Hurricane Man: 1938-1996
by Alvin Handelman

We left Newport Harbor on Monday, the twenty-third of July, at three in the afternoon. We passed under the Newport Bridge on a hazy but otherwise sunny day and were full of expectancy for a fast passage. Interestingly, beyond the bridge, the fog was quite dense. We encountered a large sailboat coming in, no doubt because of the fog. A woman on the boat called out to us, prophetically, “Don’t go out there!” And Kelly yelled back, “We’re going to Bermuda.”

Refuse
     When my brother Jeremy died, in 1996, at the age of 58, I felt as if an enormous hole had been dug out of my chest. I was not lightened by it. I was weighed down and weakened. I kept fighting the reality of it. I must be dreaming. How could he be dead? He was the successful doctor. The boat’s
captain. The sports-car driver. The last of my immediate family. I would wake up.
I woke to the reality of a hundred necessities. I had inherited his
estate: a house built in the 18th century in swank Newport, R.I., a 48-foot
sailboat, and a Nissan 300zx. If his estimates were correct, I had acquired
a real nest egg.
The house was full of things I did not need or want. I rented a 6x4x4
dumpster -- 96 cubic feet. I couldn’t imagine I’d fill it up. The house had
seemed nearly as empty as Thoreau’s cabin: two double beds, a leather couch,
a chair, a flea-infested futon. Yet I spent three days filling the dumpster.
I put on his doctor’s latex gloves to collect the soiled things in his
bedroom -- towels, shirts, pants, fecal underwear, sheets and pillows with
ominous dark stains on them.
There were hundreds of books and yachting magazines. I bundled the
magazines for recycling. I called the library about the books. The librarian
said, yes, they accepted donations. I tied the books in five vertical
stacks, 30 books in each. There were books I had -- Sartre’s Nausea and
Camus’s The Stranger-- and books I didn’t want -- collections of Fleming and
Cornwell.
The librarian was on the loading dock, smoking. “Just put them inside,”
she said.
Emboldened by death, I said, “You know, you should stop smoking. It’ll kill
you.”
“I know I should,” she said. “Thanks. Do you want a receipt?”
I brought six plastic bags filled with his clothing to the Salvation Army.
Also four sports jackets and a dirty blue three-quarter-length parka. A big
black guy unlocked a steel container and helped me toss in the bags. He
offered me a receipt, too.
I gave a three-piece pinstriped suit to the guy who was cleaning the floors
in the house. He was my brother’s size, five-foot nine and stoop shouldered.
He was now, suddenly, a happy man. He had needed a suit for his cousin’s
wedding, he said, then he went on scrubbing the floors to get the stench
out. Something crazy had happened here over the last two months, some
elemental breakdown in the universe that even cats, so fastidious and
self-contained, could not bear. They had shat and pissed everywhere.
I emptied the basement, untouched for years. Paint cans, tools, broken
hi-fi sets, a TV. There were six canvas bags filled with sails. They were
too heavy to lift or move. I imagined the basement walls exuded 18th-century
humors, miasmic vapors, now released by his death. A great slab of bedrock,
seven feet long and four feet wide breached the cement floor. It showed the
marks of sea and ice. It gave me strength. I longed for solidity. The Millennium Falcon is an aluminum, forty-eight foot sloop,
designed and built by Sparkman and Stevens of New York in 1966.
They are among the premier boat designers in the world. Their
boats are sleek, fast, extremely sea-worthy, and, in my opinion,
delightful to look at. I was the captain, forty-nine years old
[actually 52], with eighteen years experience. I had three Bermuda
trips to my account, two of them solos. My three companions, Kelly
and Sue, both nurses, and Frank, a musician, were novices at best.
I was the only crew member with sufficient experience in
navigation for this trip. The boat, however, was well-fitted for
the voyage, in view of the navigational tasks involved [sound of
cigarette lighter]. An auxiliary diesel engine could power the
boat at about six knots; fuel reserves would allow us to motor
nearly the entire distance, about 900 miles. We had food stores
and water sufficient for the crew for at least three weeks. While
this might not be considered a luxury trip, we had provisions for
a comfortable voyage.
Winds at that time of year are generally from the south,
southwest, and occasionally from the southeast. The trip to
Bermuda, therefore, is more arduous because you must beat into the
wind. Still, boats manage the trip in five to six days. Over the
next three days, we steered a southeasterly course. The weather
was idyllic, with temperatures in the low eighties. The sun was
bright and cheerful.U-Haul
Books: Mind in the Water, Why Things Bite Back, The Art of War, Remarkable
Recovery.
Tools: A radial arm saw. Six hand saws, two drills, two grinders, a router,
a drill press.
Furniture: A double bed mattress. A faux lobster trap with glass top. A
hand-made corner cabinet. A small white leather couch, its sides raked by
cats’ claws. A Sony 19-inch TV. A brass porthole containing a mirror from
the Hogpenny, his first sailboat. A framed charcoal portrait in which
Jeremy’s jaw is a bit too prominent and he seems to flinch. I should have
kept one of his ashtrays.
Musical instrument: A Martin D-35 guitar.
Miscellaneous: A diploma from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, no.
001299, conferring “le grade de docteur en médecine, chirurgie et
accouchements” on the “30 juin 1969.” Four handwritten and illustrated,
hard-bound books stamped in gold: “JHH Textbooks of Anatomy.” The Newport
telephone book. A “Freedom Phone.” Two three-ringed binders with 40 CDs in
each, music by Enya, Wings, Brahms, Beethoven. Photos from the 1970s of his
first sports car, an MGB; his ex-wife, Linda; his daughter by his first
marriage, Carolyn, age two (whereabouts now unknown).
At the U-Haul office I said, “What if the truck breaks down in Indiana?”
“You’re screwed,” the proprietor said, ringing up $780 on my credit card.
“Just kidding. You call this number.” He handed me a brochure titled “Useful
Tips.”
The odometer showed 100,004 miles. The inspection sticker was stamped at
20-, 40-, 60-, and 80,000 miles. I had a premonition. I drove off, turned on
the radio. Silence. It’d be a long trip without a radio. I wanted to return
the trunk and get another one, but I had had to wait two days to get this
one. It was a 12-footer. I packed it full. I needed to keep these parts of
him.
