"Me Too Honey" (c) 1999-2007

 

"Me Too Honey"

[The Death and Dying of Stuart Jenks]

(c) 1999-2007 Stu Jenks

[Images: "The Everywhere" (c) 2001 & “Stuart Circle, Richmond, Virginia” © 1999]

    Dad may be dying.
    I don’t know but I think so.
    Off to my left, is Stuart Circle Hospital, and inside in a private room is my father and mother. My father is getting chemo this week, and I have flown to Virginia to help and do what I can.
    I got the call two weeks ago.

    “Stu, your father’s cancer has come back. The surgery didn’t get it all” my mother says on the phone.
    “What does that mean? Do they go in again and operate? They’ve already gone in twice” I say.
    Mom starts to cry.
    “They can’t operate again. It’s spread,” she says.
    “Spread? Where? To his lymph nodes?”
    “It’s spread, Stu”
    “What do we do now?”
    “We have to do chemo.” Her voice is shaking a lot now.
    “What kind,?” I say. I can feel myself getting a little light headed.
    “He has to go into the hospital and be hooked up to an IV for 4 days straight and then he goes back to the hospital for a week, once a month. It’s experimental chemo, Stu.”
    “So it’s spread” I say.
    I can hear Mom fighting back the tears, trying to be brave.
    “Yes, honey,” she says.
    “When’s the chemo starting”
    “I think in a little under a month”
    “I’m coming back to help” I say.
    “Would you?”
    “I’ll got to tell them at work here, but they have to let me go. It’s the law.”
    “I’m so happy you’re coming,” Mom says. I can hear the tears in her voice.
    We finish the conversation on the phone, and I leave my office to go outside for a smoke, before I talk to my boss and Human Resources. I go to the northeast fire stairs and start walking down. I always take the stairs here. As I descend the stairs alone, I begin to talk quietly to myself.
    “Please don’t let my Dad die. Please God. Don’t let him die.”
    The tears come.
    “God, is Dad going to die?”
    I don’t hear the quiet still voice say ‘No, he’s going to be alright’. I hear the voice say just three words.
    “I’m sorry, Stu.”
    I stop on the stairs and lean up against the concrete wall, and I begin to cry. I can hear my weeping echoing off the walls, up and down the flights of stairs. I think briefly that I hope no one hears me, and then I think, I don’t care. My Dad’s dying.

    So I caught a plane and flew to Richmond a few weeks later, rented a car and drove to Mothershead Neck, and now for the past few days, I’ve been driving into Richmond, in the morning and driving back out to The River at night. Mom has been staying with Dad in his room, sleeping on a foldaway bed. I’ve been sleeping in an old Civil War vintage bed at Ed-Lil at The River.
    Tonight, I’ve taken a break to shoot some. I haven’t stayed by my father’s side all the time. That would drive me crazy. I’m grateful that Mom has me running errands during the day. And at night, my time is my own pretty much and it’s been great to rediscover the town of my birth: Richmond, Virginia.
    My camera is set up at the far eastern east of Monument Avenue, a beautiful old thoroughfare in The Fan of Richmond. Monument is south of Broad. Broad Street is just a couple of blocks to the North. North of Broad and South of Broad had great significance back in the day.

