My first ambulance ride

The sound and sight of the ambulance backing down our driveway finally drew the attention of some other neighbors. I recognized the voice of Ken, two doors over, as the EMT reached into my makeshift tent and strapped oxygen onto my face. He apologized that he now had to touch my foot, and strap it into a splint to immobilize it for the ride. I was so focused on the implied promise—that I would soon get out of this weather and get some help—that it only hurt a little more when he cinched the straps that kept my foot in its twisted position.

I rolled to one side and they slipped a backboard under me. Later, Ken would tell me he became one of the "pall bearers" that carried me up the hill and into the ambulance. I said over and over, "Be so careful. It's incredibly slippery." It's odd how safe you feel in the world until something like this happens—now, I could perfectly picture them all falling on the hill, dropping me, and sending my newly sledded body down the hill and into the lake.

But we made it to the gurney behind the ambulance without mishap and they set me, with the backboard, down on top of it. They asked what hospital I wanted to go to. I knew Gouverneur was the closest, but my aunt had had such a bad experience there a few years earlier she made me promise that if I had any emergency with my parents I would take them to Star Lake. So I said, "Star Lake."

The guy actually laughed, which isn't surprising—Star Lake, like most destinations any farther east into the Adirondack National Park, was kind of in the middle of nowhere. He said, "It's Gouverneur or Canton-Potsdam."

I said, "Take me anywhere where I can find a good orthopedic surgeon."

As they pulled the raincoat off of me and pushed the gurney into the ambulance he yelled to the driver (without hesitation, I noticed): "She's going to Canton-Potsdam."

Potsdam was an hour away, over many back roads with plenty of painful bumps. To make me comfortable for the ride (please note intended sarcasm), they left me on the backboard. They claimed I was strapped on but every time we went around a turn I reached over my head to hold on for fear I'd roll off.

Surprisingly, the man and woman in back with me kept me distracted for most of the ride. They checked me over for other injuries (none), kept asking me if I had chest pain or difficulty breathing (no). All I wanted at that point was to get warm, and they did crank up the heat and cover me with dry blankets, which made me feel a bit better. They were kind of surprised when from beneath my shirt I produced the damp rice sock that had been keeping me warm.

Then he told me he had to cut off my sneaker.

I was wearing my MBTs, the mother of all the new knock-off toning shoes. I was rarely without them: they'd greatly improved my feet in the past year and eliminated my need for the custom orthotics I'd previously never been able to go without. Since they're so expensive, and since my feet had never complained that the shoes had "broken down" the way other sneakers usually do, I had delayed replacing them as long as possible. I have no doubt that their complete lack of tread was the main reason I went down so fast—with no channels for the water in the lawn to seep into, I'd hydroplaned.

As he snipped through the laces, I told him that this pair of shoes had cost me $245. He said, "Look at it this way, then—cutting this one off only cost you $122.50."

Every few minutes they asked what my pain level was, on a sale of one to ten, with ten being the worst pain I'd ever experienced. The first time I answered I looked at the woman: "I'd say it's a five, but that's only because I've had a child. If I were a man, I'd say a nine."

They finally started to orient me: we're past Canton, we're past the new Wal-Mart, this will hurt a bit because there's a bump here but the hospital's just ahead. They told me my mom and Beth, Ken's wife, were in the car behind the ambulance, and that they had my purse.

And I thought, this is just so ironic. I'd never heard of this hospital until earlier this summer, when a social worker whose family summers at the lake hired me to teach my "Healing Through Writing" workshop in the building across the parking lot. That had been at the beginning of August.

Now, at month's end, I was being wheeled into the hospital in desperate need of my own healing.

Awaiting help

On any other Sunday the lake would have been busy with waterskiers and kayakers and the shore would have been lined with parents watching young children splash in the shallows or fish from docks, but Hurricane Irene had chased them all inside. I lay on the sloping lakeside outside our camp, where decades before two of my sisters had done their great Sun-In vs. hydrogen peroxide experiment, and where more than once I had fallen asleep on a grass mat while drugged with sun-comfort only to later regret the hot pain of my reddened skin. But late in the afternoon on August 28, groundwater seeped through my shirt, hoodie and pants from below and rain pelted me from above and I held my calf so my disfigured ankle wouldn't touch the ground. My body temperature lowered, and I started to shiver.

