When Autumn Comes

Autumn came suddenly this year. Because of an unusual and unpleasant summer dominated by rains, humidity and flooding, the trees aren’t bursting with color. Most have leaves that are covered with mold. Other leaves just brown, wither and die. The maple tree at the heart of my life for more than twenty years dropped its leaves exposing a wound that my nineteen-year-old son Jason says must have come from shoddy trimming decades ago. The maple seemed so lush and healthy all these years that I never saw the cancer spreading. Every tree surgeon that came told me the tree had to come down because the lesion couldn’t be cut out. So this autumn, as I begin my descent into the empty nest and struggle with hot flashes, a time when I need everything to stay the same, the tree comes down. The tree that was the selling point for us when my husband and I bought the house (our only home) twenty-one years ago. It was home plate when my boys were growing up. It was where Halloween scarecrows conferred. It cast a gentle shadow across the guest room where I’d take cranky or sick babies years ago or where I take myself now that my changing chemistry is making sleep hard to come by.

This autumn has the edge of winter already. My forever-young father-in-law, Joe Sr., had esophageal cancer exposed by a routine workup in September before he even looked or felt sick. He walked six miles that morning and ate bologna on rye for lunch. Then he went in to see a doctor who turned his life around. Suddenly Joe had a feeding tube cut into his muscular stomach, a chemo pump threaded into his chest and radiation tattoos scripted on his torso and throat.

My husband, Joey, a doctor, is frustrated. There is nothing he can do for his father. Joey is at home unless he’s by his father’s side. This autumn Joey’s too overwhelmed to rake leaves (a favorite activity), but too frightened to just sit. So he fiddles with our machinery—blowers and mowers—until they break so that he needs to call Jason home from engineering school to make things right.

I can almost hear my husband shouting, “Help!” when he talks our son into coming home. “Help!” like a man overboard.

I’m caught in the middle. Not naïve enough to believe everything will be OK with Joe but not willing to let Joey drag me down. It’s a balancing act made harder because Joey is trying to hide his feelings from our boys. He doesn’t want them to see him “this way.” I say he’s the one who can teach them how to let go of a loved one, but that responsibility plus his current reality is too much so he shuts down. We open and close to each other and I keep praying he’ll stay open a bit longer. He needs me now. I need him, too.

Sometimes I feel more like the one with the mask on walking our boys closer and closer to the first death they will remember. This loss will be tattooed on their hearts in deep indigo and it will spell “Bumpa” a name my mother-in-law hated.

“Say Grandpa, Grandpa,” she’d say. But “Bumpa Joe” wore that name with pride and never even minded when his grandsons called him “Bump” for short. I feel like I’m in a minefield as I lead our boys on one step at a time.

“Until someone tells us otherwise we will believe that things are going well. We will believe.” I say. Then I remember the doctor that made the mistake of using the word “cure” early in Joe’s treatment. I held onto that fiercely until days later Joe reacted to the new chemo and his blood pressure vanished and Joey ran from our house at 1:06 a.m. crying, “My father might die tonight. He might die.”

I communicate with Jason at college via email so he believes things are still all right. Who would send really bad news via email?

“Bump had a setback last night. He’s in ICU and being cared for really well.”

“They found something on Bump’s liver and I’ll keep you posted.”

I tell our younger son Dom in the car with Lead Zeppelin playing in the background.

“I’ll leave the car for you at school and a cell phone message if Daddy needs me to drive him down to Bump today,” I say.

Then I ask Dom, “Do you remember when Frannie died?” Dom was 8 and Jason was 10.

Frannie was an old nun and surrogate grandmother to my sons. We fell hard for her when we moved to this community. She had a zest for life and lived in balance—not too holy, not too evil. She took my sons to mass and then bought them scratch lottery tickets. She cared for the poor and then traveled to Atlantic City where she lost her shirt on the slots. She talked her order into letting her and two other nuns live in a townhouse in our community. She cooked us meatloaf on Fridays and pecan pie for the holidays. She loved our family in ways we never even realized. Frannie died the way she lived—on her own terms. She lived past midnight on December 31, 1999 to greet the new century, and then died peacefully in her sleep before morning.

“You stood soldier tall at her funeral,” I remind Dom.

The mass was in the chapel at the motherhouse. All the nuns in the convent, candles in their ancient hands, marched before the sky blue coffin that held Frannie. They sang, “Are you there Lord? I hear you calling.” Jason, teetering on the edge of understanding the magnitude of our loss, was too overwhelmed. He vomited up waffles and orange juice and Joey took him home. Dom stood by me.

“You came to the cemetery with me.”

The priest there knew all about us. He said to Dom how Frannie loved him and Jason so much. He gave Dom a spadeful of dirt and Dom without question or hesitation threw the dirt on the casket to lay our sweet lady down.

What I want to say to Dom now is “This will be so different honey. From beginning to end. There will be suffering and changes. There will be a time when there is nothing more to do. Nothing—not like baseball games where you, as the pitcher, might find a little something in your bag of tricks. When there is nothing more to do things can get dark and scary, a tough place to settle into especially when your pagan parents haven’t given you the rock of formal faith to hold on to.

“Just the way Frannie taught me that love sustains you through hard times, Bumpa will teach you that. Your heart will open and you will heal and you’ll believe that love is infinite and everlasting. You’ll believe that you’re not alone; you never have been and never will be.”

I picture Dom years down the road, his Bump deep inside his heart anywhere he is—just the way he told Dom he would be the last time we saw Joe on his porch in Connecticut, frail and bald and fighting as hard as he knew how.