paragraphs also just serve to illustrate that as humans we build up expectations so high that nothing can meet our good wishes. Everything we fear has us dead by morning. Like most things encountered in the boat being rowed upstream, the truth of it all lies somewhere in between.

   

Birth Day

Everything else on the 27th day of January in 1945 paled (as it should) next to the Russian troops throwing open the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau while radio stations in this country were playing “Don’t Fence Me In” by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. While the troops were finding 468 dead inmates, folks in New York were catching Martha Graham and Dance Company at Jordon Hall performing “Appalachian Spring” at the Saturday matinee. While the troops were liberating 2800 people abandoned by the SS without any provisions to survive, William “Willie” J. Glunk was being born in Astoria, New York, about the time Noah Berry, Jr. was preparing for an opening and run of 504 performances in Up In Central Park at the Century Theatre with book and lyrics by Dorothy Fields. While Lois Ada Comfort was being born in Doniphan, Maryland, Raymond Cothern in Baton Rouge, David Hermes in Baraboo, Wisconsin, while these and countless others were being born, hopefully with joyous cries at new life, the Soviets were inventorying the storage buildings and finding 836,255 women’s coats and dresses, over 368,000 men’s suits, and human hair totaling seven tons. While Oscar Schindler was saving 85 Jews from a train in Brunnlitz that had been locked for a week, in Bound Brook, New Jersey, William Hennessy was being born and would live 67 years to the day, the 27th of January, both his birth and death date.

In Baton Rouge and other places in Louisiana that day, there were no ironic newspaper headlines, only straight-forward reporting during war-weary times and the seemingly necessary one-sided reporting of race. Harold Joseph, Negro, died that Friday in New Orleans Charity Hospital of an abdominal gunshot wound received while resisting arrest during a jewelry store robbery Thursday night. His partner, Robert Guidry, Negro, was also shot while escaping with the goods and was in serious condition. No doubt Patrolmen Jay Sedgebeer and Paul Oestricker were busy filling out reports about Joseph and Guidry refusing to halt while fleeing and how many shots were fired and by whom. Also in New Orleans, Rock P. Scallan was sentenced to 60 days in jail by Judge George Platt for driving a truck while drunk earlier on December 23rd. In Baton Rouge, despite objections from the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the sale would go forward of 22 horses and mules no longer fit for duty at Angola, the state penitentiary. The Society cited a law prohibiting the sale of “debilitated, diseased and lame horses and mules in cities of 10,000 or more.”

On that winter day in January, while Robert Guidry, Negro, struggled to survive his gunshot wound and the family of his partner prepared for a funeral, while Patton’s Third Army was crossing the Our River and capturing Oberhausen and while the 6th Ranger Battalion and the 6th Army Special Reconnaissance Unit began a rescue behind enemy lines of 500 American, British, and Dutch prisoners-of-war in the Philippines, Onetia Mae Wilson Cothern was 31 years old and giving birth shortly before noon at the Baton Rouge General Hospital, right across Florida Boulevard and two short blocks west of Bernardo Street. Willie Talmadge Cothern was 33 years old and waiting with other expectant fathers for the birth of his child. Willie Von and Wayne Harolyn at ages 12 and 6 were in school, perhaps with vague inklings that the attention they had been receiving was being splintered into unequal time, that the balance of power was shifting under them much like the uneasy alliance among all armies, all families.

Tumbling

It only seems like slow motion when tumbling to the ground because I’m aware of every step. The first step on Colorado River rocks behind the koi pond’s waterfall, another step on uneven rocks for balance, and the feet are leaden, refusing to lift high enough or quickly for more balancing steps as the momentum of my body pushes forward, aware the tipping point has slipped behind me, the right shoulder crashing into a spiny asparagus fern spreading over more large rocks on the mounded perimeter of the pond. No banging of the head like two friends who died from falling, sudden leaks in the brain. There is slight pain from the thorns of the fern and the middle finger on the right hand throbs from cushioning the impact. Add blood-thinning meds since a heart attack more than a year ago and skinny white legs sticking out of cargo shorts look like someone has been playing mumbly-peg with a sharp knife. Small cuts bleed as if they are more dangerous ones and they do so on through the night.

