July 18, 2011

• Go Home, Dan’ll, Go Home…

  A row of trolls with wild colored hair stand guard on the
  window sill, watching over the room, giving all who enter the evil eye. In the
  corner is a rack carefully holding well-worn baseball caps. On the dresser is a
  row of family pictures and next to that a storage container holds a stack of
  magazines and VHS tapes. The small TV is blaring loudly. A poster, a “Go Cubs
  Go!” sticker, some get well cards decorate the walls. Old Velcro sneakers are
  abandoned in a wheelchair. He’ll never use either again. Four bottles of RC
  wait near the bed, but they’ll not be opened by their owner. He no longer
  drinks.

  He coughs and coughs and moans slightly. When he opens his
  eyes, it’s for a brief moment, and you can’t understand his guttural sounds.
  The Parkinson’s took most of his speech months ago and he’s too tired to blink
  once for yes or twice for no.

  When my husband was growing up, he learned to play sports
  from his Uncle Dan’ll. In front of the small farmhouse, in the weedy yard, Dan’ll
  taught him to play baseball. Danny’s bat connected to the
  ball and it went deep into the pasture regularly. While you feverishly searched
  for the ball, Danny loped around the bases, taunting jeers and threatening the
  loser with a trip to the quicksand down the road. The basketball hoop nailed to
  the tree hummed with the sound of the ball hitting the rim and swooshing
  through it. For the geeky kid whose father was too exhausted to play catch,
  Daniel was a lifesaver and I’m not sure when my brilliant husband realized
  there was “something different about Danny”, but it never mattered to him.
  Danny was this big kid who told bad jokes, loved to tease, and accepted him
  unconditionally. Danny was his best friend and big brother all wrapped up in
  one body and nothing else mattered.

  Danny graduated from high school and went off to college in
  the nearby city, but came home shortly after, not quite the same. No one talked
  about what happened, but Danny settled into life at the farm- studying modern
  farming methods that would never be used on the land his mother owned, raising
  a few cows, doing chores. We rarely saw him once we moved out East. Trips back
  to Illinois were brief- once or twice a year- and as Grandma B got older, we
  had to make a special effort to go out to the farm to see her and Danny since
  it was too difficult for her to make the drive to my In-Laws.

  But Danny was always thrilled to see us. He wanted to hear
  what my husband was up to, and even when the science was beyond him, he
  listened carefully. He talked about his cows and price of beef, the weather, if
  the Cubs had a chance that year, and how the car was running.

  I thought about all those too-short visits as we made one
  last visit yesterday. As his sleeping becomes deeper, and it’s harder to roust
  him to consciousness. When my husband tries to wake him, he doesn’t open his
  eyes, as if he’s dreaming we’re visiting like old times- back when he could
  still play ball and tell bad puns. His eyes open briefly when his sister
  arrives and he seems to recognize my husband, but his hands shake badly and his
  sounds have no semblance of communication.

   As we leave, we wake him one more
  time and say our good-byes. I can’t listen to my husband’s words without tears
  forming in my eyes. We walk out of the nursing home. The next time we see Dan’ll,
  he’ll be dressed in his best clothes, his hair neatly combed, resting easily in
  a silk lined coffin, his soul long gone. It’s a hard visit. There is a sense
  that we should have made the trip earlier- when he would have enjoyed sitting
  in the sun and shooting the breeze, but we were here to say good-bye, and I don’t
  regret one minute of the long drive.

  “Go home, soon, Dan’ll,” I think on the drive back. “Don’t
  linger here. There is nothing here but pain. Go home. Duke is waiting for you,
  his tail wagging. You have a new and perfect body waiting for you there. Go
  home.”

  The phone call came this morning, seven hours after we
  arrived home from our eighteen hour day. Daniel, friend, brother, uncle, age
  63, left his imperfect body behind July 18^th, 7am CST as the trolls
  watched him take his last breath and go to a better place.

  **Edit: Duke is Aunt Martha’s dog. There were countless dogs on Uncle Danny’s farm tho! Sorry for the confusion!

  • 9:41 am
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