I was shaking uncontrollably when my mother arrived, holding loosely over her head a long camo coat in dual shades of green from our resident rainwear supply.

"Charlie's coming," she said. My mother, 80, looked so little as she hovered above me. She had lost weight since my Dad's death this spring and weighed a mere 117 pounds—I knew because she'd recently recovered from a bad case of bronchitis and a double ear infection that required I take her to the health clinic in town. I had cared for her, helping her sort out the meds since she kept thinking she should take the antibiotic four times a day and the cough syrup only once, instead of vice versa. Now she said, "What can I do to help you?"

I was shaking so profoundly I had trouble getting her to understand my words. "Take my c-c-c-cell phone inside and d-d-dry it off. I'll need it." She took the phone and covered me with the raincoat she'd been wearing. "And be careful—it's so slick out here." I pulled the raincoat over my head—it covered most of me—to wait until help arrived.

After another minute or two I heard a man's voice. "Kathy, it's Charlie." I moved the raincoat aside so it shielded me from the rain, but allowed me to peek out. "I've called 9-1-1, but it will be a while till they can get here. What happened?" I gave him the shaky, Reader's Digest version. Pat, his wife, arrived too. Both stood over me in hooded raincoats. My mom arrived with an umbrella and several more jackets, which she used to cover my legs. Now, only the twisted foot remained uncovered.

"I wish I had a tarp or something, " Charlie said. He might not have had one, but we did—we had several on the shelves in the garage. I told him where to locate them. What I didn't factor in: like any 76-year-old Charlie needed light to see, we have no electricity in the garage, and the hurricane sky offered little light. He came back with our hot pink, fully inflated float. "This is all I could find," he said. "Here." He laid the lightweight float over the broken ankle.

Distracting me with chitchat was the best medicine available just then, and Pat and Charlie are masters of the form. Yet even they could find a limited number of things to talk about in such a situation. "I wish there was more I could do," my mother said during an awkward lull. My number one complaint at that point was the wet and the cold—my foot was screwed and I knew there was nothing to be done about that. It was then I remembered the rice socks.

I host writing retreats for women at the camp at the beginning and end of the summer season, when nights can be chilly in our unheated camp. So I keep tube socks filled with rice on top of the fridge—3 minutes in the microwave to heat them, slip them beneath the covers, and your bed will be toasty when you climb in. I asked my mother to heat me one. When she passed it under the raincoat to me a puddle of collected water spilled onto my face, but I took the sock and held it to my chest. When the heat dissipated some, I stuck it right beneath my shirt. I couldn't stop shivering—I assumed at this point that might be from shock—but I did draw some comfort from the heat source.

Pat went into our camp and found paper and pencil and opened the window so I could shout up to her with Dave's phone number. She said she'd call him as soon as the ambulance left.

EMTs were in the firehouse in Hermon when Charlie's call came in, so they responded instead of the crew from nearby Edwards. I had shivered on the ground about a half hour when I heard the beeping of the ambulance backing up. Charlie went to greet them. He told me later that the EMT said, "Where is she? I told you not to move her." To which Charlie replied, "That's her—down there, under that heap of coats."

I've heard they're canceling All My Children so feel free to stop in here daily for your daily fix instead! Sorry, no sex scenes, but plenty of drama. More tomorrow...

The edges of the storm

Up in Northern New York State, where my mother and I were staying at the family summer home, we didn't expect much damage from Hurricane Irene. We were located at the storm's feathery edges, meteorologists said—although to my untrained eye it doesn't look like that in this satellite image. All day the wind pushed whitecaps towards us down the lake and blew a onslaught of water at us, making it difficult to see out through the rain-spotted window screens.