What’s disconcerting is the tumble happened to a formerly agile guy, one who climbed ladders daily hanging lights in a theatre. It was the inevitability of hitting the ground once the fall started, knowing no instinctive maneuver would be quick enough to avoid the accident. It is like the sudden looseness in the steering or the brake pedal going all the way to the floorboard, the sudden acceptance of a crash into rocks covered by a pondside fern.

Heart Attack Friday

One year ago today . . .

After my father died of a heart attack at the age of 58, I had experienced sympathetic chest pains for months after the funeral. Despite being profoundly scared standing next to my father’s bed, knowing from that experience the symptoms of a failing heart, when my turn came over forty years later, I was not surprised I waited almost a full day before driving myself to the hospital, something the experts say you should never do. Famous last words in many cases, I guess, but the pain was hardly severe, not at all like the pain radiating across my father’s back that had made him sick to his stomach. What I thought while driving to the hospital—stopping at every red light—was getting a cure for the annoying discomfort before the weekend. I had books to read and writing to be done.

It began Thursday evening with discomfort behind the sternum, from stress I thought from financial concerns in retirement and because my wife was ill. Took aspirin and meds for my arthritis and went to bed. Awoke at 4:30 Friday morning—long before daylight—with the same discomfort and knew that was unusual but went back to sleep for a while, always the best way to escape concerns, or the best way to die for that matter, as several people I knew had done, to sleep, perchance to dream before sudden painless nothingness. Inclined as most men are when it comes to doctors and hospital, I put off doing anything, always aware of the discomfort and now some pain on the back of my left bicep—something felt plenty of times from arthritic pain in that shoulder. For short periods of time, the discomfort and bicep pain were joined by slight pain along the jawline and all were with me until early afternoon Friday.

Getting admitted to the emergency room was rapid, dizzying. It became the beginning of the story of how to avoid paperwork and waiting in a room full of sick people. I told the ladies through the round hole in the glass, I know this may sound dramatic, but I need to see if I’m having a heart attack. From the moment of uttering those words until I was on the gurney in an operating room, naked except for a gown, shivering because it was so cold in the room until one of the men put a warmed blanket on me, in that span of an early quick EKG and an emergency room doctor asking if I knew I was in atrial fibrillation and had high blood pressure (no to the first, never ever had the second), from the moment of being on a gurney and racing down a hall while talking on a cell phone to Dee who was too sick to come to the hospital and telling her I was headed to the cath lab, from being amid a gathering heart team and after the cardiologist introducing himself and me sort of echoing my father by asking if the doctor was any good, from that first utterance about checking to see if I was having a heart attack to having a line installed from groin to heart along mysterious pathways and three stents installed in an artery with 99% blockage, in that time, thank you, thank you, thank you, far less than one hour had raced by.

I was never in a great deal of pain, feeling only flushed warmth during the procedure. There was some pain from two IVs, some slight pain from the shaved pubic start of the pathway to the heart. The endless blood gathering always hurt and bruised, but the most pain came from countless sticky contact pads for always awkward and tangled lifelines connected to them. Despite shaving various hairy areas, the worst pain was the removal of two hand-sized sticky pads stuck to chest and all the hairs upon it in case my heart needed some shock therapy. After just one firmly fixed pad was yanked off I was ready to confess all the bad things I had ever done.

There is always a value to serious illness. After my daughter’s battle with encephalitis, it was learning not to sweat the countless and ultimately meaningless small stuff that makes up so much of life. Her illness also brought an appreciation of living in the moment. True of all serious illness, I guess. But I learned something entirely different from having a heart attack.

Dreading it despite knowing it is mostly an infinitesimal part of living, I have always been afraid of the actual act of dying since I was old enough to understand the process. Somehow, lying there on the table before snaking a line up to my heart and installing three stents to save my life, despite knowing I could go into a full-blown attack and die, I felt no great fear, and part of that may have been the speed of the process from when I first spoke to the lady at the ER window. It was a feeling that one of the shoes had dropped, that finally the end process had become visible. Not that I wanted it or welcomed it, but it was a dance with the actual end game that binds all humans most strongly to each other.