    Back in those days of segregation, the poor blacks lived north of Broad and the wealthy whites lived south of Broad. Both races took the same streetcars to and from work. Black women came over to The Fan to work as maids during the day. But after sundown, blacks didn’t go South of Broad and whites didn’t go North of Broad. That’s just the way it was until the Civil Rights Act was passed and things slowly began to change. Also during the 60’s, the new Interstate took out much of North of Broad in the name of urban renewal. It didn’t touch The Fan. Ironically, Blacks make up most of the population of the City of Richmond in 1999. In The Fan, it’s about 50/50 black to white. Unfortunately, due to annexation restrictions, the size of Richmond hasn't changed since the days of the Confederacy, and since most of the middle class and wealthy Whites have fled to the surrounding counties, Richmond is tax poor. So even though, Blacks (and Whites) now live South of Broad, Richmond is now poor, and Henrico, Chesapeake, and the other counties are flush, with good schools, new infrastructure, and fancy shopping malls. The City of Richmond, now, is an odd mix of poor Blacks and Whites, gays, college students, artists, gentrifying Whites, and a new Black middle class. Life could be worse but it could be better.
    Monument Avenue is definitely the major street of note here in the Capitol of the Confederacy. Renovated after the War Between the States, it runs right through The Fan and out of town to the Northwest. It’s just a four lane street in the outskirts of town, but here in The Fan, it’s 5 miles of hundred year old oaks in a central green park, where yuppies jog and walk their dogs. Two lanes each way flank the huge medium, wide enough to play a game of touch football and lining the avenue are one hundred to two hundred year old townhouses, old mansions of the Old South that have been mostly restored. Also along Monument are the wealthiest churches in town and luxury apartment houses from the 50’s and 60’s.
    But the hallmarks of the street are the bronze monumental statues of Confederate War Heroes and one black man. Starting where I’m standing now is the statue of  J.E.B. Stuart, the renowned Captain of the Confederate Calvary. Sometimes I think that I (or rather my father, Stuart, Sr.) was named after this brave and loyal soldier, but knowing my grandparents, it’s just as liking that they named my Dad after the street they lived on, Stuart Avenue.
    Next, a half a mile to the west, riding his warhorse Traveler is Robert E. Lee. When I was growing up, I was taught that Jesus Christ sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty and Robert E. Lee sitteth on the left (I was also taught that U.S. Grant was a murderous drunk.) Lee faces south on Traveler, symbolic that he return from The War alive. J.E.B faces north for he was killed in 1864 at Yellow Tavern, just north of Richmond. J.E.B.'s monument, like other statues on the Avenue, has a few words carved in granite stating some facts about him and his life. But Robert E. Lee's statue only has one word on a huge bronze plaque on its pedestal. That word is “Lee”. No more needs to be said, to any son or daughter of the Confederacy, black or white.
    Every school child in Virginia knows some stories about Robert E. Lee. The story of him leaving the U.S. Army to lead the Confederacy for he couldn’t fight against his country, that country being ‘Virginia’. The story of his mansion home in Arlington being seized by the Feds and turned into a graveyard. The story of him riding his horse Traveler and no other, throughout the entire war. The story that at the Battle of Fredericksburg, when it becomes apparent that his victory that day over the Union would be complete, devastating and beautiful, he said “It is well that war is so terrible, lest we would grow to fond of it”. The story of his overconfidence on the third day at Gettysburg, when he launched the mile wide charge up a gently rising open field and how his troops were cut to pieces with rifle and cannon fire and how after that horrible defeat, he rode into his returning wounded men and said over and over “It is all my fault. It is all my fault.” The story of him surrendering with honor and dignity at Appomattox Courthouse. The story of his refusal to write an autobiography after the war, for he stated “I refuse to make any money off the blood of my men”. The story of his gentle later life as the chancellor of Washington College (now Washington and Lee). The story of his tomb inside the chapel at Washington and Lee, and the grave of Traveler, buried outside the church. The story of the love for his wife and family, and his love for Virginia.
    I’m a Son of Virginia, born in Memorial Hospital in Downtown Richmond. I guess you can tell.
    Next at the intersection of The Boulevard and Monument Avenue is the bronze statue of Stonewall Jackson. He is facing north for he was mortally wounded by his own men in 1863, after his victory at Chancellorsville. In trying to save his life the doctors amputated his left arm. Robert E. Lee was quoted as saying “He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right.” His dying words were “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”  He liked lemons alot.
    I passed Stonewall every Sunday until I was five or six, for he was on the way to St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. I marveled as a kid at the hugeness of the statue and the wonders of a traffic circle. I didn’t like going the church that much, but I loved looking up at Stonewall going to and from.
    Jeff Davis’ statue is the next up Monument. He stands low in front of a tall  granite column. Not very impressive and frankly no Southerners talk much of Jefferson Davis. I’m guessing we didn’t like him then and we don’t like him now. F-ing politician.
    Next to last in line is Matthew Maury, the Commander of the Confederate Navy. I remember asking my father dozens of times, over the years, who he was. He said he was the head of the Southern Navy. That was all Dad said. He isn’t well known to me or probably few others present day Virginians know who he is either. Nice big bronze globe above his head, though.
    Maury used to be the last sculpture on Monument until 1996 when one of the most prominent Richmondites of the 20th century was honored. Arthur Ashe, tennis player as a youth and educator in later life who died of AIDS, was given his own bronze monument after his death. Battle lines were drawn again between black and white on this sculpture, but kinder hearts won out, and Arthur was honored as he should be.
    My father dislikes Arthur Ashe being on Monument Avenue, feeling it was a slap in the face to the majesty of Monument Avenue and another example of political correctness. That's what Dad said. Whether he admits it or not, Dad is a bigot. Not a card carrying member of the Klan, and he even voted Democratic a few times lately, for he hates the Religious Right, but to this day, one of my Dad’s favorite phrases when I spend money foolishly is that I’m “spending money like a nigger on a Saturday night”. As I’ve become older and gutsier, I ask Dad to not use the ‘N’ word around me. His coming halfway is, right before he said the word ‘nigger’, he will preface it by saying “I know you hate this word, but …..” and will say it anyway.
    He’s not a bad man. Just a man of his times. A veteran of World War Two. Fought at Iwo Jima. Came home. Meet Mary. Married her after college. Had two kids. Got a job at the railroad where his father worked. Got a better job at IBM. Worked on Model A cars for fun. Retired and moved to the summer home of his youth on the Rappahannock River in Virginia. Built a new house. Fiddled around for ten years. Got a little cancer. Kick it. Now got a big bad cancer. Fighting it and losing the fight. The life of Stuart.
    But the part of Stuart that others don’t see is a man who appears to have lived his life out of obligation, rather than living any dreams he may have had. He has felt obligated to take care of his wife Support his kids. Worked at a job he didn’t like for years. Waiting for the time he could go back to The River. The Rappahannock River that he has always loved. But all of that silent sacrifice has bred a slow burning resentment inside of my father. He may love Mary, but I don’t think he likes her very much. He does love me, that I know, but he doesn’t understand me nor truly support this artist, who is his only son. He often asks if people buy my art. ‘Yes, Dad, they do.’ I say. And my sister Pamela he really hates and can barely stand to be in the same room with her. That’s another story for another time.
    My Dad and I find common ground in only two subjects: Auto Racing and How Mary Drives Us A Little Nuts From Time To Time. But Stuart always told me, to my face, that he loved me. Often. From high school on up. Told me he loved me just a few minutes ago when I left for the night. And yes, I do wish my father would like me more, but I’ll take his open expression of love for me, and cherish him, as best I can, just for that.
    All Dad’s faults and failings, and even his good sides, really don’t matter to me now. He may be dying of a very fast growing interstitial muscle cancer and I’m here to help. I’m his only son and he’s my only father, and I’m here.
    Earlier today, I was up in Dad’s room and he has a nickname for his chemo, this orange liquid in a drip, that is going into a catheter that pours right into his chest.
    “I’m getting the Agent Orange” he would say, laughing, to any and all of the visitors who came by.
    A number of Mary’s church friends came by. Dad used to go to church on Sunday, but he has tired of it in his retirement years, but many of Mom’s church friends are his friends too. He’s polite to an Bishop who came by, who all three of us agreed later was an arrogant sot. The nurses seem to like Dad. Funny, Dad doesn’t want the TV on. He watches quite a bit at home, but only at night. So mostly the three of us try to find something to talk about that isn’t cancer or chemo or death. Mary is more hyperactive than normal, and normally she is like a hamster on a wheel. Stuart is quieter than normal, not joking as much, with the ease that he usually does. And I’m in the middle, having the dual reality of happy to be at my father’s side and wishing to escape this hospital room as much as possible. When my mother has an errand for me to run, I can’t leave quick enough.
    Sure, Death is around, walking the halls, but that’s not the problem. It’s this low hum of tension that seems to be between my parents. Mom, anxious that Dad might to say something hurtful to her, and Dad, anxious that Mom is going to try and control everything. Thank God I smoke for that gives me an excuse to go outside and take a breather now and then, from the black electric charge in the air.
    But now, I’ve been relieved for the night.
    Mom is probably setting up her foldaway bed and Dad is drifting in and out of sleep I suppose.
    I’m here on the northeast end of Stuart Circle looking at my namesake and being mesmerized by the traffic. I line up the shot, with the flood lit Presbyterian Church on the left, J.E.B. on the right, and the circular traffic in the foreground. People are taking their time going around the circle. Even those who are just crossing over seem to not be in a hurry. Richmond is still a southern city. Still wonderfully slow at times.
    I look into the ground glass of my Rollei and watch the headlights cut across the bottom of the frame and think ‘good. That’ll be enough light’.
    I cock the shutter and wait. Waiting for the right set of cars to approach. The exposure will be only be only for a few seconds or so. There’s a car at the light. I open the shutter. The car slowly rounds the statue and leaves the circle. Then another car and another. I wait, countting seconds in my head. 13 one thousand, 14 one thousand, 15 one thousand. I close the shutter. I do this for a few more exposures, but stop after three or four shots and begin to pack up. My heart isn’t really it tonight. I don’t feel like walking up and down Monument Avenue looking at the light and seeking out the shots. Don’t really care about hifalutin Art right now.
    I just want to go back home to The River. I still got a two hour drive ahead of me. I just want to get back home.
    I just don’t want my Dad to die.
    I walk to the rental truck, throw my Rollei and my tripod into the back seat, start up the truck and drive around J.E.B. Stuart myself. I head toward Broad Street and out of Richmond. I head toward the River.
    I throw an Emmylou Harris CD into the truck’s player and my eyes water, as she sings songs about losing love, about missing Elvis, about life’s mysteries and about living life as it fades away.
    I really wish Dad’s wasn’t dying.
    I cry hard without hardly making a sound.

[Images: Death of Self, Emmerton, Virginia” (c)1999
“The Seaweed Spiral: The Rappahannock River, Richmond County, Virginia” © 1999
“The Black Sand Spiral: The Rappahannock River, Richmond County, Virginia” © 1999]

  A beautiful clear August morning at the River.
    I’m sitting on the front porch of my folks’ place, with a cup of coffee at my feet, a cigarette in my hand and the Richmond Times-Dispatch on a chair beside me. A cool breeze is blowing off the river.
    I’m having a first time experience here at the River, these last few days. I have the whole house to myself. The whole river it seems. Mom and Dad are at Stuart Circle Hospital, and I bet Dad is eating his breakfast of cold hospital eggs right about now. His daily dose of Agent Orange is soon to come. Best get ready to go into Richmond, but not quite yet.
    A crabman is in his low slung boat a hundred feet offshore, his right hand on the outboard motor at the stern of the boat, a tall stack of crab traps tied high in the bow. He’s going downriver to drop the traps, I suppose, or maybe just exchange new traps for old. Another drag off my Camel Filter. Another sip of burnt coffee with cream. Life is good.
    The Rappahannock River, or ‘the Riva’, as the locals call it, is a tidal river that is about two miles wide from where I sit, a river that flows from the Appalachian foothills to the Chesapeake Bay, that is fifty miles to the east. Piers stick out from the shore, for fishing, for boating or for just sitting. Reminds me of the old southern joke about a old man who is sitting on his front poach when a passerby yells up to him.
    “What are you doing, old man?” hollars the stranger.
    The old man responses, “Sitting and thinking. Sitting mostly.”
    Allison and Polly Jones live a couple hundred feet upstream on this side of the river. Gladstone and Florence Mothershead live about the same distance, downriver. Allison is a Bullock and Gladstone is a Mothershead. These two families have farmed this part of Virginia since the time of the Revolutionary War. Gladstone’s father sold the old river house to my grandfather back in the 1930’s. My family came up here in the summers when I was a child. I hated it, being a boy of the suburbs. I hated the fleas and the mosquitoes and most of all, I hated having to spend two solid weeks with my distant father, my hyperactive mother and my mean and crazy sister. Thank God, Mama Lillie, my father’s mother, would come up from Richmond from time to time when we were here. A quiet and good hearted woman was Mama Lillie. Made the best sugar cookies in the world. When her husband, the cold and grumpy Papa Edgar died in 1972, Lillie flourished with him gone. When she was dying 10 years later, she was pissed off. It wouldn’t surprise me that the reason she was so anger then, was because she was living her life to the fullest, and now, God damnit, she was dying. To my father’s credit, he took Mama Lillie into his home in Raleigh, N.C. and sat with her every night after dinner, reading the paper, and smoking his cigars. He wasn’t about to put Mama Lillie in a nursing home. No siree.
    The old house at The River is gone now, all except the dining room that is used as a shed , but Mama Lillie and other folks’ ghosts still seem to be around. Mostly though, Stuart and Mary’s energy is here, and I feel blessed this morning, that I can feel their energy without having to actually be around them. I grab my cup of coffee and walk down to the pier. The bank rises up about 15 feet from the river’s surface and weathered wooden stairs lead down to the pier. Dad built that pier with Allison’s help, they sinking the posts all by themselves. Dad was so meticulous that he even built a 1:50 scale moquette of the pier so he would know exact how far apart to put the planks and pylons. I walk to the end of the pier and breath in the morning river air. Small fish break the surface of the river. Dead calm this morning.
    Suddenly out of the corner of my eye, I see a Blue Heron, huge and sleek, flying downstream between me and the river bank. Wings pushing air, slow and hard. When he get to our pier, he rises just a bit so he’ll clear the planks and as he crosses the pier, he turns his head, looks squarely at me and says,
    “Auckkkkk”.
    He then drops back down to river level and continues on his way.