I called Dave back in PA and asked him how bad the flooding was near our home. As we spoke I went from window to window, trying to see if we had any tree damage to report. On the short hill between our camp and the lake, I noticed something skewered into the lawn. It was small, but sticking up straight. Curious. Like an on-the-spot reporter I carried my cell out into the storm so I could tell Dave what it was. I didn't bother with a coat—I'd only be out there a sec—but three strides later I was skidding on the water-sodden hill as fast as if it were wet ice.

It all happened so fast. Between heartbeats. I rolled over the inside of my left foot as I fell and heard a loud snap then more crunching sounds. Even before I saw my foot stuck in a goddawful, unnatural position I knew what had happened.

The cell call was still open, but the phone had slid several feet down the hill.

Powerless to help from Pennsylvania, my husband stayed on the line and heard me screaming, "Oh god I've broken my ankle! Mom! Mom, you've got to hear me! Mo-o-om!"

Inside, my mother did not hear this. She was enjoying the thrumming of the steady rainfall on our tin roof, a sound my whole family finds comforting, blissfully shielded from any intrusive noise by the double-paned windows we installed when we renovated the formerly screened-in porch.

I screamed for a few more minutes, my throat raw, my shirt and hoodie soaking up the groundwater that was the cause of the accident, new rain pelting me from above. I held my left calf so my foot wouldn't touch the ground—dear god, the sight of it, twisted that way—and somehow eased myself downhill a foot or two so I could kick the cell up toward my hand.

"I've broken my ankle and my mom can't hear me," I told Dave. "The phone's all wet. I've got to shut it. I'll call you back when I can." My mother finally peeked out to see what was taking me so long. "Get Charlie," I yelled, referring to my neighbor. I knew she couldn't help me. I was up there caring for her after my dad's memorial service this summer; losing him after almost 60 years of marriage had worsened her dementia. "I've broken my ankle."

As I waited for Charlie, an uncontrollable shivering began.

***

Well, I've done it. After three weeks I've finally committed the edges of my personal hurricane story to the page. I'll keep writing every day until I'm spent on the issue. I knew that writing about it would help me heal, But I've suffered post-traumatic stress symptoms that gave these images way too much power over me and until an hour ago, when I once again dissolved into tears about it with my sister on the phone, it turned my stomach to blog about it yet. But crying helps relieve pressure, as I hope writing about this will, so I thought I'd give it a go. More tomorrow.

But to end today's post I'd like to skip ahead to my return to the camp after my hospitalization. The storm is now over, Dave is with me, and I am on the couch with my leg propped up on pillows, doped up on pain meds. He is looking out at the lake, and says, "I see it. The thing that's skewered into the lawn. It's a pine cone."

The pine cone had blown from the top of a hemlock standing some sixty feet high above us, and the hurricane winds combined with gravity and the soaked earth created a situation in which the first 3/4 inches or so skewered into the ground and the rest of its length, some seven inches or so, stuck straight up.

Dave says, "You're right. That is weird. It looks like the lawn has an erection."

Granted, I've had to pay dearly for my curiosity. But I ask you: wouldn't you have wanted to check that out?

Healing: You've got to play to win

Even my first husband, who suffered from alcoholism to the point of suicide, would have drawn a line between him and the seventeen men and women in my Canton-Potsdam Chemical Dependency Unit workshop (read the first post on this workshop here). Ron would have said he had nothing in common with them. I heard that same line-drawing from one of the participants, who upon hearing that I was an editor, was eager to share some of his poems with me.

“This isn’t court ordered for me or anything,” the poet said. “I’m here to get clean for my wife and kids.” I hoped that would be enough incentive—I noted he left himself off that list. “And the piece I wrote says I used heroin but I didn’t, I used cocaine. I just thought the rhythm in that line benefitted from the sound of ‘a needle in my vein.’”

This guy was tall with big blue eyes and sun-kissed hair and he followed everything I said with great interest, nodding his head and offering insightful comments about work read by others.