On I-95, south, my premonition was fully realized. The truck began to
shimmy violently at 64 mph. The front end was out of line. Every car and
truck on the road passed me, including other U-Hauls. I drove home to
Minnesota -- slow and silent. To keep awake, I recited poetry and sang songs
to myself. My throat got raw, my lips chapped. The hardened armrest on the
door radiated through my elbow; my ulnar nerve ached. I propped my elbow on
a lidded Styrofoam cup, which I had to replace every 200 miles. In the
eastern half of Indiana the air conditioner started to fade, then gave out
entirely just south of Chicago.
Two weeks later, I called Bob Bolton, President of U-Haul. I got his
secretary, Sally, and told her what had happened. “I want a $150 refund.”
She said she’d credit my account. For a moment I felt redeemed. Somehow it
all seemed worthwhile. It wasn’t. None of it. Those pieces of him I brought
home have already begun to blend into the fabric of our lives, have begun to
lose their “Jeremy-ness.” Soon, as it is with my parents’ possessions, I
will only occasionally remember that this mattress or that telephone was
once his. An interesting sidelight during this period of time was the fact
that mechanical problems started to develop, and it seemed that
virtually everything on the boat, which up until that time had
been functioning quite well, started to fail. The stove, which is
alcohol-fired, developed a problem in its pump. And the
pressurized water system also stopped working. We were able to
repair both items. There were also minor electrical problems that
were rectified within a matter of an hour or two. In general, the
boat sailed well and we were all having a good time.The Big Tickets
When he visited us July 20, 1996, in Vermont, Jeremy told me his house was
worth $200,000. The mortgage was $144,000. He figured the boat was worth
between $100,000 and $125,000. It was free and clear. Money in our bank when
we sold it. He owed $24,000 on the 300zx. It would sell for $34,000. “It’s
all yours,” he said.
“You’ll be fine,” I told him.
Twenty days later, Jane McDonough, a real estate agent, inspected the house
and estimated its worth at about $140,000. She said the Newport housing
market had collapsed. Jerry Trowbridge was less optimistic. His estimate
fell between $125,000 and $135,000. Al Stone thought he could get $160,000.
I hoped so. On January 6, I received a registered letter from the Newport
Bank saying that the house would be sold at public auction on February 28.
No one bought it. The bank sold it three months later for $132,000 to Ken
Riley, Jeremy’s friend and colleague. He began restoring the house and its
moribund gardens. As for the car, my cousin Marian, who was the excutrix of
Jeremy’s estate, swung a deal with the loan company and bought it for its
Blue Book value, $22,000. The boat? Like its name-sake, Hans Solo’s
warp-speed rust-bucket, the Millennium Falcon had begun to rot. The wooden
decks had grown spongy, the hull was corroded, the keel was thinning due to
electrolysis. “We’ll be lucky to get $30,000 for it,” Ted Bunch, the agent
at the marina, told us. He sold it for $22,000. After paying Ted’s fees,
there was $16,200. That went to pay off Jeremy’s debts, fifty cents on the
dollar: $23,000 charged to a dozen credit cards, and $12,000 on an unsecured
loan. Marian had to pay legal fees, funeral and her own expenses. Had he
taken better care of the boat and bought mortgage insurance, Jeremy might
have sent my son Matt to Brown or Dartmouth. It would have been an avuncular
thing to do. He died thinking he had.
“If anything happens to me,” he had said. “Kelly said she’d take the cats.”
But Kelly didn’t take the cats. I prefer to believe that she had lied to
ease his suffering. And no one else wanted them. They had gone berserk. They
were mangy, terrified creatures. Not alley cats either, but expensive
Persians. Jeremy liked them semi-feral, suspicious of strangers. If they had
sat on his chest as he lay dying, rubbed people’s calves, someone might have
taken pity on them.“What kind of animal shits on a TV?” Jeremy’s friend Ed
asked. An ex-Navy Seal, now a Navy nurse, Ed went after them. They slunk out
of reach in a crawlspace behind the bathroom closet. Eventually we trapped
them. Jim, the dog-catcher, picked them up and I donated $15 to the Potter
League. I hated doing this. It was a real betrayal of my brother’s last
wishes. I was sure they’d be killed. But maybe they got lucky, like the
ferocious tom with festering sores and tattered ears that roamed our
neighborhood and regularly thrashed my cats. Two years after he disappeared,
I found him living in the home of an acquaintance. He had become a fleecy,
plump, well-mannered pet. Maybe Jeremy’s cats got lucky, too.
We were different animals, my brother and I. I prefer Humane Society cats.
He liked expensive Persians (sports cars, and sailboats). Who was he? Was he
the person I knew, who never stopped talking, who tried too hard to impress
me, who complained endlessly about his bad luck with women, who never once
blamed himself for his failures? Was he the person who railed against the
medical industry, who trembled at the thought of undergoing chemotherapy,
who feared needles, and who never acknowledged he had smoked for forty years
and was therefore to a large degree responsible for his condition? Or was he
the guy his friends and colleagues adored? To them, he was the indefatigable
“Doc,” who saved lives, counseled the sick, was there for every patient,
every colleague, every friend. “Doc” was brilliant and selfless, they said.
He was there for you. He was a wonderful listener, a great story-teller, and
a terrific sailor. They said he was the best doctor in Newport Naval
Hospital. They had to hire two doctors to replace him. He was the hurricane
man. By five in the morning on the twenty-sixth of July, we were one
third of the way to Bermuda, but had taken [coughs] three and a
half days to get there. We had experienced some fairly intense
squalls [coughs], with moderate winds running around twenty knots,
and gusts of thirty knots (nearly gale force). The boat handled
very nicely. We shortened sail appropriately. The crew seemed to
learn on the job, so I was able to get some sleep. Being a
somewhat compulsive person, I kept checking things, so I was quite
tired.
We continued to have adverse winds, and at one point on Friday
attempted to motor rather than accept the verdict of the wind. But
the engine would suddenly stop. It would re-start promptly, so I
thought dirt in the fuel tank had been sucked into the system and
was clogging the injectors. Interestingly, the filters, designed
to screen out that sort of thing, looked remarkably clean. The
engine continued to give us trouble throughout the day -- a
harbinger of things to come.
We had been receiving weather reports by means of the short wave
radio tuned to the Coast Guard broadcasting facility. There seemed
no reason for concern.