    An hour later I’m on State Route 3, a nice two lane blacktop with high shoulders and wide lanes. The State of Virginia is known for its great secondary roads, and this is definitely one of them. Just pasted through the town of Farnham, Virginia where the nearest Post office to the River house is. Not much in Farnham now except an Episcopal church, a nursing home and an old mom and pop garage. When I was a kid, Farnham had a little more going for it. Wouldn’t exactly call it hopping but back then, there was a small grocery store, a gas station and a Plymouth/Dodge dealership owned by Mr. Self. My dad bought a 1966 Dodge Monaco from Mr. Self. I remember Mr. Self as a very nice man. I think his first name was Ellis, but I never called him that. He was just Mr. Self to me.
    I take the big wide sweeping 90 degree turn into Emmerton, Virginia, ten miles to the east of Farnham. Even less is going on in Emmerton then in Farnham. A small beauty salon that Mom goes to, a Methodist Church, and a large graveyard close to Route 3 is about it for Emmerton. Off to the right on a hill in that graveyard, is a wide substantial black granite gravestone that says just one word:

     “Self”.

     I wonder what relationship that person is to Mr. Self, the Dodge man?

    And then for the first time, I get the joke. The Death of Self.
    After years of driving by this gravestone and seeing the Self family plot, I get the joke.
    I laugh, and say to myself,
    “I gotta come back and shoot this”

[Image: “St. Mary’s Whitechapel Episcopal Church, Lively, Virginia” © 2000

    Craig and Barbara wanted me to come to New York City and shoot their wedding so I arrived by train after leaving my rental truck parked in Poughkeepsie, New York. I took the side trip to Upstate to see the house I lived in at age 8. Almost didn’t find it for the trees on Degamo Hills Road had been growing for 40 years now and had changed the landscape. But I found it, stared at it for a minute or two, and then left and got on a train for New York City. The trip down the Hudson River was grand ,seeing West Point and Yankee Stadium from my window seat.
    I stayed in a Hare Krishna Bed and Breakfast, 'The Sanctuary', in the Lower East Side, in literally a closet with a bunk bed. It was cheap, close to Craig and Barbara’s, and I was taken care of by some of the sweetest people you’d ever met. One great Krishna guy actually went across the street to a bodega and got me a pound of coffee when he found out that I preferred coffee to tea in the morning. And the banana bread that was baked in the restaurant on the first floor was fabulous. I made one mistake however, of asking why The Master is in a Federal Prison in North Carolina. That led to a half hour kong monologue about the Krishna faith, the wonderful Master, the retreat Upstate, the new sculptures that are being built, blah, blah, blah. I smiled and nodded and waited for the Krishna who was telling me this story, to take a breath. He eventually did and I escaped and went outside in the rain to have a smoke. Other than that, I have no complaints. I’ll stay there again. [Note from 2007: Craig told me at Christmas that The Sanctuary is no longer there. Pity]
    The wedding was on a Saturday in an urban garden just a few blocks from their apartment and it was lovely, with Barbara looking beautiful in her wedding dress and Craig looking as happy as I’ve ever seen him. After the exchanging of vows, and the smashing of the glass, the entire wedding party walked a few blocks to the reception at an ancient synagogue south of Houston that now serves as a rental hall. The crowd of good old fashioned liberals was rambunctious and joyous. I shot the reception  with high speed, 3200 ASA black and white with no flash and they were best shots of the whole wedding: grainy sepia images of Craig being carried aloof in a chair. Shots of the mostly smiling families of the bride and groom. Images of trays of home made bagels and lox covering the buffet tables. A klezmer band played modern and ancient tunes. It felt like the years 1900 and 2000 all rolled up into one.
    I left the Krishna B and B on 2nd Avenue two days later, hopped a train, and retrieved my truck from Poughkeepsie. I turned south, drove right through Manhattan,  and eventually got on the New Jersey Turnpike to return to Virginia and my ailing father.
    The chemo of last year and this year, kept the cancer from spreading any farther into my father’s chest, but it did not shrink it. Just sort of held it at bay. And the chemo is taking its toll on Dad. For one week a month, he can have no visitors at The River for his immune system is trashed. A common cold could put him back in the hospital.
    Bottom line: Dad still has cancer, still sick, still probably dying.
    I return on a Wednesday but I’ll be leaving on Saturday. Just a few days to hang with Dad. As usual, he tries to be entertaining and put a good face on everything, and he’s proud of his new bald chemo head. He keeps it covered during the day with a Northern Neck Electric baseball cap but he’ll lift his hat for anyone to see. He’s still piddling in the yard and in his shop. Mom is Mom. No one is talking about the lack of cancer shrinkage. Welcome to my family.
    Tonight I tell Mom and Dad I’m going to the church to shoot.
    “What are you going to take a picture of down there?” My father asks.
    “Not sure. Probably the graveyard” I say.
    Dad chuckles, a bit sarcastically.
    “Well, have a good time,” he says.
    “I’ll try not to wake up the house when I get back home,” I say.
    “See you in the morning.” , he says.
    I walk to the kitchen door. Mom is asleep watching TV in her and Dad’s bedroom.
    “Love you, Dad.”
    “Me too, honey.”

    My parents’ church, St. Mary’s Whitechapel Episcopal Church, is just down the road near the town of Lively, Virginia, known mostly, by the locals, for the bar called The Corner that serves good shrimp and great burgers. The church is south of Lively at a small crossroads. It is a very small chapel that has been there since 1669. It thrived during Colonial Times, was vacant for 50 years during Antidisestablishmentarian times (when the Church of England/Episcopal Church was shunned by Americans after the Revolutionary War), was reborn in the late 19th century, and is now an historic, financially well-endowed little church in the middle of nowhere in Virginia.
    No moon tonight but plenty of light in the graveyard coming from a streetlight near by. The groundsman has apparently cut the grass today. Tons of cuts grass is scattered around. I guess he didn’t have a grass catcher. My good fortune. I walk around the cemetery looking for just the right stone, just the right light. Found it. The smell of the grass is wonderfully strong and pungent. We just don’t have grass like this in Tucson.
    I make a circle of cut grass on the tombstone. I look and find the angle, set up the Rollei, and practice with the Zippo for a few minutes, to get the hang of it. I’m surrounded by very old Oak trees, and the graves of wealthy planters, prominent locals, and a movie star or two. After some practice, I think I know what I’m going to do. I open the shutter and enter the frame to paint a flame circle above the grass. Cicadas are singing loudly from the thick woods. I close the Zippo,  then go for a walk in the cemetery. This is going to be a long exposure, I think to myself. A very long exposure. Only a streetlamp for light.
    Up the hill, are the four plots for the Jenks Family. No markers. No graves yet. Two huge Oak trees grow around the plots. I won’t mind having my ashes here some day, I think. I walk some more around the cemetery. I walk to my rental truck to check the time. Fifteen minutes have gone by. I need more time. I throw in a Peter Gabriel CD and light a smoke. After 25 minutes, I get out of the car, and return the grass circle. I close the shutter and repeat the process. Flame Circle, walkabout the graves, think about Dad, think about Death, think about nothing at all.
    I didn’t think about death much until my Dad got sick, but now I do. I believe in some sort of Soul Survival, be it heaven or just being part of a big ocean of souls. I don’t know, but I’m not scared of dying. Actually looking forward to it. But I’m in my mid 40’s, still thinking that death is a good 30 years away. But being around Dad, who seems to be getting sicker not weller, seems to be dying more than living, and this taking-for-granted that I’m surely going to live a long time is leaving me. When they found his cancer just a year or two ago, it was no bigger than a pencil point. They cut it out, but it came back, larger. They cut it out again from his pectoral muscle, and that just made it mad and it spread. To his lymph nodes. To his lungs. Now it’s in much of his left lung, still growing. All in a year or two. It could happen to me. It could happen to anyone.
    And it’s not Death or Heaven that I’m scared of. It’s living an unfulfilled life, of wasting the time I have, of not fully loving those I love, of being too scared to risk a bigger happiness.
    I’m getting tired. I’ve shot three exposures. I’ll do one more. Open the Rollei’s shutter, make the flame circle above the grass circle. Go back to the car. Have a smoke. Soak in the Cicada sounds. Smell the cut grass.
    And think of the Ocean of Souls on the other side, and hoping that I get to swim there some day.