I was thrilled to find two poets among the rehabbers in my "Healing Through Writing" workshop. Emma (left), the social worker who hired me, had told me that some of these people would not be willing participants. Although the workshop was a required component in their treatment, some of them may have no inherent interest in writing. Even she didn't really know what to expect, as the arts component in the program was new, and they'd never had a writing workshop before. She warned me that the participants might be so freshly parted from their addictive substance of choice that they’d be physically unable to sit still and pay attention. Which did happen—at one point, Emma gently chastised a man who, in the middle of the workshop, suddenly snapped open a newspaper and held it before his face as if checking sports scores. Gambling is one of the addictions represented here, Emma had told me.

So I wasn't expecting much. A recovering addict I know, an experienced rehabber, suggested I might expect to reach one person. Then, if I connected with two or three, I’d be pleasantly surprised. But I wasn't without hope: Emma said that this was a motivated group.

Any anxiety I felt was immediately relieved as we dove into the first interactive element‚ filling in the drawing above. It's supposed to be a man, but the rehabbers called it a gingerbread man. My questionable visual arts talents aside, this illustration is an effective tool. The man starts out empty. "What goes inside here?" I asked, and the room bounced to life. As participants called out suggestions, I filled them in. Among other things we added a heart, bones, kidneys, and a stomach. “Vomit,” one of them said—okay, that was a new one. I drew some speckles in the midsection, to their delight.

When they had reached the limit of their biological awareness I said, “How about anger. Is there anger in there?” “Hell yes!” I heard. When I asked where I’d put that, one called out, “All over the place!” We added other emotions and then the title, “The Person With Too Much Inside.”

I moved to the next whiteboard and, as the participants called them out, listed the reasons people might want to write. I've given this workshop in many settings and I’m usually thrilled to get five answers; I’ll fill in the few extra needed to illustrate my talking points. So imagine my joy when this crew came up with 17 reasons—so many I had to go back and squish them in, leading to jokes that I didn’t know how to number correctly. This is what they came up with (excuse the cell phone pic):


They really got into this part of the discussion so we lingered there, talking about all the ways writing can help people. I modified the drawing of "The Person With Too Much Inside" to relive some pressure: the opening in his brain lets inspiration in, the opening through his hand lets his feelings and ideas out. After a break I prompted them to do a writing exercise and to my great surprise, all but one of them shared what they wrote. Some of it was quite good.

Even though the workshop exceeded all expectations, I couldn't help myself: my gaze kept drifting to the one non-participant, a guy with heavy lidded eyes who would alternate between nominally paying attention and checking out. In looks and attitude, of all the people in the room, he reminded me most of Ron. He didn’t call out answers. He stared into space when the others wrote. And during the sharing period, when he finally moved his hand and I looked hopefully in his direction, he was pointing to the person on his left, signaling that I should call on his neighbor rather than him.

When the workshop was over, I saw this guy one last time. As I walked to my car I saw him outside smoking. He was petting Strawberry, the unit's therapy dog, as if the animal were the only being capable of loving him and accepting his love. As our lives diverged I wondered if he was going to make it, because in so many ways, this young man was Ron.

Yet this time there would be no suicide drama. I was free to walk away. And as I did so, I was able to smile at him one last time, and say goodbye.

Healing with the Enemy

The young man reads his hastily scrawled words from a spiral notebook. He has soulful eyes, a short, hard body, and bad teeth. In his story he is high and drunk and stealing and crashing two trucks. While he reads he reaches beneath the table to pet Strawberry, the lab mix therapy dog curled up at his feet.

“I was scared and went to the only safe place I could think of—my grandmother’s house,” he reads. “It was there I was arrested for the theft of two vehicles and DUI and a bunch of other stuff I was too messed up to hear.”

The writing prompt I’d asked him to incorporate into his story: “grandmother’s house.” Is that how you would have used it? Not me.