I am not sure what the lack of fear during that dance with mortality meant ultimately. Maybe I became a slightly better person. Wife and children would have welcomed that early on. Maybe I appreciated even more the time I had left, a grand gift, enjoying family and watching granddaughters grow into beautifully brilliant young women. But other nagging fears crept in, no doubt to balance my earlier lack of fear when I was having the heart attack, small daily concerns: the blood thinner that immediately created problems; being told not to miss taking another drug because I now had foreign bodies in my artery and the body loves to clot around anything not its own.

Lovely.

A half-century after my father died from his heart attack, two decades after Jennifer’s illness, I was just glad there was another lesson learned from my illness: sometimes you do have to sweat some of the small stuff because some of it can kill you.

 

Holiday Labors

In the old days, fathers were not allowed in the delivery rooms. Admittance for them beyond a series of swinging doors even in the early stages of a wife’s labor was strictly forbidden.

Go, sit in the waiting room, watch the television high up on the wall, we’ll keep you informed of the ritual secret birth and call you when your life has changed in unimaginable ways, when you and your wife are forever marked as blessed by a tiny life you’ll come to love above all else. So go on, pace the halls and lobby of The Woman’s Hospital if you must but never ever go through those swinging doors because you are germ-filled and are only the father.

Dee woke me early Thanksgiving in the still-dark morning and told me she was in labor. No old Dick Van Dyke routine with a cap on the top of the headboard, ready to sit up in bed and put it on in one quick motion, no fumbling for a suitcase that springs open and dumps all the womanly clothing and items needed after becoming a mother. It was simply excitement and a call to the doctor who said he would meet us at the hospital. So eyes puffy from lack of sleep, excited heartbeats felt in our throats, we met the doctor and he said Dee was barely dilated, to go on home and enjoy Thanksgiving. So we mentally put my baseball cap back on the headboard and had breakfast and waited for the Thanksgiving meal at Dee’s mother’s apartment. Miriam had baked the requisite turkey and her usual delicious fare of dressing and squash and butterbeans and cranberries cooked fresh that morning, a late afternoon feast with Dee’s brothers, David and Ricky, rounding out the family.

Once seated and no prayer, my first forkful of food heading toward my mouth, I swear, the first forkful heading up on an arc toward waiting teeth and tongue, and Dee said quietly, My water just broke. My fork clattered down on the plate and catapulted a piece of turkey to the other side of the white linen tablecloth like some invading eat-or-die mongrel hoard launching the only ammunition they had left.

A quick trip home to retrieve the suitcase and we were back at the hospital, me handling the check-in paperwork, Dee in a wheelchair facing the corridor of swinging doors leading to the Labor Room and, ultimately, the Secret Birth Room and special reclining chairs with here’s-one-for-the-boys-in-the-balcony leg stirrups in a wishbone Y. Hurried kisses and reassuring hugs, finally losing sight of Dee through a small window before being exiled in the waiting room.

Dee attempted Natural Child Birth but it was a long hard labor, stretching on into the night and all the next day, so long, in fact, that when they did finally wheel an exhausted Dee into the hallway and finally allowing me back by her side, she put her hand on my face and told me we had a daughter and wondered if worry made a man’s beard grow.

When she went into labor with Jennifer two years later, two weeks after Christmas in January of 1972, Dee remembered the two long days trying to deliver Laurie. She started holding out her arm for a shot as soon as we hit the hospital parking lot—or at least as soon as we cleared the first doors of the hospital. But Jen’s birth came much easier, not nearly the physical ordeal of Laurie’s first appearance on the Cothern stage.

I posted a sign on the door of The Rainy Day Bookstore that we owned, saying the store would be closed for a day or so and giving proud father details on Jennifer’s birth and weight. A reporter for a newspaper from one of the smaller towns around Baton Rouge took a photograph of the birth notice and we were told it had been published, one of those feel good items smaller newspapers seemed particularly fond of trumpeting.