[Image: “Dad’s Fading” © 2001]

    Dad doesn’t leave the house much anymore.
    “He sometimes goes outside but he rarely stays out.” Mom says. “It’s like he’s giving up”.
    It hasn’t gone well the past few months. They can’t give Dad the Agent Orange anymore. He’s gone to John Hopkins in Baltimore and they’ve put him on experimental cancer therapy which consists of taking Thalidomide pills.
    “We’re running out of options” Dr. Evers says, my father’s oncologist. My Dad calls him Medger after the civil rights leader. I don’t think it’s a compliment.
    There is one more last ditch treatment. Another experimental procedure where they pump in a caustic chemical cocktail right into his chest. He has to be under anesthesia for this and be monitored closely while they pump in the chemicals. Very experimental. Very risky. Last Hope. We’re schedule to go into the hospital in a couple of days. I just arrived tonight from Tucson.
    Dad is sitting in front of his mini-TV in the living room. He has on the headphones to listen to it, for if he has the regular TV speaker on, it would blast us out. Dad's been losing his hearing for years.
    He just sitting there, watching the TV. Some of his hair has grown back but not much. I’ve walked out onto the porch, then to the kitchen, then upstairs to my bedroom, a number of times throughout the evening. I pass Dad each time, but after his first hand wave of the night, Dad doesn’t look up from the TV. He doesn’t look like he’s paying much attention to the TV really. Almost like he’s looking past it, to something I can't see but only he can.
    Without him knowing, I place my pinhole camera on a table in the living room, say hello, and then go outside to sit on the pier in the dark. A half hour later, I come back up to the house and Dad is still sitting where I left him. I grab the pinhole, place my hand over the hole and take it upstairs to my bedroom. I close the shutter once I’m upstairs.
    I walk back downstairs to get a snack. I wave at him. He waves back. He goes back to looking at the tube and at something ten feet beyond it.

[Image: “Route 626, Virginia” © 2001]

    The next day, I take a break from the gloomy house and head out for a drive around the Northern Neck. The Northern Neck is a four county area that is bordered by the Rappahannock River to the South, the Potomac River to the North and the Chesapeake Bay to the East. From where my parents live, there are only two ways off the Neck: upriver, a half hour on Route 3, at the town of Tappahannock, where you cross the river to go to Richmond, and down river, a hour on Route 3, the other way, at the bridge at White Stone, where you cross to go to Norfolk. When a bark robbery happens in our part of the Neck, at Warsaw, or Killmanock, and the like, and they happen to obtain a description of the getaway car, they just put a cop car at The Tappahannock Bridge and another car at The White Stone Bridge, and wait and watch. 9 times out of 10, they catch the robbers that way.
    Throughout this section of Virginia, oak and elm trees often make a canopy over the two lane blacktops, as the roads cut right through the forests. In certain areas, the two lane is narrow and straight and that is the kind of road I’m hunting for today.
    An hour and a half later, a long way from home, in Northumberland County, I discovery Rt. 626. Straight as straight can be. No traffic. The oaks, and elms are creating a vaulted ceiling of branches and leaves. It reminds be of a Medieval cathedral. As I get out of the car with my camera, I hear that Eastern American sound of winds blowing many leaves on many trees. We hear that sound out West, but not with the volume of this many leaves on this many hardwood trees. My Rollei is loaded with Black and White Infrared film. This film photographs heat not light, and hot things look white and cool things look black. Leaves are hot things and they will be white. At least they should be. Photography is a mysterious and imperfect science.
    I set up the tripod and camera on the center line. I put a very dark red filter on my twin lens reflex. I take out my handheld light meter, take a reading and estimate the exposure time as best I can. Shooting Infrared is tricky, so I’ll bracken a number of exposure, two under exposed, two over exposed, one on the numbers. I focus 2/3s to infinity and set the f stop at f22. Maximum depth of field. I click off exposures ranging from 1 second to 15 seconds. Takes a number of minutes. Just me and the blacktop, and the oaks and the elms.
    Then off in the distance, up the road, I think I hear a car. Yes, sounds like maybe a truck. The sound of the engine slowly builds. I leisurely take the camera off the double yellow line and place it on the shoulder near the rear bumper of my rental car. I look up the straight road. No truck yet. Finally, a pickup truck rounds the corner a half mile down the road and a few minutes later, it passes me by. A few minutes after that, I can’t hear the sound of its engine anymore.
    I look up and listen again to the early summer breeze blowing through the trees. Lovely. In spite of everything going with Dad, being on the Northern Neck in May, in late spring/early summer is very lovely and truly timeless. On a road like this, if you take away the blacktop, I could be in Colonial Times. Riding and driving a horse drawn wagon, a white man on my way to church or a black slave man, on my way to the fields.
    In the 1600’s, Rich white men, planters and their families, lived along the river and poor blacks, men, women and children, lived inland beside the fields or in the forests.
    In 2001, Rich white men and women, retired folk from D.C., and Richmond, live along the river, and poor working class black people, live inland in trailers and old clapboard houses.
    Things haven’t changed all that much in 300 years.

   [Image: “The Oracle Cairn, Oracle, Arizona” ©  2001]

    I’m depressed. I can feel it.
    The mountain bike ride down this part of the Arizona trail, north of Oracle, hasn’t helped. Drawing this chalk spiral on a megalith of conglomarate rock hasn’t eased the feeling much either. I thought it would, but it hasn’t.
    I’m not sure why I’m so depressed these days, but I’ve got a feeling it has to do with my Dad dying a slow death from Cancer. Helpless to do much of anything except call Dad on Sundays and talk about the NASCAR race that day. He’s putting on a good face, but we all know he’s dying.
    So I draw a spiral on a cairn rock and try and think positively of the cycle of Birth, Death and Rebirth.
    Who am I kidding?
    As Dad has said for years ‘You don’t shit anyone like you shit yourself.’
    Ain’t that the truth.

   [Image: “Stuart and Mary Jenks” © 2001]

    Mary just left the hospital room to talk with a nurse, her eyes still puffy from crying.
    Stuart is sitting in a chair, next to his bed, reading the paper.
    I’m thinking about going outside to have a smoke.
    It’s raining.
    The news has not been good.