Treatment
It began with a call, September 30, 1995. We exchanged the usual
salutations. I could tell something was wrong. When I asked him how he was,
he said, “Not good.” (Our mother used that exact phrase, the exact tone,
when she was dying.) “I’ve been coughing blood.” In my date book, I wrote
down “coughing blood,” under the date, as if I’d forget it. “I think it’s
cancer.”
A week later, he called back. I wrote down, “Inoperable cancer. No chemo,
no radiation, no surgery. Three months.” Beneath that were words I had
written earlier in the day: “rubber bands.” He started crying. Did I tell
him I was sorry? Did I yell, “That’s what you get for smoking, you asshole!
Didn’t I tell you to quit? Didn’t I tell you what my wife told me in 1975,
when I was considering whether or not to quit? Carol said, ‘In twenty years,
Alvin, you’ll have lung cancer and you’ll wish to hell you had quit.’”
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Three months.”
I read Raymond Carver’s poem to him -- “What the Doctor Said”
He said it doesn’t look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I’m glad I wouldn’t want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I’m real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn’t catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who’d just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may even have thanked him habit being so strong
On October 21, I wrote down, “Reëvaluated prognosis. Stage 2.5 cancer.
Treatment: 15 to 20% survival. 5 years.” He explained the treatment
schedule. It took an hour. My friend Ray DeVries was more succinct: “First
they poison you, then they burn you, then they cut you.”
“I’m afraid of the needles. And the surgery? They really tear you apart,”
he said. He started to cry. I was amazed. He was a doctor. How could
procedures he had recommended to his patients terrify him? “And you know
what the oncologist said? ‘We’re going to whack you.’ How could he say such
a thing?” He was silent. “You know what I’d like to do?” he said. “I’d like
to throw a going-away party on the boat. I’d fly you out, invite my friends
and colleagues -- Ed, Andie, Steve, Kevin -- our cousin Marian. We’d put on
the choral movement from Beethoven’s Ninth. I’ve got a stash of morphine.
I’d like to go out like Ian Fleming. You know what he said on his deathbed?”
“No, what?”
“‘Ah, what a blast it’s been!’”
“You’ve got pretty good odds,” I said. “You can’t give up yet.”
He called to tell me his chemo treatments would begin November 6. He had
organized a support group -- drivers, housekeepers, cooks. He was
astonished. He had never realized so many people cared about him. It
occurred to me that he had accepted our mother’s equivocal love, which was
embodied in the phrase, “Yes, but. . . .” He thought all people loved him
that way, because he didn’t measure up. He mistook criticism for love, and
was forever trying to prove himself -- to her, to me, to everyone. (I loved
him that way, too; I am my mother’s son.) He said he’d ask for my help if
something went wrong.
He called November 3. “You have to come. Please!”
He met me at Logan Airport. He was a wreck. I couldn’t believe how much he
had deteriorated. Three months earlier, in August, in Vermont, he had kept
pace with me as we walked several miles over the hills. I was surprised by
his stamina. I knew he didn’t exercise, except for what exercise he got
sailing. He had given up smoking a half year earlier. I was happy for him,
proud of him. Now I feared he lacked the strength to walk to his car. The
temperature was relatively mild, yet he was wearing a watch cap, slightly
awry, and a dirty blue, three-quarter-length parka. And he looked exactly
the way our mother had looked in the last months of her life. Imploded.
We drove home in his 300zx, the sporty car that would attract, impress, and
win, he had hoped, the prettiest and smartest women in town. We drove
through the Massachusetts darkness to Newport. He said he was glad I was
there. He was scared. He squeezed my hand. I hated this. Not the
hand-holding, but the sickness, the terror of illness, his body possessed by
alien growth. It was the blood between us, the genetic connection. Frisson.
His illnesses were my illnesses, from mumps and chicken pox when we were
little kids, to acne, to cancer.
Ah, the smell of ocean air, sea wrack and salt. It was so good to be alive.
He was trying to be brave, he said. He looked the way a bird does when
you’ve taken it, still living, from a cat.
Inside the house, he did something amazing. He lit a cigarette. I couldn’t
believe it. We were in Marlboro Country. And what a lovely place it was --
virgin woods, deep fluffy snow. A big man rides a big horse. That’s my big
brother, the doctor. Now the cowboy starts to cough. He coughs so hard it
hurts. He keeps on coughing. That night I hooked up an old TV that was
sitting on the floor in the guest bedroom. I tuned it to static to cover the
sound of his coughing. I still see that row of solemn executives raising
their right hands, swearing before Congress that smoking is not addictive. I
see them tied to posts, gunned down by a firing squad.
On Monday morning Jeremy showed me the quart berry box sitting on his
bookshelf. Inside the box was a picture of Ivan, his friends’ four-year-old
boy, a hank of green tinsel (grass), and a three-inch tall stuffed giraffe.
This giraffe would be his talisman. I regarded him, the man of science, the
ship’s captain who had twice soloed to Bermuda.
We drove to the Boston Cancer Center in Plymouth, MA. Pilgrim country, 1620
-- the right spot to start chemotherapy. We met Joy, the receptionist. She
liked the giraffe. He told her the child’s name, the giraffe’s purpose, but
he could not reveal its secret name. Joy said she understood. Jeremy told
the same story to the oncologist, Dr. Lockidge, when he arrived, ten minutes
later. He smiled politely. He then described the procedures. Poison. Burn.
Cut. Jeremy questioned him carefully on each point. Lockidge went into
greater detail, doctor to doctor. I thought I grasped what he was saying,
but, finally, I didn’t.
Route 44 is an old road that winds through the tiny towns where America
took form. As we drove home, I saw cranberry bogs turned a deep russet color
that even I, blind to subtle shadings of red and green, could see. I said,
“Lockidge’s talk was like a poorly written paragraph. Once you begin parsing
it, it makes no sense.”
Jeremy nodded. “What can I do?”
I washed his clothes while he smoked Marlboros and told himself, “It’s
going to be OK.” Treatment began the next day. Donna would administer it.