During the time both daughters were born, their historical holiday birthstones included the still raging Vietnam War and the sometimes violent push for racial equality. While the Beatles’ “Come Together” / “Something” was climbing Billboard’s Hot 100 as a two-sided single (and would peak at Number One on Laurie’s birthday of November 29, 1969), The Plain Dealer published shocking photographs of the massacre of Vietnam villagers at My Lai, and in a more subtle approach John Lennon returned his MBE medal to protest his government’s support of the war in Vietnam. Two days after Laurie was born (and something that concerned her father), the first Draft lottery was held in this country since World War II. Three days before Jennifer’s birth on the 13^th of January, 1972, a local reporter and anchorman, Bob Johnson, and his cameraman, Henry Baptiste, were covering a rally for a group claiming to be Muslims from outside the state who parked cars in the middle of North Boulevard to protest racial discrimination. The crowd grew, 200 or more strong, deputies arrived, and bottles and bricks flew. Two by three they died, two deputies, three Muslims, and the enraged crowd attacked Johnson and Baptiste as they fled, and it was Baptiste, a black man, who dragged from the scene his co-worker and friend, Johnson, a now comatose white man, who would remain in a coma for almost four decades.

So in all the years down the road, there were celebrations of birthdays while historical events swirled amid the holidays, always making reflections of the season a little deeper, more poignant. The girls grew up so quickly, and in the rush and hassle of living day to day we sometimes blinded ourselves to the simple sentimental facts that no matter the season of discord in the world, loving and sharing and protecting and giving to one another were the best gifts we had to offer.

Foreshadowing

It occurred to me only later that there was a hospital episode when Jennifer was a senior in high school that was a sampling of what was to come for her and us. When she contracted encephalitis and battled for months to stay alive while in a coma and battled for years rebuilding her life from the ground up, the earlier botched tonsillectomy was a foreshadowing of the dark days to come as parents, helpless, worrying about a sick child, worrying that earlier time about the outcome of a second surgery needed to correct the weakness of catgut or silk in the back of the throat, the placement or tightness of the sutures, all done in the operating theatre by a masked man performing badly.

The initial surgery went well, we thought, all according to form, we thought: a sedative to relax Jen, an intravenous line in the arm for fluids and antibiotics and whatever, general anesthesia before the procedure started, a breathing tube through the nose and down the throat, the mouth propped open, and the tongue no doubt pulled to the side like a thirsty hound on a summer day, snip, clip, suture ligation, the recovery room until the anesthesia wore off, and finally the white-sheeted bed.

But all during the day, after Jen was awake and aware, she said she could taste blood and assurances constantly came from us and the nurses about that being normal. She threw up once, twice, three or more times, each episode filling one of those kidney-shaped yellow plastic bedside pans. Aahhh, that will make you feel better, to get all that blood out of your stomach. And it went on and on until early evening. Finally, finally, the man was called back, unmasked now, Dr. Breaux, so obviously put-out by being called and having to come back, doubting until he probed the back of Jen’s throat with long crooked surgical tweezers and mumbled something about the sutures, straightening and telling the nurse to call a surgical team back to the hospital.

Now more assurances to Jen from us that everything would be fine, a stitch needed repair, that was all, and the pan again filling up with blood, her teeth and lips smeared with bright blood. You’ll be okay, here’s the gurney, slide over, that’s it, we’re going with you as far as we can, everything will be fine.

A nurse maneuvered the gurney out of the room, bumping the door facing a couple of times, pushing Jen by the nurses’ station, some of them registering slight surprise, and Jen sat up suddenly, hemorrhaging, gagging, leaning over, and the blood coming out, a projected wide stream like dark rusty water thrown across a yard out of a full bucket, covering half the gurney, Jennifer’s lap and legs, and splashing down to the floor, some of it rolling down the framework of the gurney as if the chrome tubes were being magically transformed to a bright Christmas red.

The speed of the gurney picked up and Dee and I were racing down the hall to keep up, drops and plops of blood marking our trail.

Dee and I waited in an empty pre-op room, the stillness and evening quiet unsettling, the worry now manifest in furrowed brows and tight lips and eyes moist with concern, pacing, arms across our chests, hands squeezing biceps in rhythm with our thoughts, Dee suddenly giving out a quick sob, telling me to please come hug her, asking me why I didn’t know she needed that, me wondering for a moment what was pushing me to stand at a distance in the empty room, apart from her, some solitary grieving ritual denying us both comfort.

