(This is the latest draft I wrote for a local storytelling event, it’s still in process but any feedback is welcome)
December 28, 2019
“I have…Cancer, Pancreatic Cancer” he said. He spoke slowly, each word measured and weighed, while he leaned forward with his fingers tented, head bowed, face turned away from the open garage door. “Now I don’t want to talk a bunch about it…” the man started, going on about how he’d keep her updated with his treatments, that he’d probably forget words or sound strange once the chemo started.
She nodded her head as she listened to him continue. He gave her the bare bones of his diagnosis, the current treatment plans laid out in vague terms. She heard his words, his voice, as if from far away. Her mind was blank, knowing it would only hurt him to show her fear she steeled herself from the news.
So she listened. She took in the timbre of his voice, the way he paused between his words. How he was able to deftly maneuver their conversation towards other things, easily distracting them both with a book he pointed out on the shelf. She listened when he went quiet, feeling the silence swell the space between them. Then a powerful urge to break it.
It had been only thirty minutes earlier, maybe less, that I was driving to the store. It was that in-between week of Winter Vacation, after Christmas but right before New Year’s, when time was irrelevant but seemed to go too slow. I’d planned on spending the day baking, soon it’d be New Year’s eve with plenty of places to share all best baked things.
It was just as I pulled into the parking lot between Big Y and Walmart, mentally reviewing the shopping list ,when her phone rang.
“Caller Unknown” showed on the screen. Unless telemarketers had started working Sunday’s I knew it would be my Dad. Likely just checking in after the holidays, seeing where I’d been or what I was up to this week. She answered without hesitation.
“Hey, Jacquelyn, can you come by the house today? I’ve gotta talk to you about something” her shoulders tensed. His tone was strange, urgent in a way she’d never known him to be.
“What’s up? I’m kind of in the middle of some things, was just heading to the store…” she pulled into the nearest empty space.
“It’s something I need to tell you in person” he interrupted her, “Can you stop by this afternoon?”
The lazy, lighthearted mood of the day suddenly evaporated as I agreed, ending the call and taking a deep breath. Her tongue grew thick and her face flushed, with her grandparents dead it was either an emergency involving her estranged mom or something was wrong with Dad. I prayed for the former, as her mother’s mental health crises are more routine than crisis these dayst.
Itook the long way home that day, driving through the center of a small town and headed towards the mountain. As always, Idrove carefully, “Predictable over Polite” her father always told her. He’d briefly been a policeman long before I was born. Before he got sober. Back when he was still trying-but-failing to be an all-around good guy.
I had known about his time as an officer, and his time as an atrocious drunk. The woman could hazard a guess at the path he’d taken to finally get where he was today, a story I knew in broad strokes and sketches, but there were so many crucial details missing. I knew my parents had met and dated while in sober-living situations in the late 80’s. I knew Dad spent most of her own childhood drunk on a mountain an hour from where I lived with Mom.
I didn’t know the cop story. So, with this newly looming cloud of death and loss hanging over the garage that day I asked him. What’s he got to hide at this point?
So, I asked. Quick staccato question to fill the space left by the announcement he’d made.
“You really wanna know huh?” he asked, a sly grin stretching across his face as he scratched at the stubble along his jawline. “I guess I can tell you, you’re old enough now”. He turned towards me..
Well, there’s not that much to tell if I’m being honest. I knew I was in trouble and I needed to get help, get myself clean. I wasn’t any good to anyone in that state and I needed to dry out. So I went to my Lieutenant, guy I’d known for years, and explained myself. I told him I’d need 90 days to get sober. He looked at me like I was crazy, hemmed and hawed that they just didn’t have the manpower to grant me that long of a leave.
Well I’d just about had it, I told him if he couldn’t give me the time off I’d quit. He called my bluff, said if I was leaving I’d have to give him the written notice. In a rage I grabbed a pen and paper, wrote “I QUIT” -John A. Hafey and threw it in his face. Left my badge and my sidepiece on his desk and stormed out. “Fuck ‘em,” I thought, “If he doesn’t want me sober I’ll show him” Heh, and damn if I didn’t do just that.