She led us into a room that faced Plymouth Bay and the Atlantic. There were
six leather chairs with sturdy armrests. Beside each chair was an aluminum
I-V rack. Donna asked about the giraffe and Jeremy told her the story. I
looked out the window at the bay, where 375 years ago the Mayflower hove
into sight. Now he was the pilgrim. Donna had a Boston accent and a quick
wit. She was relaxed and respectful. She didn’t use euphemisms or speak in a
whisper. She said the infusions would take five hours. He told her he was
afraid of the needles. She said, “I’ll do the best I can.” I squeezed his
left hand as Donna shoved the needle into the skin on the top of his right
hand. He winced. She poked around, seeking blood. She was pushing the vein
to the right and left with the needle. He squeezed my hand hard. Finally she
stuck it. It was the first of the many sticks he’d get for smoking. Was he
to blame for this? Did he deserve it? He had told me that you can’t blame
the patient for his disease. He had said he didn’t need a guilt trip on top
of the cancer. He had smoked. He had been unlucky. You couldn’t blame
someone for having a heart attack, he said, for getting shingles or breast
cancer. I had said, “Yeah.” I wanted to say that I exempted heart disease
caused by obesity and lack of exercise, melanoma caused by constant
sunbathing, cirrhosis caused by drinking, and lung cancer caused by forty
years of smoking. I wanted to say, “Of course you’re to blame. You should
have stopped years ago. You’re a doctor. You knew the risks. If you had
stopped twenty years ago and got cancer now, OK, bad break. No blame.”
I squeezed his hand. Donna dripped in the liquids. First glucose and an
anti-nausea drug, then Toxal, an extract from eucalyptus trees. God works in
mysterious ways. The cancer poison slid down the tube, a drop at a time, a
modern version of the Chinese water torture.
There were two other patients in the room: a woman wearing a cotton
turban and a man with a wooden leg. They both had raspy smokers’ voices. Two
hours later, a businessman joined the group. He was robust and had a full
head of hair. Donna explained to Joe how the infusion pump she was giving
him worked. Jeremy told me later this was a bad sign. Joe probably had a
liver or pancreatic cancer. He’d need the pump for continuous doses of
chemo. Jeremy felt sorry for him. An hour later, a dignified woman, in her
early 60s, joined the circle. A little flame of fear lit her eyes. Her
husband looked like a company president -- gray-haired and distinguished.
What a group of pilgrims we were. The upper and lower classes mingled
here, Christians and Jews, blue- and white-collar workers, housewives,
retirees, nurses, doctors -- linked by this disease. Who among the five
would survive the five-year voyage? What were the odds for the guy with the
pump, the scared woman, the guy with the peg-leg, the bald woman, or my
brother?
By Friday, the pilgrims were nodding acquaintances. Jeremy was feeling
somewhat comfortable with the process. He thought he was tolerating the
chemo fairly well, but that evening he had gas and violent diarrhea. The
chemo was whacking him, just as Lockidge said it would.
Saturday he got a transfusion to raise his red blood count. Sunday,
awaiting a visit from Marian, we opened two-months’ worth of bills. Then the
gas and diarrhea came back. He rushed upstairs to the bathroom, trailed by a
fetid odor. He took to his bed. Marian, her son Ben and husband Tom, and her
mother Elsie, arrived soon afterward. We sat and talked. Elsie sniffed the
air. “Who’s smoking?” she asked. “You?”
I grimaced, shook my head, pointed to the ceiling.
“After this?” Marian asked.
“Nuts,” Elsie said and waved her hand.
An hour later, he came down. He felt better. We walked to the Pizza Place
around the corner. Jeremy picked at his spaghetti. The sauce was a bright
red color, horribly zesty.
Elsie, 82, told him to eat. She pushed the plate in front of him. “I’m
not hungry,” he said, and he gave us a look as we gobbled up our food. I
knew what he was thinking: “You people aren’t sick. I’m the sick one. I’m
the one who’s going to die.”
On November 12, 1995, none of us expected Jeremy to die. He was a
sailor, a fighter, a survivor. He had 15 to 20 chances out of 100. One out
of five. Stupendous odds compared to winning the lottery. I was feeling
hopeful. Yet I wondered why the doctors told him at first that it was
inoperable, hopeless, he had three months to live. Why had they reversed
themselves? Were they testing their medication and procedures, or trying to
earn a little more cash for Christmas?
By November 12 he was on his way. He was getting treatment. He loved
medicine, yet distrusted it completely. He wore Ivan’s giraffe on a chain
around his neck everywhere he went. He thanked me countless times. We hugged
and kissed. He was a pain in the ass, and I was an asshole. I swore I’d talk
to him as soon as this was over. We’d talk about our relationship.
Over the next five weeks, he endured two more chemo sessions. Whacked,
he came back, feeling more hopeful each time. He could bear this. Maybe he
could even beat the cancer. He started eating again, he called to tell me.
He was ravenous. He was gaining weight, he said. The tumor had shrunk. The
x-rays and CAT scans showed only the tiniest lesion. He had responded well
to the treatment. He was a tough old bird, Dr. Lockidge had said. “That
really made me feel good,” he said.
“Just like Mom,” I said.
In January he went back to work at the Naval Hospital. He was glad to be
off sick leave and back on the payroll. He couldn’t fathom how
accommodating his colleagues were. This was the Navy -- ship-shape,
rule-bound -- yet everyone high and low was bending rules for him. Captain
Henderson put him in Occupational Medicine. It was boring compared to Urgent
Care, but OK for now. Denise, the chief nurse, sent him home whenever he
felt like shit. And here was the real bonus, he told me, “People really love
me. I can’t believe it. They really care.”
In February 1996 he began radiation treatment. We had spent a month
discussing whether or not he should have his brain radiated. He feared
memory loss -- “What’s a doctor without his memory?” he asked -- and decided
against it. The radiologist and his staff were incredibly considerate. If he
arrived early, they swept him into the office and began treatment. “Lockidge
always kept me waiting, always confused me. First it was one plan of attack,
then it was another. And would you believe this?” he asked. “They fired Joy!
Such a great person. And do you know what Donna tried to do? She ordered me
around. Boy, I can’t stand that! Jesus, nobody tells me what to do!”
During his radiation therapy, he began obsessing about surgery -- the
cutting of flesh, the breaking of bones. He talked to me about it for hours.
He had to psyche himself up. During his monologues, I could hear the odd
pauses, the jubilant exhalations. He was smoking. I wanted to shout, “How
can you still do this? Use your fucking brain, will you?”
The radiation sessions ended in early April. He told me the skin on his
chest was raw, and he felt a dull pain deep in his throat. But it was no big
deal. He sounded happy, more connected to himself. He was healing, he said.