Reposting Gustav

Hurricane season in south Louisiana is always a time of nagging worry that weather patterns will align and a path will open up through the Gulf of Mexico, sending a storm of destruction that changes people’s lives. Hurricane Gustav in 2008 was one such storm, six years ago today.

All day the Sunday of that last storm, in that longtime home in Baton Rouge, the wind and rain bands moved inland and in the dark of early Monday the wind began to gust at alarming speeds. He lost electricity mid-morning and still the winds were building to velocities that were downright scary. Thinking the brick fireplace down into the house was a strong point and because it was close the to walk-in kitchen pantry with walls all around, he sat on the raised edge of the hearth for long moments, hearing and feeling the distinctive crack and ground-shaking thuds of falling trees, each time backing into the pantry doorway, waiting for a time before venturing back out into the house proper.

Peering out of rain-streaked window panes in the bedroom, the huge oak at the end of the driveway came crashing down along Seven Oaks, taking all the poles and previously-dead power lines with it. Amazing how fast it came down, earth-quaking up his 8" thick driveway into slabs as big as kitchen tables. Venturing to the large picture window in the kitchen, not standing too close because of the possibility of the glass exploding inward, he watched the large oak across the driveway, on the other side of his fence, crashing toward the house, the treetop splitting the tall Bradford pear tree next to the koi pond, crushing plants and tied down patio furniture and smaller trees and shattering lantern-like patio lights on supposedly immovable iron posts, the top branches finally crashing into the roof. Still, all around, the crack and ground-compressing whoomp of falling trees felt in the chest. Like standing next to a speaker at a rock concert when he was young, the vibrations like a cello bow being drawn across his ribs. It went on for hours and hours, the feeling of helplessness building endlessly with each minute, what it felt like when he was in the middle of a battle. Two more trees from across the driveway came crashing down, one of them hitting the corner of the house, enough so it was being helpless in battle again because his first thought was, I got hit that time.

And it went on and on.

When the worse of it passed, but still the gusts scary enough to walk with his back flattened against the outside walls of the house, it was emerging into a battlefield. Nothing was left untouched. It was like wartime views in Vietnam he saw from bombers dropping so many close-patterned bombs, carpet bombing, and then the view up close, at ground level. Even after going through actual war and now seeing a small portion of the storm through rain-streaked windows, it was still difficult to wrap his mind around what had happened.

Later, reports stated it was the worse storm ever for Baton Rouge—with gusts of 90 mph with sustained hurricane force winds for nearly 5 hours, the result of Gustav's eye coming close to the city, putting it on the northeast quadrant, the strongest area of destruction. In every neighborhood it was the same: 20% of the trees in Baton Rouge down, every third or fourth house with a tree on it or in it, streets blocked by huge oaks, trunks as big around as cars, street signs found miles away from the actual streets.

There was a long week of no power. He moved everything from refrigerator into the freezer, eating sandwiches, Shredded Wheat before the milk went bad. Trees across the driveway blocked his automobile, but there were no stores open even if he could have gotten to them. No streetlights or traffic signals were working in the entire city. At night it was like being at the cabin in the country: no ambient light from any source. There was the sound of a few generators running, powering someone's refrigerator, a fan, radio, a lamp. It was eerily similar to the end-of-the-world movies. For the first two days the wind continued to blow, bands of rain falling, the weather cool enough to get some exhausted sleep. It was Wednesday before an out of town crew was hired to cut a path through the trees across the driveway, those crews like Carpetbaggers after the Civil War, from North Carolina, Alabama, Ocean Springs, all seeking work in the devastation. Thursday the sun came out, the humidity rising and the nights miserable; he would sit in the dark with as few clothes on as possible, candles in every room, hurricane lamps aglow, reading (because there was nothing else to do) by booklight and flashlight, finishing three books in as many days. Every day, he started by burying two or three koi he and his wife had raised, ten-pounders and bigger, each floating in the water pitch black from the undissolved oxygen, beautiful fish, raised from thumb-sized specimens. It was like burying pets each day.

When the lightless nights were becoming the norm, when it was second nature to light candles and lamps at dusk to keep from entering totally dark rooms, the lights came on a week later at Sunday dusk, the light over the kitchen sink suddenly lighting a small area on the patio, the sound of the pond pump with its first surge of water through the hose into the waterfall basin. Finally back to teaching classes after that week off, he would come home into air conditioning, watching off-air TV because the cable was still out, and feeling for weeks to come somehow still disconnected, disgruntled, discovering it was the aftermath shock of driving home along a street no longer the same, a stranger street, not the same neighborhood of so many years before.

