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It Was Our Summer of Dying
They say death is final — but I know dying is never finished
When my stepfather died, my mother was in the kitchen, cleaning up after supper. I was in the back room where we had set up the hospital bed for him.
I had just put some balm on his lips. He’d made no effort to take the ice cream I’d held to his mouth on a spoon. Nor any water.
The house was quiet, the way houses can be in Georgia mill towns on late summer evenings. Some vague news was buzzing at the far end of the hall, peeper frogs chirped away in the darkening trees outside the window, and he was breathing.
That house stood at the top of a hill where, at the start of that long summer of ’95, he had been cutting the grass when he fell and tumbled down the slope. At first, my mother feared another heart attack.
I didn’t hear of this until after she phoned me in North Carolina, barely able to say it was brain cancer. Late stage. Of course, I didn’t have to come down, but I should know.
By the time I reached the Emory trauma center in Atlanta, it was well after dark. The waiting area was illuminated dimly, indirectly, and the windows superimposed a sketchy reflection of the room and its occupants over constellations of the city lights beyond.
My middle brother was already there with my mother and there was no hope. She said, “Oh, Paul,” and sank into me and sobbed as though she might break apart.
My stepfather was a tall man and my mother was too small to move him around. She had to continue working, as did his son and his son’s wife who lived near them, and I did not begin teaching again until the fall. So I moved in, sleeping in their basement on a convertible sofa which, many years before, had sat in the living room of the house I’d grown up in. I took care of the yard, and I lifted him and drove him around during the week — to the pharmacy, the Kiwanis Club, the meat-and-three with its wooden benches and Mason jars of iced tea, all the places where he had been known and been loved so long and so casually — until he could no longer use the wheelchair.
His friends came by to see him at first. Then less so. I would tell them, “You may not understand him, but don’t worry about…