People liked him. He was going to change his life. After a few more tests,
they’d make a decision about surgery. Two weeks later he called to say, “I’m
a tough old bird. I can take the surgery. Six weeks and I’m home free, and
I’ve covered all the vents.”
“Vents?” I asked.
“Before you heave to and go below, you cover all the vents.”
And then, May 8, 1996. He called to tell me, “There’s nothing there!” I
wrote this down. He shouted. He hooted. “Do you believe it? The damn thing’s
gone! I’ve beaten it! Goddamn it! Isn’t that something? I studied the x-rays
myself. There’s some grayish scar tissue. That’s all!”
Like an idiot, I underlined, “There’s nothing there!” as if I’d ever forget
it.
He must have hooted for ten minutes. No cancer meant no surgery. The
months-long talks about the pros and cons of surgery were now moot. The
chemo and radiation had done the job. He was incredibly happy. He felt
terrific. He had known he could beat it. He felt great! And he was going to
change his life, he said. I could hear him lighting a cigarette.
I was happy for him. I don’t remember if it occurred to me that it couldn’t
be that easy. Cancer’s a nasty business. You’ve got to survive five years
before you can claim a cure, and even then it’s iffy. Not wanting to spoil
his happiness, I wouldn’t have brought it up. I do remember that the portion
of my soul inhabited by Richard III snapped its fingers as the $200,000 I
imagined I’d inherit danced out of reach. By Sunday, the twenty-ninth of July, we were about two-thirds of
the way to Bermuda, and were tacking to the southwest under gray
and leaden skies. We had received information on two storms the
previous evening. One was Hurricane Arthur, the first of the
season. It was expected to go ashore in the Yucatán. The second
was tropical depression Bertha, also heading west.
At ten-thirty that morning, we were passed, approximately a
half-mile to the east, by a northwesterly bound freighter, the Joe
Corazon. It looked like an older boat, white hull with a green
stripe around it. We switched on the radio to get confirmation of
our position and more recent weather reports. Their operator had
been frantically trying to contact us, and his message was (he
spoke with a moderate accent) Hurricane Bertha was bearing down
upon us in the western Atlantic, at a distance of one hundred and
eighty miles. The radio operator on the ship also informed us that
the storm center was moving at twelve knots. That meant its time
of arrival was barely fourteen hours away.
How the Bad News Caught Up to Us
The bad news was standing in front of me, July 20, 1996. Carol and Matt
were in town. I was in our cabin, in Vermont, reading Tim Parks’s An Italian
Education. I was a happy man. For three weeks we had thought our well was
dry. I had just removed the cover and found water lapping near the top. I
was astonished. I couldn’t wait to tell Carol and Matt, and Jeremy, whom I
expected to arrive at any minute. As far as I knew, he was cancer-free. In
mid-June, he had taken one last, massive dose of chemo, as a precaution. He
had told me over the phone that he was still recovering, and was pissed it
was taking so long. He had felt so great. Now he felt like shit again. I had
offered to drive down to visit him in Newport, but he said the house was a
mess.
I stopped reading and looked out the window. A bald man wearing sunglasses
-- a biker, I thought at first -- was staring up at me. It was my brother,
my dear dumb brother. He looked awful -- pale and frightened. Scattered
wisps of white hair clung to his scalp like fog in the hills after a rain.
His ears stuck out from his head. He said he had walked from our neighbors’
yard, because the ruts in the road would have wrecked his 300zx. He said he
almost didn’t make it up the hill. I went out and hugged him. He said he
was exhausted. He sat down to rest. I remembered the long walk we took
together last year. He railed against the Boston Cancer Center. “If anything
happens to me, sue those bastards for every penny they’re worth! I’m feeling
like crap. That last round of chemo knocked the shit out of me. They told me
I’d feel fine in four to six weeks. It’s seven weeks now. That son of a
bitch -- Uh, what’s his name --?” He looked at me, helpless. “Christ, I
can’t remember anything. And I’ve got a pain under my rib. And in my back.”
I should have recognized the bad news.
“Not enough exercise,” I said. Exercise was my answer for practically every
ailment.
He started to cough. It was the same cough he had last November.
The next day he was eerily silent. “I guess I shot my wad,” he said. He
didn’t eat anything for breakfast. We drove into town to get the paper. He
took Matt for a ride in his 300zx. They hit 107 mph. Matt was very
impressed.
Jeremy had to go. We were standing beside his car, the hills all around us,
green and lush. “Did I give you a copy of my will?” he asked. He had
forgotten he had. “Everything’s yours,” he had said, showing me the papers.
“The house, boat, and car. My estate’s worth $200,000, maybe more. After the
debts are paid, you’ll have $175,000.”
“A couple of years at Dartmouth for Matt,” I had joked. “You’ll be fine.”
“Look at this,” he said now. “Some bastard keyed my car.”
I looked on the sideboard, expecting to see a livid wound in the paint. He
pointed to a small indentation at the corner of the roof.
We hugged. Then he did something he had never done before. He took my hand,
looked at me, then kissed my hand. What was he trying to say? He drove away.
I figured he was overreacting. He was anxious. How could it be otherwise?
I didn’t call him during our last two weeks in Vermont. The nights were
crystal, the days a blue balm. We were having a good time. We stopped in
Middlebury to visit old friends on the way home. I didn’t call. The next
day, driving through Ontario, I used our temperamental cell phone to check
our answering machine at home, just for the fun of it. I didn’t get through.
The following day was lovely, bright and cool, not a drop of humidity. We
were approaching the central time zone, outside Escanaba, Michigan. I always
enjoyed this crossing; it made re-entry to the Midwest more bearable. An
extra hour to read, to swim in the lake, to take a walk. At 1:16 p.m., 255
miles from my in-laws’ cottage in Wisconsin, I tried the cell phone again.
Our answering machine reeled off the messages: “Hello, this is Dr.
Gorelick. I’m your brother’s doctor. Would you please call me at Newport
Hospital, 401-846-6400.” Beep. “Hello, this is Ed. Call me at 401-846-6400,
extension 506.” Beep. “Hello, this is Kelly, your brother’s friend.” There
was a call from the Police in Bradford. Another call from Ed, and another
from Dr. Gorelick. I called the hospital and asked for my brother. They
patched me through to Ed.
“How bad is he?” I asked.
“Real bad,” he said.
“How much time has he got?”
“Five days.”
“Weeks?” I asked.
“Days,” Ed said. “Days.”