Warren Eyster / Writer & Teacher

   My writing resume usually starts with the fact that I studied writing at LSU with Walker Percy and Vance Bourjaily, both known to interested folks as two great writers. I list them for just that reason, to have someone think, Wow, two fine writers and this unknown studied with them so let’s pay attention to his work because he must have some talent. If that has ever been the case it is surely talent by association. But as well-known as those two writers are, there was another writer and teacher at LSU who influenced me more than Percy and Bourjaily.

   Merely scratching the surface, here are a few facts about Warren Eyster, my old undergraduate creative writing teacher.

   He was born in Steelton, Pennsylvania, in 1925, and after high school, Eyster became a hydraulic repairman in the Army Air Corps and, in 1942, joined the Navy. His experience in the navy was to be the basis for his novel Far from the Customary Skies, set on a navy destroyer operating in the Far East during World War II.  While in graduate school at the University of Virginia, he wrote half of that first novel as short stories, and after leaving Charlottesville he devoted himself entirely to writing. Audrey Wood, primarily a theatrical agent, with clients like Tennessee Williams and William Inge, nearly succeeded in persuading Little Brown to publish his first novel. Instead, David McDowell at Random House became his editor and with support from Bob Haas and Bennett Cerf, Eyster became acquainted with a number of writers, including James Agee, Robert Penn Warren, Mario Puzo, William Carlos Williams, Budd Schulberg, and William F. Buckley. In 1954 he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to work with aspiring Mexican writers at El Centro Mexicano de Escritores in Mexico City. Finishing a second novel, No Country For Old Men, Eyster started to write a novel about a Mexican revolution. He also translated the first three chapters of a Carlos Fuentes novel, Where the Air Is Clear, and  was instrumental in getting it published. The movie, The Old Gringo, was based on conversations Eyster had with Carlos about Ambrose Bierce and his determination to bring about his own death by becoming a spy for Pancho Villa.

   In 1970 Warren Eyster came to Louisiana State University and became coordinator of the undergraduate writing program, teaching courses in writing short stories, novels and plays. Since it bolstered decreasing enrollment in English—even future journalists and law students particularly interested in creative writing courses—the writing program became more acceptable to the English department, allowing students like John Ed Bradley, James Colburn, and Valerie Martin to take more than 20 hours of undergraduate writing classes.

   In the early ‘70’s, he reminded me of Columbo, the television detective played brilliantly by Peter Falk. Short, a little stocky, clothes always giving the wrinkled-at-the-end-of-the-day appearance, even first thing in the morning, like Columbo he seemed forgetful, his desk always piled high with stacks of short stories and plays and novel excerpts, all in danger of sliding off of his desk at any moment and some doing so occasionally. Always open to talking to any student who came to his office—official office hours or not—he often discussed books and films and then suddenly realized he was late for class, grabbing one stack from his desk and hurrying off and muttering a line from literature, I’m late, I’m late. The thing was, often hurrying behind him to the same class, I was always amazed he had read every story and had jotted down succinct notes that always pointed to improvement in the narrative. Like Columbo, his appearance was deceiving, like the character’s seemingly faltering style, the sudden remembered question to ask, Eyster’s comments on each student’s work were never less than concrete clues that led to the solution of a story. Like Columbo as played by Peter Falk, at the end of each episode, there is a realization of being fooled by appearance. Warren Eyster was never less than a brilliant teacher in disguise, kind and caring of his student’s success, and always willing to impart everything he knew about the craft of writing.

   Thank you, Mr. Eyster.

   Any writing achievement is from the association with you.

   In recognition of your accomplishments, your name will always be mentioned.