    A few hours ago, Dad was wheeled to a small operating room to have the procedure done on his chest, but when the surgeon read the x-rays, he found that the cancer had spread and he didn’t even bother to open him up. Both lungs, around his heart, beginning to go down his left arm. A lot of Cancer. The doctor simply stitched up the small incision, and came out to see Mom and I in the waiting area. As soon as he came out to see us, I knew something was up.
    “Mrs. Jenks, performing the procedure on Stuart will only make him uncomfortable. We didn’t do the procedure. I’m sorry. There is nothing more we can do. Just make Stuart as comfortable as you can.”, said the doctor.
    “Oh God” said Mom, beginning to cry.
    “How long does he have, Doc?” I said.
    “I can’t really say.” The surgeon looked nervous at that question.
    “Ballpark, Doc. I’m not going to hold you to it.”
     “Could be three months. Could be a year.” He said.
    I sensed three months was closer to the truth.
    “What can we do?” Mom said through her tears.
    “Just make him comfortable. And you all can go home tomorrow. I’m sorry, Mrs. Jenks” he said. He looked very sad that he couldn’t do more, for Stuart, for Mary, for me. 
    “Thanks Doc for all that you did” I said.
    We sat there for a few more minutes, asking the same questions over and over, the doctor giving the same answers. How long does Dad have to live? What can we doing? Thanking him for trying. Eventually the surgeon quietly rose and left and Mom and I just sat in the overstuffed chairs, not saying much.
    “Mom, are you alright? I’m going out for a smoke. You be OK for a few minutes?” I said
    “I’m OK, son. Go ahead”
    “I’ll be right back”
    I go down a flight of stairs and exit the hospital and stand in the front, under an awning. I light a Camel. It’s misting, just beginning to rain. I then begin to cry. I look around to see if anyone is walking up to the entrance. No. I allow myself to cry a little harder.
    “Well, that’s it.” I whisper to myself.
    “That’s it. Damn.”

    Back up in the hospital room Dad and I are alone. Mary is still out in the hall doing something. Stuart has been given the bad news by now that the cancer has spread and there is no more that can they can do. He smiled a little and nodded a lot to the surgeon. He, as Mary and I had done, thanked the doctor for trying. Then after the doctor left, we just talked about when we would go back to the River. No talk about dying in a few months. Just when we would leave Richmond again.
    So it’s just Stu and Stuart, with Mary soon to return.
    Then Dad surprised me by saying,
    “Stu, I need to talk with you.”
    I know all the blood drained from my face. What in God’s name did Dad need to talk with me about? He usually avoids all heavy discussions, but then again, he’s dying now. Is he going to ask if I’ll take care of Mom? Does he have some words of wisdom for me to live by (which would be a first)? Is he angry at me for something? What?
    “You want to talk now?” I say.
    “Just a little later,” He says, “I’ll let your mother know that I want to talk with you.”
    “OK.”
    Mary comes back and Dad mention that he wants to talk with Stu alone for just a few minutes. Mom looks a little nervous. She hates being left out.
    “All right,” say Mom, “I’ll go down to the cafeteria and get a little something to eat”
    “We won’t be long, Mary.” Dad says.
    After Mom leaves, Dad says.
    “I just have two things to tell you.”
    I’m hardly breathing.
    “One, you know the Huckster Wagon? Well, your mother tells me you want to have it.”
    “Yea, I do”  I say.
    [The Huckster Wagon is the Model A Ford Pickup Truck my father rebuilt with care and love a number of years ago. A beautiful tan four cylinder vehicle. I imagine myself driving it on dusty desert roads in Arizona with Annie by my side. Dad put it up on blocks in Raleigh ten plus years ago before he moved up to Virginia to retire.]
    “I’ll be happy to sign over the title to you, son. That’s no problem, but don’t hang on to it on my account. It may be more trouble to you then it’s worth. You got to get it out to Arizona and then you’ll have it garaged. It’s sort of like that joke about the two happiest days when you own a boat. The day you buy it and the day you sell it.”
    I laugh.
    “Don’t worry.” I tell Dad, “I won’t keep it just because of you, but I would like to have it”
    “All right.” he says. “Before you leave to go back to Tucson, we’ll go up to the Post Office in Farnham, and have the title signed over to you and notarized. How’s that sound?”
    “Sounds good to me”
    “Second time,” Dad continues, “is don’t take any shit from your sister!”
    I laugh even louder this time.
    “You know, Pamela is such a selfish….well, anyway….just don’t take any shit from her.”
    Smiling I say, “Thanks Dad. No, no….I won’t take any shit from her.”
    “Good” He says.
    That was it. No deep revelation from God that he received in a dream. No words of reprimand for things done or undone. No apologies for past actions. Just don’t keep the Huckster simply in memory of me, and don’t take any crap from your sister.
    Then again, those are pretty powerful words of wisdom. I only regret that he hadn’t given me the green light on Pamela about 30 years ago.

    I’m going home to Tucson tomorrow. We are all back at The River house this afternoon. We are all exhausted. As I go upstairs to my bedroom to start to pack for my flight in the morning, I notice my mother and father sleeping together in the other guest room. I tiptoe to get my 35 mm and come back to the door. Shutter. Focus. Click. Click again. Then a third exposure. They don’t wake up. Mom snuggling up to Dad. Dad on his back, his foot on the bed rail. The comfort of being married over 50 years.
    And now I look at Dad and he does look old. He is 79. He looks older that that. He is dying.
    I quietly turn and go back to my guest room, and put the camera away.
    I sigh and wipe away a tear.
    I’ve always been someone who cries easily. Hell, I even cry at Saturn Car commercial. But now? I seem to cry all the time.
    I have a reason to cry.

   [Image: “The Pine Forest Spiral, Virginia” © 2001]

    I got the call on late Saturday night.
    “Stu, It’s time. You need to come now.” Mom said.
    On Monday, I told work I needed to go.
    On Tuesday I was on a plane
    On Tuesday night, I drove up Route 3, took a right on State Road 608, drove through Mothershead Neck, and up the drive to the River House. My sister’s car was there. The lights were all on in the house. It was after 10.
    I walked into the house and went straight to my Dad’s room.
    “Well Stuart, look who’s here?” Mom says.
    My dad is in bed, lying flat, his eyes closed.
    I grab my Dad’s hand.
    “Hey Dad, how are you doing?”
    Dad opens his eyes
    “Well hey there son. Glad….well…..glad you’re here.”
    “Me too, Dad. You hangin’ in?”
    “Yep. How was your flight?”
    “It was OK.”
    He is noticeably smaller in the legs and arms then he was, three months ago. His left arm is quite swollen though, and above his left pectoral muscle is a large bandage that cover a cancerous growth as big as your fist.
    “Well, I’m going to get my bags out of  the car” I say.
    “Oh…Ok”. He squeezes my hand and I squeeze back and then I release it. I look up from Dad and look at my sister and my mother. They look wiped out. I turn and go outside to get my bags.
    It’s the first week in August, 2001.
    I’m home with my Dad.

    Hospice consists of Myself, Mary and Pamela, and that’s it.  A nurse comes to the house every other day to change Stuart’s chest bandage, but she leaves soon after doing that. Mom says Dad doesn’t want hospice, but I think she doesn’t want strangers in the house either. So it’s just the three of us. Pamela and I trade shifts on who will get up in the middle of the night and lift Dad if he needs lifting, to change his diapers or change wet sheets or to help Mom somehow. On nights when it is my turn, I’m up after Mary’s yells for me to come down. Every time she yells ‘Stu!’, I listen to the tone in her voice to see if it is an emergency, or just another time to help lift and clean him up.
    Dad is pretty cool about all of us seeing him naked as Mom changes the sheet if his diaper leaked or if he just needs lifting. For the days to come, there is a lot of lifting Dad up and onto a step off the bed and into the Lazy Boy next to his bed and back up again and back into the bed. A lot of scooting him up in the bed. A lot of feeding him by hand. A lot of giving Dad Gatorade. A lot of us just sitting with him during the day while he sleeps. None of us sleep well except Dad. All of us are exhausted after a week. No Hospice is a fucked up idea if you ask me. Whose idea was this anyway? But I’m here to do what needs to be done.
    There have only been a few times in my life when I knew I was in the right place, doing the right things with the right people at the right time. Being here, now, with my Dad was one of those times.   
    A baby monitor is on in my Dad’s room when he is sleeping so we can hear him when we are in the kitchen or in the living room. When I go outside to the pier to take a break, I take a walkie talkie with me if I’m needed suddenly. Usually I get buzzed at the pier to come help lift Dad in or out of bed, but there is another call I may get, that I hope I never get.
    For Dad’s cancer has spread and has surrounded his heart and his coronary arteries. There is a possibility, we have been told ,that Dad may die by having one of his arteries rupture and he'll then bleed out. If that happens, blood will fly out of his mouth and nose under huge pressure, spraying the room, and he will be dead within seconds. We have placed bath towels all around the room to place over his mouth and face if he starts bleeding out. This is our worst fear. We pray he dies in his sleep.
    Every time the walkie talkie gets keyed and I hear Mom’s voice, I’m wonder if Dad is spraying blood. So far, no blood bath.
    This morning, I’ve gone to the little forest of trees that my dad planted 15 years ago, a tiny pine forest next to the house. They were little seedlings less than a foot tall back when he planted them. Now they are twenty foot tall pines, all equal distance apart, all in neat rows. Just like my Dad to be so precise about the planting. A thick bed of needles covers the forest floor. I walk through his forest, myself smelling of Deet. (I’ve been bathing in bug repellent since I arrived. Part of being home is I’m new fresh meat to the mosquitoes). It is a beautiful place. A wonderful gift my father has given to the Earth. He didn’t have those kind of noble thoughts when he planted those trees, but it’s true just the same.
    And as I walk, I see a space inbetween some of the trees. I reach down and touch the pine needles. I have an idea.
    I bend over and begin to form a ridge in the pine needles with my hands and I slowly walk backwards as I fluff the needles, making a spiral on the forest floor. It takes a little while to get it right. Precise. Just like my father’s forest. I am my father’s son.
    After I’m done, I walk into the spiral and walk out again. Spiral in, spiral out. A gift for my Dad. I’ll photograph it in a few days, but not right now.
    As I stand there, I pray to God to give my Dad a good death. A death without exploding arteries and gushing blood. A death with some peace and with little pain. A death that won’t hurt him or us.
    “Please, God, if you could do that, I would be so grateful.” I quietly say out loud, to the trees, to myself, to God.
    I then walk into the old shed/dining room in search of an offering for the spiral. I find it right away. I walk back outside to the Pine Forest Spiral and place my prayer offering in the very center.
    An 40 year old solid wood croquet ball with a red stripe around it.