“What? My God!”
“You’d better get here. He’s been asking for you. The cancer’s everywhere.”
I considered turning around and driving back, but our nephew was getting
married in two days, and Carol’s mother had just recently undergone bypass
surgery.
At the airport, I told Carol, “I feel like I’ve got a starring role in an
important play, and I don’t know a fucking line.” The operator on the Corazon had also informed us that on the
storm’s eastern side, more dangerous because wind strength is
increased by the hurricane’s forward motion, winds were blowing at
ninety to ninety-five knots. In the “safer” quadrant, the western
quadrant, winds were blowing from sixty-five to seventy-five
knots.
The issue, then, of course, was which way to go. If we continued
to sail to the southwest, we would run into the storm on its
northeasterly track. We could not turn back, because although we
would gain some time, the storm would eventually run us down. The
only logical course was to proceed southeasterly, if the wind
would allow, at an angle perpendicular to the storm. This would
carry us as far from its center as possible (assuming that it
remained on the same track).
The engine, however, would not assist us. It had quit entirely.
We did sail thirty miles in a southeasterly direction, but we were
stopped by a heading east wind. From the wind’s swinging from the
south to the east, I presumed the leading edge of the storm was
rapidly advancing on us. I knew we were in for considerable
trouble.
Dying
Dying is easy. Anyone can do it. The process reminded me of Work, one of
Matt’s first books. On each page a diapered toddler is pictured “working”:
sitting in a highchair, eating from a bowl, sitting on a potty chair,
sleeping in a bed, playing with a toy. I imagined a new page for the book
called “dying.” You lie in bed on your back, hands folded on your chest. You
breathe, you bubble green foam, and eventually, for no obvious reason, you
die.
Matt and I arrived late Sunday evening. Jeremy was already at work. Ed,
Andie, one of his Navy nurses, Marian and several other nurses from the
Naval Hospital were in the room with him. I don’t know why, but they all
quickly left. Marian took Matt down the hall. Here was one of the acts in
the play for which I had no script. I took his hand. It was cold. This was
the only sign that something was wrong. He appeared to be asleep. In a coma?
Did he know I was there? Ed had said he was asking for me. “Jeremy,” I said,
“I’m here,” and then, equally stupid, “It’s me.” I squeezed his hand. Did he
squeeze back? Did he know about my “just-for-the-fun-of-it” phone call home?
“It’s me,” I said. I wanted to discuss his condition. What’s going on? This
is a bad dream, right? This is a terrible joke? You were in Vermont sixteen
days ago. You were not well, but you were not dying. What’s up? You’re the
doctor. What happened to the miracle of May 8? If there was “nothing there”
then, what’s “this” now? I wanted to tell him I’d miss him, though over the
years I had seen him so rarely -- two days every summer. He never came to
visit us in Minnesota, as if he’d catch something there. I wanted to tell
him we needed to talk about our relationship. I wanted to tell him what a
jerk I was for not dealing with him straight, that I had not been honest,
that I found it difficult to be with him, that he dominated our talks, was
always bragging and putting others down, and always trying to impress me
with his achievements. The more he did this, the more I backed away. I
wanted to tell him that his attitude toward women was Neanderthal; that he
needed to look at his own faults and problems. But now wasn’t the time. Was
he scared? Was the scientist in him curious about what was happening? Was
he, in some awful yet amazing way, glad it was over? No more worries. No
more bullshit. Fuck the IRS and the creditors, and the girlfriends who
ditched him. I sat there, stunned. I told him I loved him. I couldn’t
believe he was dying. I was sure there’d be a reprieve, remission. He was
still breathing, wasn’t he?
Maybe he did squeeze my hand. Maybe he did know I was there. And maybe he
could hear me. Andie and Ed both told me, “Talk to him. Hearing’s last to
go.” Maybe I did give him some profound comfort, beyond words, as he slipped
away. His ex-wife Linda, an intensive care nurse, had visited him two hours
earlier. She said he smiled when she came into the room. Who knows what the
brain thinks as it begins to break down, clogged with cancer and morphine?
Maybe he was happy we were all there. Maybe he thought we were sailing on
his boat to somewhere more beautiful than Tahiti. But I didn’t believe it.
If he were conscious at all, how could he rest easy knowing he’d never see a
maple tree in bloom on a perfect spring day when the sky is cobalt and the
air is full of the scent of lilacs?
Later, we were all sitting around when he sat up. I thought he’d open his
eyes, push the covers back, smile, and say, “Phew, that was close! Let’s go
home. You know how I hate hospitals! Thanks for your help. You’ve done a
great job. Hey, Alvin, I’m glad you’re here! Thanks for coming. Let’s go.
Ed, got a cigarette?”
Ed and Andie held him, coaxed him gently to lie down.
“Andie, what would happen if you let him go?” I asked.
“He’d fall flat on his face,” she said. “He’s not conscious.”
Jeremy lay down, his nose prominent, his hands folded on his stomach. He
was breathing evenly. Wisps of white hair floated around his head. His ears
stuck out like Dumbo’s. He always blamed me for those ears, because I pulled
them when we were kids. Ed said the discharge from the tumors in his brain
was pushing his ears out. The cancer had metastasized to his brain. That’s
why he couldn’t remember names. He must have known what was wrong, and
didn’t want to believe it, as I couldn’t believe it now. He had been
presenting classic symptoms, and would have recognized them immediately in
one of his patients.
Near midnight, Marian and Tom drove us to Jeremy’s house. It stank of cat
shit and piss, even after Ed, Kevin, Andie and several other colleagues from
the hospital had spent three days cleaning it out.
In the morning, a man from the hospice set up a hospital bed in the living
room. At noon, they brought him home. He could now hear the familiar sounds
of home -- people on the stairway, the clunk of the front door latch, the
creaking floorboards in the library, Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” on the CD
player.
His breathing was heavier. He was moving his feet. Ed and Andie told him
everything was OK, they were going to give him a suppository to calm him
down. They removed his diaper. It was yellow with piss. They rolled him on
his side, slid the pill in, slipped a new diaper on. Every half hour they
pushed the button on the infusion pump. This released an extra bolus of
morphine. I wondered what had happened to Joe, the man at the Cancer Center?
Was he dead? Was he the picture of robust health? Was Jeremy the only one
from that group dying of cancer?