The Value of Illness: Love Again

     I wish I could say my daughter’s almost deadly battle with encephalitis brought quick changes, an appreciation of living in the moment, magically the nearness of death immediately forging Dee and me back together as loving husband and wife. But, in fact, Jennifer’s long rehabilitation brought more paranoia—Jen asking in the early months if she was dead—all of us expecting the next foundation brick to loosen and slip out, bringing another crisis of health for Jen, for any of us. The months rolling along were just chaos with familiar faces: Jen’s continuing recovery, how far she could come back, and the fallout from all the expenses the insurance didn’t cover. The simplest decisions took effort, the movement forward weighted down with the feeling that little mattered, that daily concerns were just battles contested with slight gain and little reward.

     It was much later that Dee and I realized our daughter’s illness did reveal within us strengths and weaknesses and concern and care and love that both of us had forgotten in the other.

    We dated in junior high, high school, the usual breakups, one so bad we went our separate ways to college, and Dee got married, eventually divorcing, and we came back together a few years later, her pregnancy happily bonding us for life.

    The marriage dynamic started like most marriages do: loving, caring, the sense of great adventures to come, and eventually the gift of children, Laurie and Jennifer, and a love for them that brought a welcomed understanding that they were the most important people in the world, suddenly shifting self-interest to a lower rung—at least for a long period of time, until those wizard-hiding curtains began falling for us, revealing a Raymond and Dee neither one of us really knew.

We separated, tried again, separated, me staying away from Dee and the girls for weeks at a time. A year or two of this until Dee finally announced she was tired of ping pong and had rented an apartment. I was an angry man, knowing I hadn’t given her my best but feeling like I had, telling her, fine, go on, get the hell out if that’s what you want.

She went.

The girls stayed.

In her usual quick decision way, oldest daughter Laurie said she was not moving out of the house since her friends were all nearby. Still following our old edict of treating them like an equal member of the family early on, Dee reluctantly swallowed the hurt and allowed Laurie’s decision to become law. Oh, yes, I should have been the one to move out of the house but my anger was hard resolve not to make it any easier for my wife. Jen told Dee privately that she couldn’t move out of the house because someone had to look after me. Nothing said could convince Jen that taking care of her father was not her job. So the positions were fixed.

Dee became the self-imposed outcast, and I saw the pain she attempted to hide every time she came by the house to pick the girls up for shopping or eating out, the pain of simply not being with her daughters on a daily basis. I smothered my pain with anger and alcohol and my sense that everything put together does eventually fall apart.

Routine did settle in, the anger veiled by common courtesy and consideration for the girls, the years rolling along in this city on the river, a time when Laurie viewed me with suspicion, knowing something else might change again and interrupt the delicate balance of her life. Jen was more concerned with everyday issues, school, getting together with friends, even shopping with me at the grocery store and quickly planting herself in front of the cooler with ten pound packs of legs and thighs, throwing her arms wide open and saying, No, Dad, no more chicken, please, no more chicken for a while. Without anything being said about it, Dee and I always attended any function the girls asked us to, showing up as a united front as their parents. Repeated over the next several years, our continuing association and long history together did smooth over those initial reactions when we first separated, the anger that was sometimes directed at each other by deficiencies within ourselves, our lives as a broken family now accommodated somehow.

     So we went through Jennifer’s illness united in battle.

   Starting with fever and terrible headaches, the trip to the emergency room, negative drug test, Jennifer was more and more out of touch, not knowing what was real. The Behavioral Unit, walking around barefooted, talking incoherently to imaginary people, pulling her hair out, coming back suddenly for a moment of clarity.

     Two weeks, no control, and finally a spinal tap.

     Encephalitis.

     An inflammation of the brain due to an infection, a virus.

   After being transferred to the critical care wing, I walked into the room, expecting a calmer Jen, sedated perhaps, but seeing her attempting to sit up, eyes closed, straining violently against the cloth restraints, instinctively fighting what was happening to her, my soul plunged along with my daughter during that long night, Jen descending into a coma, Dee constantly yanking her up to sitting positions, yelling at her, Breath, Jennifer!

    Even those days became routine: carrying on and dealing with the constant monitoring of machines and infections and bodily functions (or lack of them), Dee and I making an effort at small talk, at being interested in matters outside of the hospital, most times the effort of reading a newspaper or book or watching the TV high up on the wall too much to overcome, walking the halls when the need to escape the room was high, peering into other sick rooms when doing so, making eye contact with other vigilant people, the heaviness of waiting etched always in expectant looks, wondering at other stories of illnesses, nodding at the thin young man in his robe wasting away from AIDS, wondering at his thoughts as he stood at the end of the corridor looking out the window, knowing (unlike Jen) just how ill he was, knowing the prognosis was dim, dealing with it the only way any of us could, one moment at a time, one after the other, then again and again, moments rushing together so quickly but strung out so endlessly that the fabric of time finally stretches and slows down.