[Image: “Allison Jones” © 2001]

    I’ve been here 10 days now. Dad is still talking but sleeping a lot. I’ve worked on my eulogy. A good page or two. Thought I should work on it now, while I have the time. Been doing a little fishing, too, off the pier. Even set a crab trap.
    Mom, Pamela and I are getting along as well as can be expected. Pamela and I don’t like each other very much. Pamela drinks a lot, barely works, and can be as mean as a snake. Myself, I don’t drink or do drugs anymore, I work at a job that give me money to do art, yet saps my energy some, and even though I’m a Scorpio who can sting you quickly without due cause, I try and look on the bright side of life, and not hurt people too much. I can be very hurtful with my words. No mistake about that. I’m working on it.
    Mary is really stressed out. Mom is aware that Dad is dying, but when she gets anxious or frightened, she tends to try and control things even more than she normally does. Over the past number of days, she has been trying to control how Dad is dying. She isn’t listening to Dad when he expresses his annoyance with her fluffing of his pillows that are fine to him, or moving him around when he just wants to lay still. When I’m watching Mary do this, I want to literally grab her and stop her. Give him everything he wants, Mom, I think. Leave him the fuck alone. Christ, he’s the one who’s dying, Mom, I think to myself. But I keep my mouth shut mostly, with just occasional subtle hints toward letting Dad be. These hints are not picked up on though. But to Mom’s credit, she is here to feed and take care of Dad, to change his diapers,  to give him liquids, to sleep beside him at night, loving him as he dies. My mother has not abandoned my father to die alone.
    Even Pamela is being helpful. She’s hasn’t drank since I got here, at least it appears she has been sober (and when she’s ‘in her cups’, it’s very obvious that’s she drunk, by the extreme slurring of her words). She's been there for all of the middle-of-the-night lifting of Dad sessions. She's been going on errands to town for Mom, just like I have. She is doing pretty great actually.
    Funny. All four of us are not really that close normally, but we have pulled together to help Dad die. I don’t expect it to last much after his death though. And not to toot our own horns too much, but we are helping a father and a husband, respectively, who doesn’t like any of the three of us very much.
    Stuart wishes he had married someone else, it appears, by his annual ( and now often ) statements that he has been married 50 plus years to the wrong woman. When he says this, my mother’s heart just breaks. You can actually see it on her face, the breaking. She is still in love with the man.
    Stuart has had great disdain for his daughter ever since she returned from a trip to England in the 70’s where she learned how to cuss. Her sporadic employment history, and her sense of entitlement over the years haven’t helped Dad come around to liking her anymore either. Add to that, that I don’t think Stuart likes women very much to begin with, so she is screwed no matter how much she tries to make Dad like her. And she does try. To a fault.
    And Stuart and I? I was never the son he wanted. I was an overly sensitive child, a creative odd duck who wasn’t interested in sports, or cars, and guy stuff as a teenager, and who, in college, became a major stoner and eventually got a BFA in Studio Art. But both of us in the past 15 years have tried to reach across the divide. He does encourage and respect that I’m clean and sober now. He does know that I’m working at a job I don’t like that much, and he likes that. Perhaps its because he worked his whole life at jobs he hated. And even though he doesn’t like me, I have always known that he loves me. Ever since college, when he would say ‘I love you’ as he walked me to my Karman Ghia in front of the Raleigh house on Sunday nights, when I was preparing to drive back to school at Chapel Hill. He still tells me he loves me, and I do tell him too. I do love him. Now though, he is weak. He used to initiate the I Love Yous, but rarely now. It’s usually just a ‘Me too Honey’ after I tell him that I love him. But that’s fine. Perfectly OK with me.
    One of the hardest times for me these past few days is when Tommy Kellem comes to visit. Tommy is an ex-football player, now a construction contractor in his 30’s, who has a weekend home done the road, and who Dad has bonded with over the past few years. I see Dad brighten up when Tommy comes into the room, and I’m terribly jealous for I’ve never seen that look on my Dad’s face for me. I get so envious some times I have to leave the room when Tommy is here. I guess some things I haven’t let go of yet, eh?
    Actually, it seems that Dad is quite happy to see me when I come into his room, and that does feel very good. Not Tommy happy, but happy. Mom is really happy to have me here too, and Pamela seems glad as well. Weird, huh?.
    Tommy isn’t the only visitor to come to see Dad over the past few weeks. Others have come but Mary is a firm gate keeper for Dad, which I'm glad she does. Sometimes controlling behavior has an up side. None of us like the acquaintances from Mothershead Neck who are not close to our family but who seem to want to come by and see Stuart Jenks die. Mom is polite on the phone saying that it isn’t a good time to come, and if they drive up, she cuts them off at the front porch and won’t let them in the house. Way to go, Mom.
    But there are people from Mothershead Neck and from church and Dad’s childhood, that are greeted with warm hugs or gentle grabs of the shoulder. There is Harwood Junior, my Dad’s cousin and best friend from childhood in Richmond, who has visited some but not too much, and Dad really loves Harwood Junior. There is Neil Smart, a friend of my folks from down river, who seems to appreciate Father’s humor, and seems to be a good soul himself. There is Victoria, a good friend of my mother, who cleans the house once a week. Of late, she doesn’t clean much but just uses the weekly visit to see Mary and Stuart, and give her love. She is a large but short black woman with a huge laugh that can fill a house and a heart that is bigger than both her body and her laugh. A true pearl of the River.
    There are our neighbors to the east, Gladstone and Florence Mothershead, who Stuart has known for over sixty years.
    One day when my sister and my mother are just too tired to cook, Gladstone happens to drop by. He doesn’t want to go into the bedroom and see Stuart. Just came to say hello to us. He stays outside on the lawn, out of respect. He has lived here on Mothershead Neck his entire life and wishes to live no where else. He is a very funny man and a deacon at the Farnham Baptist Church.
    Pamela comes rushing out and says to him, “Gladstone, can we give you this raw chicken to take to Florence to cook?” Florence is a wonderful cook. Everyone knows this. And she is a gentle loving women who also loves our family.
    “Sure,” says Gladstone, “Would you all like anything else? Florence’ll be happy to cook you all something to go with that chicken.”
    “No,” Pamela says “Just the chicken will be fine. It’ll be really great if Florence would do that. That’s won’t be problem, will it?”
    “Oh, I’m sure it’ll be no problem. When do you want it back,” Gladstone smiles.
    Mary says “ How about around 7?”
    Gladstone take the chicken in the grocery bag from Pamela’s hands and begin to walk to his car.    
  “See you around 7.” Gladstone gets in his car and drives down the drive. It’s about 4:30 or so.
    At just before 7, Gladstone arrives again saying, “Well, Florence made a few more things for y’all.”
    He walks into our house and crosses to the kitchen counter, his arms full. He places the bounty on the counter.
    There is the chicken, cooked and hot. There is a plate of freshly baked biscuits with paper thin Smithfield Ham inside. There is a casserole dish of fresh corn pudding. There is a bowl of fresh cooked butter beans from their garden, with pools of butter on top. And hiding under a sheet of aluminum foil is a freshly baked lemon meringue pie, so hot that the meringue is slipping off the top.
    Mary, Pamela and I are speechless. Mary breaks the silence.
    “My lord, Gladstone. What has Florence done? This is wonderful,”  she says.
    “Well, she was cooking dinner for us. It was no trouble to make a little more.”
    We all knew that is a lie, that Florence went to great effort to make all this food, and none of the four of us are going to expose that truth. I still couldn’t speak. I was just bending over the counter, putting my nose in the butter beans, the biscuits, the pie.
    I’ve died and gone to heaven.
    And then there is Allison Jones.
    Allison Jones is possibly one of the sweetest, most kind hearted men I have ever met. I liked Allison the moment I meet him years ago, and I love him now.
    Allison lives just up river with Polly his wife. He is retired and about 10 years younger than my Dad. He splits his time between Florida in the winter, and The River in the summer. He’s a Bullock and he has lived on Motherhead Neck his whole life.
    [There are three types of people at the River: ‘Been heres’, ‘Come heres’, and ‘Come back heres’. ‘Been heres’ are Allison, Polly, Gladstone, Florence, Victoria, and many others. ‘Come heres’ are Neil Smart, Scott, a priest friend of Mary’s, Al, the Iranian-American from D.C. who built a house near by (who Dad by the way, hates), and others. And ‘Come back heres’, are Stuart and Mary Jenks, since they have had roots at the River for most of their lives and have returned.]
    Allison truly loves my father and considers him one of his best friends. Most mornings these days he comes by to bring fresh cantaloupe from his two acre garden for Stuart to eat. Mary has told Allison that Stuart loves the melons and he brings them as soon as they are ripe.      
    “Hey Stuart, how are you this mornin’?” He would say as he peaks his head around the corner into Dad’s room.
    “Oh, I’m hanging in.” Stuart would reply.
    “Well, Good, Good…..I just dropped off some more cantaloupe for ya. Well, I won’t keep ya. I’ll see ya later.”
    Allison would leave the room each time, and there would be a huge sadness in his eyes. A sadness as large as mine.
    Just a few days ago, the power went out from a large thunderstorm. Dad is on oxygen but it is an electric pump, and Allison knew that (but he didn’t know that we had a 4 hour manual back up tank). Pamela was on the phone with Northern Neck Electric, trying to convince them to put us as a high priority since Dad is on oxygen. Mary and Pamela are pretty nervous. I’m doing ok, knowing we have the back up. Also, no matter how cruel it sounds, the goal here is to have Dad die comfortably, not prolong his life even longer. I just don’t get why we seem to be trying to keep Dad alive.
    The power went out at 12:30 a.m. and at 12:40 a.m., in the hard rain, Allison drives up our driveway in his white Cadillac. He gets out of the car, and runs to the front porch where all three of us are standing, with flashlights in our hands.
    “I saw your power went out. Mine too” Allison says, “I know that Stuart is on oxygen. Bobby down the road has a gas generator in his garage. I can go get right quick. You all want me to go get it? I just need to call him and get the key to his garage”
    “No, Allison, we’re fine. We have a back up tank that’ll last about 4 hours. But if the power doesn’t come back soon, we’ll give you a call.” Mary says.
    “Y’all do that. I can get it here real quick. I just need to call Bobby.  I don’t mind.” Allison says. 
    “Yea, we’ll call you if the power doesn’t come on. Thanks so much Allison. We really appreciate you thinking of us” I say.
    “OK, now don’t hesitate to call. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He gets back in his Cadillac, backs up and drive away. Still raining like hell. Lightning flashing all around
    “Can you believe Allison?” My mother says with a smile
    “Go, Allison.” My sister says with a loud laugh.
    “Man” I say. “What a guy.”