A few days later I woke up in a strange bed to the sound of someone pounding on the door. I was in a motel in the middle of nowhere, my hands cut-up and my body felt like I’d been beaten. It had been 4 days since I walked out of the precinct, only god really knows what I did those four days. There was something about a car wreck, a missing persons’ report filed by Mary, all of this was laid out for me by the rookie cop who’d been sent to track me down.
“See the thing is Jack, we want you back” Rookie cop said, “Legally speaking you quit, so none of this has to go against your record. Lt. What’sHisFace said he’ll even give you that LoA you requested. Just come back, you do good work”.
I told him to fuck off, and that’s how I left the force.
I sat for a moment, digesting the story. Letting the final notes of his saga sink in. Over the years I’d imagined a hundred scenarios, a thousand reasons why he stopped being a cop. That he left in a stupid show of bravado over time off to get sober? That never even crossed her mind.
Suddenly it hit me, the enormity of what he’d done. Not how he’d left the force, but how he’d finally gotten sober. Her half siblings were about a decade older than her, their mother Mary was the one who’d filed the missing persons’ report. To imagine the scope, decade upon decade of falling back down the bottle only to scrape your way out just to slide back in again…until he didn’t.
I was 32 then, and by my reckoning my dad had been a functioning member of society for roughly 16 years. Right around when I’d needed someone to give me driving lessons. When Mom went up to the fifth floor for her….4th? 5th? Break with reality. He was an absentee Father for most of my childhood, a background character at best. Showing up every so often on a Sunday. The odd family get-togethers for Thanksgiving and Easter, a houseful of vague strangers I didn’t know & couldn’t figure out how fit in with.
But he had come through that somehow, he had faced down his demons and lived to see another day. In those sixteen years he’d become not only a person to rely on but The Person. In any crisis or emergency situation he was the first I called, he knew how to talk me through it. How to be calm in chaos and focus on what’s next. “Are you safe? Go somewhere safe. Are you hurt? Get yourself bandaged up. Sit down, call XYZ, and then call me back. I’ll be right here.”
Only he wouldn’t. I knew without knowing that people Don’t Survive Pancreatic Cancer. That this wasn’t some benign melanoma, or a one-off cardiac event that could be managed going forward. I knew in that moment that he’d be leaving soon, and I did the only thing I could think to do.
Driving home I rehearsed the conversation. I took pains to remember his voice, the way he phrased questions, the subtle way he laughed. I spent the next 8 months etching these soundbytes, these brief clips into my memory as faithfully as possible. I’d imagine conversations where I came to him crying about his illness, lamenting the cruelty of the world.
Then covid hit, and everything sucked. I couldn’t see him face-to-face anymore, at least not until he was beyond any hope of healing. We talked on the phone and I kept things upbeat, told him about my gardening, work, anything really just to stay on the phone with him.
When I got the call that my mother had committed suicide on July 23rd I waited till the next morning to call and tell him. Waited until I’d had my hysterics with his imaginary self, until I was (somewhat) composed. ‘Ahh, shit’ he said, summing up the situation and everything it encompassed so succinctly I laughed. A dry laugh, but still a laugh.
A few weeks later I went to visit him, my stepmom had asked if I could sit with him while she ran an errand. It was the first time I sat in a room with him alone, albeit still masked, since the start of COVID. I worked on this embroidery project, it was a silly pattern I’d gotten to make for him. For the most part I just sat quietly next to him, but after a while I broke. I looked at him, really looked. I saw how sick he was, and I couldn’t hold it back. I blubbered and begged him to stay, please, I know it’s hard but if you can would you please just stay? I told him how I still needed him, how we hadn’t had enough time. I blew my nose and wiped my face, asking one more time, if he could please stay.
On August 29th I sat next to his bed as he took his last breath. I remember standing in the room with my half siblings, their mother, and my stepmother. People who I know he loved as much as I do, who were just as hurt and pained as me. It was so quiet, I had my hand on his and tears just poured from me. “It’s ok if you have to go, I know you tried. It’s OK.” I said. I felt like my past requests were selfish, holding him here when he should be gone. I had to say it was ok, even if no one else in the room knew why. He did, and so he left.
I still practice his voice in my head, and the voices of those I love and can’t talk to. Sometimes in a silly way, sometimes as self-soothing, but always with the hope that whatever’s still left of them joins that moment. So in some way we’re still together.
Resiliently Ridiculous 