     After a year of rehabilitation in Texas, the lowest moment of the entire ordeal came a couple of days after Christmas

     It was also the moment, looking into Dee’s eyes, I realized how much I still loved her.

   When Jennifer was between her junior and senior years in high school, she was one of 19 girls chosen to attend the Women in Science Program at Harvard University. Math, science, it all came easily for her, rarely cracking books in high school where she ended up as Salutatorian, the girl as a fearless child with a fistful of earthworms approaching the house and dumping them on the steps for study.

     Jen was home from rehab in Texas until after the first of the New Year. Dee and I were standing in the kitchen when Jen came back from checking the mail. She opened a questionnaire from the Summer Science Program at Harvard, flipping to the information about the girls she was there with in 1989. Her eyes rounded slightly as she read about their accomplishments, those doing scientific research, those working as doctors in major hospitals, and Jen broke down, crying, trying to talk while sobbing.

      I am never going to be a doctor.

     Dee and I encircled her in our arms, the three of us standing there, hugging and trying to comfort each other.

     Jen wailed and said, It is so hard when dreams die.

    My heart literally changed at that moment, the ache unlike anything I have ever felt in that one moment I had dreaded for all of the last year, watching her confronting the realization that her life had spun out of her control, hearing her admit that her dreams were no longer valid, seeing the pain of the last year made visible on her face, looking into Dee’s eyes and seeing her pain also, all driving home the random injustice of serious illness, the dark chaos always circling that will someday claim us all, realizing in that moment we have but one weapon.

     Months later, coming up out of sleep because of the rolling thunder and the constant lightning, alone since Jennifer was spending the night at a friend’s house, I was in the dining area off the kitchen, looking out of the rain-smeared bank of floor-to-ceiling windows when a huge tree came crashing down across the roof, almost slicing the house in half, exploding into the book-lined den with limbs as big around as my waist and legs, and it felt like a tank at full speed had run into the house, the impact of it surely like the first huge shock of a California earthquake, the floor shifting suddenly once, equilibrium suddenly suspect. Waterfalls with leaves and twigs and pieces of wooden roof and tar paper and bits of insulation and black shingles poured down to the parquet floors, splashing walls and running into other rooms torqued out of plumb.

     I called Dee and plugged the coffee pot in, knowing the electricity would be turned off for safety reasons when the firemen arrived. Surprisingly, a miracle to me, the books in the den, some ruined, yes, but I found the tightly shelved ones with only wet spines on the dust jackets.

A reluctant but accommodating Dee welcomed me, providing the last puzzle piece, reshaping our relational landscape.

     Refusing to leave the neighborhood after the destruction, her illness now dictating the notion that she had to be close to the destroyed house, to her actual possessions, Jen stayed for weeks with a good friend across the street, and from the front yard Jen watched the tree being removed, so large it had to be cut in desk-sized segments in order to be lifted by the crane, watching and wondering in her post traumatic stress phase what use the tree could now serve, knowing—with the help of her therapist—and laughing softly after she realized the tree was a symbol of herself: a once strong entity felled, the usefulness of it changed in a moment in another direction, lasting forever.

     Slowly, that morning storm brought Dee and me together again, me lacking resources to rent another place, back to living under one roof, an effort of graciousness on her part, me the grateful guest. Discovering the comfort of company while sitting across the table from each other, good food on the table between us, conversation was a forgotten joy revealed again in the talk of everyday news and the shared history of raising children, seeing one through a terrible illness along the way. Never mind that certain subjects were skirted and some events were off the radar for now, never mind the wariness flashing for a moment in the eyes, in the bodily shift on the kitchen chair, never mind all that. For the talk was a courtship again, the good parts history between us a starting point to begin again, to see if eventual openness came and the bad parts version could be discussed and accommodations made to lay it all to rest.