The Smell of Colors

I once worked with a child who said that he could smell colors; I was intrigued by his claim and asked him to tell me more about it – how he’d first noticed it (“I just did,” he said) and what each color smelled like to him (interestingly, I thought, white smelled like flowers, whereas I thought it would smell like the “fresh cotton” scent of an air freshener).  Some of the other people who worked with this child seemed to think his behavior was bizarre, but I thought it was fascinating.

Obviously I can’t tell other people how a certain color smells, but what I can do is to describe what certain emotions sound like. 

On the first night after we’d gotten to Durham when we took my dad to the Brain Tumor Clinic at Duke, my sister Jennifer and I lied down to try to sleep on the pull-out couch in the little room that adjoined with the bedroom where my parents were. Dad, who was both exhausted and wound up from the very long, tedious drive there that day and somewhat disoriented about what was going to happen the following day, had finally gotten to sleep, and Jennifer and I had only then realized that all of the pillows and blankets were in the closet of the bedroom.  We didn’t dare go in there for fear of waking Dad up.  We lay there on the thin, spring-violated mattress with a threadbare sheet over us, without pillows for our heads, and suddenly we both started laughing.  Punch-drunk is what I guess it’s called: laughing when essentially nothing is funny - out of fatigue so thick we could hardly think – and stress and terror and so many more things that felt so much more powerful than we were at that moment in time.  We had to keep shushing each other until we finally giggled ourselves to sleep that night, with the laughter somehow helping us to steel ourselves for the next day, which was both Jennifer’s birthday and the first day Dad got chemo.

The metaphor that comes to mind most often when I think about my emotional state during the time Dad was sick is a glass that’s completely full: whenever anything additional was added to what was already in there, the overflow was out of my control, and I was completely incapable of handling it.  One of the many things that happened during those ten weeks that threatened to put me over the edge was the car trouble that mysteriously started happening just after Dad’s diagnosis.  Just days after his surgery, I remember hearing a faint buzzing noise coming from under the car hood after I'd parked and taken the key out of the ignition.  My husband checked it out and said that it seemed like the battery was still running, despite the fact that the car wasn’t.  He took it to the repair shop, but they couldn’t get the problem to reoccur while it was there.  It didn’t happen again for about a week; the next time I heard the buzzing noise, I was in the parking lot at the rehab hospital, about to go inside and take an overnight shift with Dad. 

I was torn; I needed the car because I had to drive back home to go to work the next day, but I needed to be with Dad.  In a move that seems totally uncharacteristic for me, I threw caution not just to the wind but completely into outer space and left the car – and the buzzing – in the parking lot and went into the hospital.  Since my dad’s diagnosis, my priorities had never been clearer.

The next day when I went outside to the parking lot after Mom had come back to be with Dad, I unlocked my car door and tried to start the engine.  Nothing.  The battery was obviously dead.  Luckily for me, my aunt, who was at the hospital too, offered to help; we called AAA and they sent a repair guy to check it out.  He replaced the battery, and, when the same incessant buzzing sound started up again as soon as he connected the new one, he told me to get the problem checked out to be sure it wouldn’t happen again.  I took the car straight to the dealership near the hospital, but they couldn’t find a problem; they said they’d disconnected and then reconnected the battery and the buzzing noise had stopped. 

Looking back and remembering the amount of stress I was under at the time, I’m a little surprised that I didn’t just tell the people at the dealership to keep the old car and bring out a new one for me; having to deal with car trouble on top of everything else was definitely an overflow of the stress with which I was equipped to cope.  Instead, though, I drove the three hours home and told my husband what had happened (again), and he showed me how to disconnect the battery under my hood and gave me a yellow-handled wrench to keep in the side pocket of my car door, just in case. 

Just in case was a language in which I was fluent by that time.  I’ve always felt the need to have plans and back-up plans, and, since Dad had gotten sick and had begun to need around-the-clock care, I knew that careful strategies and consideration of all the variables was essential to my entire family.  Having to tote a yellow-handled wrench around did not at all – pun intended – put a wrench in the plans we had laid.

A couple of days later I drove back to where my parents lived and parked my car in front of their house.  I heard the buzzing again after I’d turned off the engine, and I inexpertly used the wrench to disconnect the battery. I became much smoother at the process over the next couple of weeks, even performing the procedure later in snow and in the dark.  On the day when I was driving home from my parents’ house on icy roads and had to turn back due to the route being impassable, I pulled up in my parents’ driveway, stepped out of the car, and heard the buzzing again.  In the snow and ice, I hurriedly used the wrench to disconnect the battery and then closed the hood of the car and went inside, wet from the snow and shaken from the precariousness of the road conditions.  Dad, who was sitting in his red leather recliner chair in the den, looked up from reading the newspaper when I walked in and noticed the wrench that I’d forgotten to put back in the car in my hand.  When he asked and then I explained why I’d needed the tool, he laughed and said, “Well, if the whole OT thing doesn’t work out for you, I guess you could always be a mechanic.”

When Dad was in the hospital the last time and my family was having to deal with getting to and from the hospital on icy roads at all hours of the day and night, I got so adept at disconnecting and reconnecting the battery that I could do it in the hospital garage in under ten seconds each time.  I ignored the stares of the people around me in the garage and declined the help of the security guard who saw me with the yellow-handled wrench and my car hood propped open.  The battery hookup/unhook became part of my commute routine, just like defrosting the windows and driving through Sonic on the way to the hospital to get Dad a Diet Coke.

I still sometimes think about the boy who said he could identify colors by their smell, and it makes me think that maybe part of the reason I made it through the difficulty of the time when my dad was sick and since then is that I somehow recognized that, because my family is lucky, we had the sound of laughter to remind us of the love and hope and devotion we shared even through the most challenging times.