But this is not my milieu. This young man is now out of prison and doing a stint at the Canton-Potsdam Chemical Dependency Unit in Potsdam, NY, where yesterday I gave my “Healing Through Writing” workshop. Previously I’ve given this workshop at libraries and writers’ groups and bereavement groups. None of which bandied about words like: Addiction. Prison. Court-ordered rehab. Heroin. Cocaine. Relapse. Escape.

I tried to pretend this was just another workshop. "Healing Through Writing" has always worked its magic before, and I prayed it would do so again. But somewhere deep inside I felt I was crossing enemy lines. For a good eight years after my first husband Ron committed suicide, I’d explain gently to my children (and anyone else who would ask) that Daddy was sick with a disease that had eaten him up from the inside out. I was speaking from my head, through the filter of obtained knowledge. Even my heart wanted to jump on board. But inside my muscles and bones, I held tight to my anger that he would choose alcohol over our children and me. I released that anger, slowly, through my writing.

In any other setting, I would have been afraid of this young man, who told me he writes so that he won’t beat up on people with his fists. Except here in Potsdam workshop, there's a difference: during the break he came up to show me his poetry. It contained sweet, sensitive, insightful musings on life and death—the same kind of stuff I like to write about. I told him his writing moved me. "You have to do something to pass the time in prison," he said, telling me that when he wasn't writing he was reading and re-reading books obtained through the black market.

He told me he writes as if speaking to his best friend, who was killed in a car crash by an erratic driver three years ago. The young man was to pick up his friend that night; instead, he went to get high. This odd fact may have saved his life, and he has some survivor guilt. “But he’s always with me,” the young man said. He shyly rotated his forearm to show me his friend’s name, tattooed on the white vulnerable skin of his forearm.

I asked him if he had hope. Without missing a beat, he said, “Every day. And I’m going to work on my poetry even more when I get to the halfway house.”

Everyone has a story, and if willing to share it, you can find common ground. That’s what I love about these workshops.

I’ll share more about this amazing experience in my next post. For now, I’ll leave you with this:

I just conducted a Google image search for “Canton-Potsdam Chemical Dependency” to try to find a picture to accompany this post—and while scrolling through the images, on page four, I found the picture of Ron and me “torn asunder” that I created for a previous post. Why would it be there, I wondered—“chemical dependency” wasn’t even a keyword phrase associated with that post. Then, on page five, I found my headshot. When I put the cursor over my face, it said, "Healing Through Writing."

Maybe Google knew something I didn’t. Maybe I was right where I belonged.

From retreat prompt to memorial tribute

While retreating with the above crew at my summer home in Northern NY State in June, I posed a writing prompt I lifted from a post by Kim Pearson, a fellow contributing editor at The Blood-Red Pencil:

Describe a room in your house, perhaps the room you are sitting in now. Describe everything and anything in it – without using any adjectives or adverbs that imply opinion (such as pretty, or dirty, or jarring, or too anything). Use only words that cannot be disputed.

Since it was a beautiful day, I suggested my retreaters might also choose an outside space. Yet when we began writing, no one moved from the room we were in. So I went outside and sat in an Adirondack chair to serve as a role model. The first thing I saw was "Mahn-Go-Taysee," the canoe pictured above. I started writing from this prompt through a filter of loss; my father. who died at the end of April, had loved this canoe. With a little adaptation my writing became the piece below, which I read last Saturday at his memorial service.

[Note: When trying to get your writing life back to normal after suffering such a loss, I recommend you refrain from posting a picture of your father looking youthful and handsome on your blog. It's been very hard for me to add something that would push him from the "front page," scrolling him into my past. I'll do so gently, by sharing here my tribute.]

* * *

Mahn-Go-Taysee

The overturned canoe graces the lakeshore as it has every year, vivid yellow against green growing grass. This year fore and aft seem more neck and tail, curving over sawhorses in a reverent bow. Above it, in the pines, birds twitter strange syllables as if calling its name: “Mahn-go-taysee.” If they could tell the story of that name, I’d love to hear it.