Matt and I went out and bought a model of a Nissan 300zx. Matt built it on
the card table in the library.
In the living room, my brother lay on his back, sedated, pain free, his
hands folded on his chest, his eyes closed. He was doing the work of dying.
It was easy work, but tedious. Circling the bed, we watched for signs of
system break down. A death watch. You can see this scene in paintings by the
Masters. Was this the death he wanted? He was surrounded by his friends.
Music was playing. Morphine was killing the pain. Pneumonia was killing him.
What about dignity? Did Jeremy have it? How much dignity could one ask for?
The doctor and writer Sherwin Nuland says we can ask, but we shouldn’t
expect much. Death is a messy business.
That afternoon Matt walked into the death-watch room, looked at his uncle,
and kicked the door. Then he went back to the card table and started to cry.
“It’s sad,” I said.
“Fucking cigarette companies!” he shouted.
That evening I sat beside my brother. He was blowing green billowy bubbles.
Every few minutes, Andie, on the other side of the bed, dabbed his mouth.
She was wearing latex gloves. “It’s pretty contaminated,” she said. “You
want to be careful.”
At 6:00 a.m., Tuesday, August 6, Marian woke me. “He’s going.” I rushed
downstairs. The nightmare of his death was still unfolding. I hadn’t dreamt
it. His friends were sitting around the bed. Andie and Ed at the head.
Denise and Kevin were at the foot, next to Ivan’s parents, Jon and Heather,
up from Mystic, and Marian on the white leather couch. Steve Fitzgerald
called asking if he should cut short his vacation. They told him not to.
Jeremy lay quietly on the bed. He was cold now, gurgling a bit more slowly.
Breathing in, breathing out. Expectant parents learn this rhythm in
childbirth classes. The bubbles were dark green. It looked real bad. Beyond
remission. He was going to die. Who would I call now for a sensible second
opinion? Who would I ask whether a particular test was necessary? Who would
I question about a mole, about flesh-eating bacteria, about the latest on
prostate cancer? What about PSA and colon cancer tests? Were they reliable?
Gone, too, would be the stories of his pursuits, which I as a writer,
cruelly, used as material: the woman he upset because he gave her a bottle
of wine; the woman who left a message on his answering machine saying she
didn’t like sailing, so was calling it quits; the abused woman afraid of
love who loved my book of short stories.
Seven hours later, I went upstairs to take a shower. I felt dirty, useless.
The great weight pressing on my chest had become unbearable. I tried to
imagine a day when I’d be on a bed, dying like this. Would Matt be in the
room? Where would Carol be? Would I hear what they were saying? What music
would they play? (The Brahms “Violin Concerto,” please.) Or would I go out a
drooling Alzheimer’s patient, a burden to my sweet, model-building boy?
Would I be lucky enough to have good friends like these, friends who made
sure I was cared for and pain free? Jeremy’s friends loved him. How come I
had so much trouble?
In the shower, I tried to wash the dirt away and to embrace the reality of
what was happening. But I kept asking myself how this could be happening?
Just sixteen days ago in Vermont he had –.
“He’s gone,” Marian said when I came back down.
I walked to the bed. He lay still. No gurgling. No breathing. Nothing. He
was dead. I had found my mother this way in her room, alone, in the nursing
home, on September 24, 1988. I had wanted to be there. The nurses hadn’t
called me in time. She was ashen. Her skin felt like cold tissue paper. She
was 85. Jeremy was 58. The options he had obsessed about, as if he could
heal himself through intellectual endeavor alone, had all played out.
Matt came in and looked, and then walked back out. Everyone was crying.
It seemed right that pneumonia killed him. He had told me about it many
times. “Pneumonia,” he said, “is a good way to go. It’s painless and quick.
We call it the old man’s friend.” At that point I decided to rig the ship for heavy weather. The
Bible of instruction on this subject is the treatise by K. Adlard
Coles, “Heavy Weather Sailing,” which I had read through four or
five times. That bit of learning stood us in good stead later on,
as did the design of the Millennium Falcon. We took down the
mainsail. We left the staysail and the heavy-weather jib up. A
much smaller sail, called a storm trysail, was installed on a
separate track. This sail is barely twenty-five square yards in
surface.
We broke out emergency provisions where they could be moved to a
life raft if necessary. We watched the wind and waves increase
from the east and then from the northeast.
Since we could not sail or motor to the southeast, there seemed
but one option -- to dash across the track of the storm and get
into the “safer” western quadrant, where the wind and waves were
likely to be somewhat less intense. The wind was already blowing
at thirty-five knots -- gale force -- with gusts to forty.
I gathered the crew in the cockpit. They were desperately
frightened, as I must admit was I. We sat in a circle, and held
hands. I had to give them a pep talk for what lay ahead. All we
could think of was here we were, trapped in a relatively small
boat in the middle of the ocean, with a hurricane bearing down on
us.
Beforehand, I had gone below to be by myself. I had looked over
the boat, saw that all was prepared, and was pleased with those
efforts. I wondered if we were going to die. I wondered if the
boat, which I loved, would wind up at the bottom of the sea.
Although that thought seemed a reasonable possibility. I didn’t
feel it was going to be the case. But make no mistake, in
circumstances like this there’s no boat so well-designed or so
sturdy or so well-captained that it can’t be sunk.
My purpose for the meeting, obviously, was to instill confidence
and courage in the crew. I think I succeeded, though I remember I
was desperately tired. I had gotten very little sleep. In spite of
all the fear and panic and necessity of the moment, I had been
dosing off at the helm while the boat careened to the west at
speeds of eight to fourteen knots. Of course, there are no
headlights to illuminate things, but the water is phosphorescent,
and you can make out the mountainous seas rushing up from your
stern to overtake you and run past. The boat handled splendidly
through all this, and was reasonably comfortable, considering all
that was going on. The wind was shrieking at a level I had never
heard before. And the rain, which had begun to fall earlier, was
now driven horizontally by the wind.
I was so tired that Kelly ordered me to go to bed. She said, “We
need you.” They could certainly steer the boat themselves, but
they’d never find Bermuda without me. I did go below, and slept on
several sail bags. There’s nothing more comfortable. I was
awakened an hour or so later by the boat crashing along at high
speed and at an extreme angle of heel. It was being pressed very
hard indeed. The wind was blowing at sixty-five miles an hour,
with gusts to eighty. The seas were thirty feet high. The boat
would surf down the front of a wave and overtake the wave in
front, burying its bow, shoveling up quantities of green sea
water. At one point, a wave filled the cockpit to midway up our
legs. I watched anxiously as the cockpit drained. It did so fairly
quickly. I was aware, however, that if more of these waves came on
board, they would have no time to drain, and would pour into the
main accommodation. I figured the boat was being pressed too hard
and that it would soon be overwhelmed.