Big News and a Mission

Something monumentally exciting is about to happen in my family: my youngest sister is about to give birth to her first child, the first baby to be born in our family for many years and an event that is heavily anticipated by all of us.  

Since the end of last summer when my sister told me that she was pregnant, we've all thought a lot about how unfair and sad it is that my dad isn't here on this earth with us to experience the joy that this baby has already started to bring to our family.  Since the moment the big announcement was made, though, I have known that one of the biggest goals I will have as an aunt to this child, whom we have all been calling "our baby" since we learned of his/her existence, is to bring my dad into the life of this child, to teach him/her not only about his/her grandfather but also to impart the lessons and the perspective that my dad shared with all of us.  It's not just a goal of mine, actually, it's a mission: I will pass those things on to our new baby, and I will help him/her to know my dad at every opportunity I get, as will the rest of our family.  

I've heard about people setting up an empty chair or leaving some extra space on a church pew as a tribute to a missing family member during a wedding or other event, to mark a spot for that person who can't be present. In the Labor & Delivery room, though, we won't need a chair for Dad -  not because I don't believe that he will be there, but because I know he will - and I know that he won't be sitting down for any of it.  He will be pacing the floor as he tended to do when he was nervous or excited - and he will be standing right by my sister's shoulder and with an enormous smile on his face as he says to her, "You've got this! You can do it!" as his youngest grandchild enters the world and as his youngest child embarks on her journey as a parent herself. 

Dad, holding newborn Nancy, many years ago

This baby will know his/her Gramps, that's a promise I am making to my dad, to my sister Nancy, and to our new baby.

Remember when you were a kid and you'd run up to Dad with some creation of yours in your hands and say, "Look what I made, Dad!"?  That's what you can say to him about this baby, Nancy, although I think he'll already know.//

Connections

As a child, I loved nature and the outdoors. When I needed some alone time, I would often grab a plastic milk crate and, with that in hand, climb one of the pecan trees in our backyard.  High up in the tree, I would place the crate upside down in the branches and sit on it so I could relax as I felt the breeze blowing through the limbs and watch what was going on below.

One thing I've found since my dad went on ahead is a renewed feeling of that love for the open air and the peace that it gives me; it makes me feel some of the connection to my dad that I, like many others who have lost loved ones, am seeking - so much so that we often end up noticing, watching for, and even collecting things that remind us of our loved one.  Just like I did up in those tree branches many years ago, these days I find peace in the sight of a rainbow or a particularly magnificent sunset or a bird that seems to be looking right at me for an atypical amount of time.

A few months after my dad died, I mentioned in conversation with a friend that I derived a little bit of comfort in having some of my dad's things with me - an old shirt of his, a pair of his socks, a book of his with the corners of some pages folded over where he had marked his place.  My friend, who had been through the loss of a parent before me, told me that she understood, and she predicted that at some point I wouldn't feel as strong of a need to hold onto my dad's things because I would feel connected to him through my memories instead.  She may be right, but I'm not there yet.

For as long as I can remember, my dad had a favorite pillow.  He was always a little particular about things that affected the quality of his sleep; I guess that came from getting up so early to run for so many years.  For years while I was growing up, he had an orthopedic-type of pillow that he slept on every night; he even took it on road trips so he would have that one instead of having to sleep on a hotel pillow.  There were several instances when he left his pillow behind in a hotel room, and, when he realized his mistake, he called the front desk at the hotel and with his usual friendliness persuaded an employee to mail it back to him at home.

When I went to the hospital to be with my dad when he first got sick, I brought a pillow from my house.  The pillow case was one that my daughters had tie-dyed months before; I thought it would be good to have an extra one at the hospital for Dad or whomever was staying there with him to use, and I knew the original design of that pillow case would differentiate our pillow from one that was hospital property.  That pillow ended up following us along during the whole time Dad was sick, going with us from the hospital, to rehab, to the hotel where we stayed when we took Dad to the Brain Tumor Clinic at Duke, to my parents' house, to the hospital again, and finally back to my parents' house.  When we brought Dad home from the hospital the last time, we bought about a dozen new pillows to use to position him to try to keep him comfortable in the hospital bed; we encased all of them in blue pillow cases which we'd also purchased just for that purpose.  The pillow in the tie-dyed case wasn't needed anymore, and so I took it to sleep on, first at my parents' house and later at my own house.  I sleep on that pillow every night now; it, like the outdoors and like some of Dad's things from when he was healthy, bring me some comfort in an unexplainable way, especially at night when I seem to need it the most. 

The pillow that followed us

I imagine that it is a universal struggle for those of us left behind to decide what to do with the belongings of the person who has gone on ahead.  Dad would tell us to get rid of it all; he'd think we were being silly and sentimental, and he would point out that it's just stuff.  And it is, but his possessions marked his place in the world, and, in a way, I feel like they still do.  

Everything that changes in my parents' house - even in my house and even in the world around us - is something that takes me further away from him.  The first few times I was at my parents' house [I know I should just call it my mom's house, but sometimes I revert back to referring to it as theirs] after Dad died, I found myself looking around for dust - not to check my mother's housekeeping skills but because I had read somewhere a long time ago that household dust is made up of mostly skin cells, and so I reasoned that some of Dad physically was still there.  I felt - and I still do to some extent - desperate to hold onto anything that has the possibility of making me feel connected to him.  

Along the way, we've cleaned out and gotten rid of some of Dad's stuff; we donated some of his suits and most of the many pairs of running shoes that were crowding his closet.  It felt a little like ripping off a band-aid, except for the fact that it still hurts afterwards too.  Again, I am sure he would have wanted us to give those things to someone who will use them, but letting go of any of it is still a really hard thing to do.  I just don't want to lose any more of him.