The name was from Uncle Bob’s Hiawatha period. Translated, the Ojibway means “loon-hearted brave.” I never heard anyone venture a guess as to what that meant, exactly. Perhaps Dad approved simply because of the name’s reference to the majestic bird that returns to the lake with its mate every summer to raise its young, just as he did.

I think of this as I place my palm on the canoe’s back. Its warmth surprises me. I almost expect a heartbeat, as if it has absorbed and reflected the life around it. My fingers skim blemishes formed by hardened sap, and stuttering scars left by generations of children navigating submerged rocks discovered too late.

It seems like only yesterday this canoe wintered over in the basement of our Maryland home, its ribs exposed, although in truth it has been some forty years. Dad had asked that we each take short shifts with the sanding; with seven in the family it would be done in a jiffy. But my memory is of my father’s hands on the sanding block, swish-a-swish-a-swish, raising dust into the air that tasted sweet on my tongue. I watched him from a perch on the basement steps. At fourteen I knew nothing of endurance, and tired too quickly to be of much use. But I sensed the importance of the project, and of witnessing it.

I run my fingers over the letters. With a sure hand and the flourish of the artisan, Dad had painted them so bold and thick that even the blind might read them with the hands: Mahn-go-taysee. Was being loon-hearted anything like being “crazy as a loon”? I suppose that phrase refers to the bird’s giggle-laugh that, like the cries of a child relentlessly tickled, is actually a sign of distress. What if being loon-hearted is to be crazed with love to the point of foolishness?

Perhaps it was foolish of my father to spend so much time preserving this old boat, with so many other low-maintenance, hi-tech materials becoming available. Yes, it sliced through the water leaving only its thin wake in evidence, but it was tippy. Dad taught us to paddle in this canoe, as soundlessly as an Indian whose very life depended on stealth. To abandon our mother’s hand-caned seats and kneel in the center if paddling solo while caught in a stiff wind. He taught my sisters and I how to switch places, one crawling through the straddled legs of the other. Balance and harmony were paramount; a canoe was no place for squabbles. And within the confines of this vessel we kept the peace well—as far as I know, it did not once overturn.

I can still see my father in the basement, working night after night within the glow of his worklamp, as alone as the loon can sound with its haunted, hollow call. The restoration would end up taking ten years. Maybe to be loon-hearted means to carry on despite what one knows of abandonment and lone effort. Yet in the end our ever-buoyant father painted the canoe the color of sunshine, building the brilliance coat after coat.

My hand skims the chipped keel. I was married by the time I helped fashion this finishing touch, to Dad’s specifications, from a hard-to-find length of oak with no knots. It is rough now from running the boat onto the sandy shore, time and again, like Mom told us not to. In ways both constructive and destructive, this craft was a family work of art.

The breeze bends long grasses and pushes ripples against the shore but the canoe continues its vigil with the patience of an elder. No one is immune to the ravages of age, not even Mahn-go-taysee. Upon the completion of her restoration in 1985 my dad wrote, “My modest assessment is that it is absolutely gorgeous!” Now deepening cracks cause mildew-edged canvas to peel from her gunwales—but inside, bathed in the spirit of the loon-hearted brave who revived her, resilient ribs have clung to both strength and beauty.

A motor starts, a dog barks in the distance. Beside Mahn-go-taysee, I watch as out on the lake a child or perhaps a renter flails oars, sending a rowboat into a spasmodic circle. I smile; they too will learn. I pat the canoe, soon to earn temporary respite from such training sessions.

One day we will restore her. Even Trout Lakers who’ve traded in double-seater outhouses for indoor plumbing understand the importance of clinging to some aspects of bygone eras. And I am one of Jack Graham’s children: if what stands between one of us and something we find meaningful is simply the acquisition of new skills, the scraping together of elusive funds, and monumental effort over an indeterminate stretch of time, why not go for it?

But before sending her to her well-earned rest, unable to resist the way she is stretched before me, soaking up the sun and the view as my father himself so loved to do, I slip my arms around Mahn-go-taysee and lay my cheek one last time against what warmth remains on her flawed, beloved surface.