Chapel of Hope
Sprung from the unbearable, helpless death watch, I was giddy, stupid with
fatigue and sorrow. Thank God for Marian. She was bedrock. We drove to the
Memorial Park Funeral Home, where the undertaker, Charles, who was
astonishingly handsome, prepared the obituary. He asked for Jeremy’s Hebrew
names. Marian recited words I hadn’t heard in years. Then we supplied his
life’s details: B.A., M.D. Portsmouth years. Married. Cardiologist. Ship’s
captain. Boat builder. Newport years. Naval Hospital. Were we really talking
about my brother -- the guy I found annoyingly self-centered and immature,
the guy who loved me unequivocally, who remembered, years later, things I
had said or written, as if they were great truths worth remembering? Christ,
look what he had accomplished! They won’t talk about me like this when I’m
dead.
That afternoon, Marian and I met with the Rabbi and planned the service.
The next day, his obit and picture appeared in the morning paper. Now
everyone knew -- his friends and patients here in Rhode Island as well as
the people he had known in New Hampshire. News of his untimely death was
rippling outward, like the concussive waves of a bomb blast. I wondered when
they would hit me. When I opened the front door, I expected to hear the
keening well up from downtown Newport. I thanked God our parents were dead.
No parent should suffer this.
That afternoon, Andie called. The Navy wanted to honor Jeremy with a color
guard. Would I mind? I laughed, knowing what my reaction would have been in
the ‘70s. I said great, go ahead. The Navy was already bending the rules by
holding his funeral in the Chapel of Hope, which ordinarily was not
available for deceased retired personnel, let alone deceased civilians. This
was a special honor.
On Thursday, August 8, we rolled him into the Chapel of Hope in his pine
coffin, flanked by the six smart members of the color guard. The Rabbi moved
solemnly but rapidly through the proceedings. Captain Henderson spoke
eloquently of the good things Jeremy had done for the hospital. He read
Masefield’s “I must go down to the sea again.” Rob Sutherland, a friend who
had flown in from California, spoke about friendship and loss. Marian read
from Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”: “Sunset and evening star, / And one
clear call for me! / And may there be no moaning of the bar, / When I put
out to sea.”
The soloist on the tape thundered, “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!” as we
rolled him out. We lifted the coffin into the hearse. My brother, the
doctor, was in the coffin, wearing a white shroud, on his way to the
crematorium. Was this the way it was supposed to happen? Something was
terribly wrong, and there was no going back to correct it, no fixing it now.
Our unfinished business remained unfinished, and would stay unfinished.
The mourners talked and milled outside. A man walked up to me and asked,
“Are you the brother?” I nodded. “He was a good man. Are you as good a man
as him?”
“Better,” I thought, but I said. “No. I’m not.” But now I’m not so sure.
Linda came out, laughing and crying. “Did you hear that?” We looked at her.
“The Beethoven stopped suddenly, then this rock and roll song came on,
‘Let’s pull up the covers and snuggle up tight –.’ Something like that.”
“Oh, no!” Marian gasped. “Ben told me that tape was empty.”
“Jeremy would have loved it,” Linda said. I decided to heave to, a technique designed to weather a hard
storm. We hauled in the sails, set the storm trysail, and lashed
the helm so the boat lay at an angle of forty-five degrees to the
wind and waves. The tendency of the bow to follow the lead of the
sail was now counteracted by the position of the rudder, and vice
versa. The only problem with heaving to is that if the waves are
breaking in an unfavorable pattern, they may break over the boat
rather than lift it up. But we had no other choice. We were all
exhausted and the boat was being pressed too hard.
We all went below. The surprising thing here was how relatively
quiet and peaceful it was. Outside the full fury of the storm was
breaking upon us, yet inside it was light and relatively warm, and
strangely quiet. The final dividend, of course, was the fact that
we could rest comfortably, knowing we had done everything we could
do. I ordered the crew to rest, and did so myself. Still, I
worried about how the boat would fare. It heeled briefly at an
angle of twenty-five to thirty degrees as a wave came up beside
it, lifted it, and passed beyond. At the top of the wave crest,
the wind would heel the boat somewhat further, and then the boat
would settle down into the trough where it was protected from the
wind. I noticed that the wave trains were such that only once did
the topmost portion of a crest break and dump water on the boat.
Reassured, I fell into a surprisingly untroubled sleep.
I awoke the next morning, just after first light. This was now
Monday, the thirtieth. I had gotten three or four hours of sleep
and felt rested. I went up to have a look. The sky was overcast,
the wind was still howling at gale force, probably around forty
knots, and the seas were still enormous, but the boat was riding
comfortably. I looked out at what in effect was the reason for the
whole voyage, for all my voyages -- literally the most amazing
sight I had ever seen at sea. These monster rollers, thirty feet
high, came in toward the boat from the northeast, slid up, up, up
under the boat; the boat rose to them, then rode down into their
troughs, then began rising again. It was fantastic. Here I was in
the middle of the ocean, my crew, my boat, and I had weathered a
hurricane -- it was magnificent.
There's a final, rather sad footnote here. You'll remember the
Joe Corazon, the freighter inbound to New England, that had warned
us of the approaching storm? I was thinking, as she passed, that I
wished we could somehow be safely swept up onto her decks. But as
it turned out the Corazon was run down by Bertha. She broke in
half and sank three-hundred and fifty miles off Cape Cod, with the
loss of six hands.
That's about it, Alvin. I think that's the story as complete as I
can make it. I hope I haven't had too many uhs and ahs, and so
forth, but it's only a rough narrative [laughs]. Your writing will
obviously read a lot better. Give me a call if you have any
questions.
Remains
1. An urn -- containing his ashes to be spread on our land in Vermont.
2. The tape -- describing his encounter with Hurricane Bertha.
3. This thought: he must have known in Vermont that the very worst had
happened -- the cure had not worked, he was dying.
4. This gesture: he takes my hand, looks at me, his face full of an emotion
I cannot read. He kisses my hand.