[Image: “Stu and Stuart Sleeping” © 2001]

    I’m tired. Mom’s tired. Pamela’s tired.
    We’re all toast.
    A couple of weeks ago, the three of us were overlooking our differences so we could help Dad. Now, due to sleeplessness, grief, anger, fear, exhaustion and simply being in close proximity with each other for too long, the wheels are beginning to come off our my little red wagons. Two nights ago, I got in my sister’s face about something. Was it her selfishness? Shit, I can’t even remember what it was and it was just a couple of days ago.  And I’m trying, God knows I’m trying, not to read my Mom the riot act, for how she wants Dad to behave during his last days on earth. ‘Wake up Stuart drink this!’ ‘You need to be higher in the bed!’ ‘Here, eat some cantaloupe!’ I can’t hold my tongue much longer. Even Dad a few times has said to Mom ‘Mary, Please. Stop.’
    Then Dad did something unexpected on Thursday. I’m standing in the living room, when Mom comes out from the bedroom in tears.
    “What’s the matter. Mom” I say.
    “Look what Stuart did.”
    Mom hands me a card and an envelope. I open it. It’s a birthday card to Mary from Stuart. It’s middle of August now. Her birthday isn’t until Halloween. Mom usually has words. She doesn’t now. She’s just crying softly. I place my hand on her shoulder. I’m tearing up myself. We know what this means. It means Dad knows he doesn’t have much longer to live and he wants to make sure Mom gets her birthday card. Mary and I just stand there in the living room. Mom is crying. So am I.
    We almost accidentally killed Dad the other day by giving him too much morphine. That was fun. His respiration was done to 4 breaths per minute. We thought he was just getting close to dying, but then Mom called the doctor about Stuart’s lack of breathing and he suggested that we actually increase the dosage. Mom didn’t like that idea and decided to go the other way and took Dad off the Morphine all together. She just keep him on the Oxycodone. An hour and a half, Dad comes back to life, thirsty, hungry and breathing just fine. Oops. We all laughed. Sure we would have felt terrible if we had killed Dad, but then again the goal here is for him to die. Still, he’s sleeping almost around the clock now, morphine or no morphine.

    I’m just now getting back to the River house after having gone in town for a piece of Plexiglas.         
    It’s the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. I walk in the back door and enter the kitchen and I notice something different right away. First, the door to Dad’s bedroom is closed. We never close his door. Second, the baby monitor in the living room is off. It’s always on. And lastly Mary and Pamela are watching TV in the daytime. I put down the shopping bag and look around. What’s up? I think.
    I walk over to Pamela and Mary and ask.
    “Oh, I can’t stand it. I can’t stand the sounds he’s making” Mary says.
    Pamela doesn’t say anything. Just looks at the TV.
    “What sound? “ I say. He wasn’t making any noise when I left this morning.
    “This horrible groaning. Hauuuuuu. Hauuuuu. Hauuuuuu.” My mother imitates the sound.
    “Really? I’ll be right back.” I walk out of the living room and enter my Dad’s bedroom.
    Sure enough, he is moaning loud and hard. A deep moan, then a pause, another deep moan and a pause, over and over again. I look at Dad in the bed and pump my fist slightly. Right on, Dad. Making the final push. You can do it. I felt like I was cheering on a marathon runner as he runs to the finish line. The Big Moaning was a great sound to me. I leave his room and go to the Living Room.
    “This is good,” I say, “He’s making the final push. This is a good thing.”
    “ I just can’t stand it. I hate that sound.” Mom says.
    Later, in the afternoon, I go to just sit with Dad. Him in bed, me in the Lazy boy.             Throughout the past weeks, I’ve often just gone in and sat in that chair. It’s an odd duality of feeling uncomfortable being there, and feeling like I’m in the perfect place, all at the same time. The beauty of just being there for Stuart. Not doing, mostly. Just being. Being his son by his side.
    The moaning has quieted a little but he’s still making sounds. A little while ago we could hear loud music coming from a neighbor up river. No one we are close to. Just a weekend neighbor. It is Labor Day weekend though and parties are to be expected.
    Pamela said “I’ll take care of it.”
    Pamela’s ability to be mean as spit comes in handy sometimes.
    A few minutes later, the music is suddenly softer and a couple more minutes, Pamela walks up on the poach.
    “What did you say to them?” I ask.
    “ I just went up them and said ‘Excuse me, we live next door and my father is dying of cancer right now, so could you please turn down the stereo. He can use the quiet. Thanks. We’d really appreciate it.’ Pamela said.
    We didn’t hear a peep out of those neighbors for the rest of the weekend.