My new, smaller family

Men watching

Okay ladies, truth time: if you saw this handsome dude in the mall you'd look twice, wouldn't you?

I'm lucky. I was watching him my whole life.

This is my father, before I ever knew him. He passed away on April 27 and I haven't posted since then. Even dedicated writers experience seasons: a time to record their lives, and a time to set down their pens and immerse themselves so fully that they might live something worth writing about.

I could have written sooner of the shock when I got to the hospital and heard my mother, so small in the waiting room, say, “He didn’t make it.” I could have written of the panic urging me to connect with the only sister within striking distance—“Can you leave work? Come to the ER right now”—so she might witness with us the cooling evidence of this loss. I could have written of the way the chaplain tugged at the wedding band ensconced on my dad's hand ever since my mother placed it there sixty years ago, and the way that struggle left my dad’s fourth finger lying unnaturally straight, never to curve again alongside his others.

But these are observations, and since what I seek on this blog is perspective, I had to wait until I gained some. And this is what I keep coming back to: the differences between my first husband and my father.

I’ve written about Ron a lot on this blog, because for fifteen years I watched him as well. In choosing death, he taught me a lot about life. Because he was fourteen years older than I, one could posit that I sought in my first husband a father substitute, and one might be right [I totally wrote that sentence in my Dad’s voice]. Ron was the hugger my father wasn’t, giving freely the affection I sought to earn from my father. But both men were aloof, and unpracticed in sharing their inner emotional lives. What I learned from them both I learned by processing my observations.

But unlike my father, Ron was overwhelmed by life’s challenges and possibilities, and he committed suicide at just about the same age my dad was when he faced off against the first of many life-threatening illnesses: cancer, encapsulated on a kidney he would lose. He didn’t need it—spirit would fill in what the body couldn’t provide. My dad would continue to fight for his life for the next thirty years, pummeling into remission two more kinds of cancer. During those years he would have and enjoy all of his eight grandchildren.

By the time his first grandson was born—my son Jackson—my father was already well into a string of heart attacks that would lead to angioplasties and stents and quintuple bypass surgery. So worried was I for his life that when Jackson and I left the hospital in 1987 we went straight to another: Ron drove us from our room downtown to my dad's in another section of the city. I wanted to show Dad his first grandson...just in case.

My dad would live beyond Jackson’s college graduation because time and again he reached death's threshold and bounced off. When my mom called that last morning of my father's life to say he’d had a massive heart attack and that the ambulance had just left, I didn’t know what to expect. I grabbed the living will and power of attorney, dutifully, but also his med list. How many times had I driven the hour to get there to find him holding court in the emergency room, greeting my arrival with a hearty, “Well hello, Kathryn. What are you doing here?” On that final drive, until I would observe for the last time his silent, unmoving face, I held all possibilities aloft.

These past few years my dad was frustrated by dementia and a tremor that kept him from two of his great loves, reading and painting. Yet still his body continued to carry him proficiently through all his daily tasks, and he accepted the challenge of finding what pleasure he could in life, much of which involved the treasured company of my mother. When his heart seized this time the end was astoundingly complete. He lived to be 86, beyond any doctor's expectations, and there is some small measure of relief in the fact that this brilliant, creative man did not have to suffer any further the ravages and indignities of dementia.

Ron’s death at age 54 was also sudden and complete, and offered some measure of relief in a household that had weathered the storm of his psychological torment. We hope he rests with a peace he never knew in life. But the torment that was his continued for those he left behind.

My dad, on the other hand, left behind a precious gift: peace. All things must come to an end, we know this, and that includes the life of Jack Graham, fighter pilot, industrial designer, corporate executive, weekend carpenter, artist, writer, devoted husband, father, and grandfather. It was clearly his time to go, and we can rest in this knowledge. Because if it were within his power to stay, he’d be calling to me now from the porch of our camp: “Kathryn, is there any more maple cream?”

I licked it from my fingers this morning, Dad, thinking of you. May the toast in heaven be slathered with it.