    Sun going down on Saturday. I walk in to see Dad. Sleeping. Still. Quiet.
    I take out the pinhole camera that he made for me a few Christmas’ back. I place it on top of the TV in his bedroom. A TV that hasn’t been turn on, since I arrive almost a month ago. I open the shutter and I go and sit in the Lazyboy. Dad’s breathing slowly. I’m tired. Next thing I know it’s been 45 minutes and I’ve been asleep. I stand up and close the shutter to the pinhole camera. Just one exposure. Just an experiment. Probably won’t come out. I go back to the Lazyboy and sit again.
    In a little bit, Mom will call me for dinner. I close my eyes again. Not asleep but just on the edge of sleep. Dad continues to breathe.
    Slowly with a rattle.

[Images: “Blue Crab Spiral, Virginia” © 2001
“The Pier Spiral: The Rappahannock River, Richmond County, Virginia” © 1999]

    Fuck.
    The last thing I wanted to do was get into a fight with Mom. Words like ‘Fucking Martyr’ and ‘Stop trying to control how Dad is dying, god damn it’ came out of my mouth.
    Fuck.
    While I was yelling at Mom, Pamela was in with Dad, quietly singing to him.
    Now, the fight is over.
    Pamela is on the porch swing out front.
    Mom is at the kitchen sink, crying.
    I feel like shit.
    I go into see Dad who hasn’t been awake since yesterday.
    “Dad, I’m sorry,” I say to the unconscious man, “I’m trying to get along with your wife but it is hard. I’m trying. Again, I’m sorry, Dad.”
    I go out to the kitchen.
    “Mom, I’m sorry.”
    “Just leave me alone, Ok?” she says through her tears.
    I touch her shoulder. She cowers away.
    “I’m really sorry, Mom.” She doesn’t say anything. She just moves away from me.
    I can’t feel much worse. Much guiltier. This was the last thing I wanted to do, to scream at Mom right now.
    Fuck me.
    I go out on the porch and talk with Pamela for a while.
    Time passes. A couple of hours I guess. Quiet. Mom has gone into the bedroom. I think she’s gone to bed. I’m back out with Pamela on the front porch. Just talking some. Smoking cigarettes.
    Then Mary comes out to the porch.
    “He’s gone” she says, “It was so beautiful. He just stopped breathing. So quietly. so peacefully.”
    “Are you sure?” I say. I’m thinking selfishly, ‘oh, Dad, not tonight, not after I’ve had a big fight with your wife.’
    We all go into the bedroom. Not much different than other times, but it appears Dad isn’t breathing at all. I place my hand to his nose and feel some air coming out.
    “Mom, I think he’s still breathing”
    “He’s gone.”
    I bend down closer to him and realize that his skin is beginning to change color. I ask for a mirror and put it under his nose. Nothing. He’s getting whiter. Then I know he is dead.
    “Remember Stu, what you said. That we need to open the window to let the soul out?” Mary says.
    “I’ll do it” Pamela says.
    I said this window/soul thing over a dozen years ago. It was just a bit of conversation, filling space as I recall. I think I was reading a bunch of Tony Hillerman novels at the time. I don’t really thing Dad’s soul will get trapped, but I say nothing as Pamela opens one of the bedroom windows. Then I open another window just so they think I’m playing along. I’m really in shock right now. Dad’s dead. Dad is dead.
    Mom then says it’s time to dress Stuart. I’ve been dreading this moment since the day Mom told me that she wanted Pamela and I to help her dress Stuart in his favorite shirt and his favorite kakei pants after he dies. I thought it would be difficult to manhandle him, both physically and emotionally. But after being  such an asshole myself just hours before with my mother, I’m not about to object.
    Pamela is at his head. Mary and I are on either side of Stuart. We take off his nightshirt and make him naked. We grab his pants and pull then on, him still lying on the bed. We have to pull hard to get them to his waist. And at that moment, it all felt right. Like we were performing a ritual that has been done for centuries: The dressing of the dead for passage to the other side.         

   Pamela held Stuart’s head and we pull him up into a sitting position and Mary and I put on his favorite plaid Dockers shirt. We gently lay him back down. Mom buckles his belt. I’m standing next to Dad holding his hand. Cold. Slack. A lifeless hand. But still my Daddy’s hand. Mom leaves the room to call the minister, the nurse and the undertakers. Pamela stays a bit longer in the room, then leaves.         
    Just me and Dad now.
    I whisper to his body with tears in my eyes.
    “I’m so sorry Dad about getting into a fight with Mom. I’m so so sorry. If I could go back…..” I trail off, still crying.
    Scott, the priest at St. Mary’s Whitechapel is the first to arrive. The nurse and her husband are next. The undertakers have to come from Richmond so I’d be an hour plus before they get here. It’s after midnight now. Dad died a little after 11. Everyone except me in on the screened-in porch making small talk. I was there for a minute or two but it felt a little disrespectful somehow. I kept thinking ‘My father is dead in the other room and we’re talking about the weather?’ I seem to be going back into Dad’s room a lot, holding his hand, watching him change color from red to pink to white. I can’t help but wonder if he really is dead even though I know he is. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that Dad is truly gone. And also, I know the undertakers are coming and I only have a few more opportunities to hold his hand. I want to hold his hand forever.
    I’m in the kitchen getting a soda when the nurse comes up and says:
    “Stu, you planning on being in the room when they take your Dad out on a stretcher?”
    “I might” I say.
    “I would really suggest you not be there for that. All you’ll remember is seeing him put in the bag. That memory will overshadow all the rest. You may want to go upstairs or go outside when they come.”
    Pamela walks in on the conversation and is getting the gist.
    “I’ll go up stairs” She says.
    “I’m going to the pier” I say.
    The next hour is weird. More small talk. Me drifting from Dad’s hands to the outside to smoke a cig to back to Dad’s hands. At one point, the nurse’s husband comes up to me and talks with me. I don’t have a clue what he said.
    Finally at around 1:30 a.m., a hearst comes up the drive and two men enter our kitchen. One is a very skinny man with a huge black suit, that fits him like a tent. Next to him is a large fat man with the same black suit on, that fits him like a child’s hand-me-down that is two sizes too small. Maybe they are just wearing the same suit, the same size. One size fits all undertaker’s suit. The skinny one holds his hands together in that earnest sort of way. The fat one just stands there. They talk with the nurse and Mom for a bit and then go outside to the hearst to get the stretcher. I take this as my time to exit to the pier, grabbing the cordless phone as I leave.
    Out on the pier, I call Annie, my girlfriend, to tell her that Dad is dead. I called her earlier about the big fight with Mom. She is trying to help me not feel so guilty about it all. God bless her, but it’s not working. But I appreciate her effort a lot. Annie and Michael and Catherine and Janet, friends in Tucson, have been getting a lot of phone calls from me over the past month. I wouldn’t have made it this far without them.
    At one point, while talking with Annie, I turn to look at the house and I see the silhouette of the stretcher going through the kitchen.
    “Oh God, Annie, I can see the stretcher”
    “Don’t look at it” she says. I had already mentioned earlier about not wanting see Dad taken out.
    “ I feel so guilty about the fight. I wish Dad had died tomorrow instead”
    “ I know, Sweetie.” she says.
    Ironic that I have been so critical of Mom for wanting Dad to die on her schedule, and now, on the pier, that’s exactly what I’m wishing I could do. Have Dad die a day after I’ve been a jerk.
    I talk with Annie a bit more, saying I’ll call her tomorrow and asking her if she would call Len and Virginia (My mother’s sister and brother in law in Tucson). That would be great, I add. And check on plane tickets for you and Len to come to the funeral.
    “You are coming, aren’t you?”
    “Of course.”
    “I really need you, honey”
    The undertakers are gone. So is the nurse and her husband. Scott is still here. Pamela is nowhere to be seen. I’m back up at the house and I tell Mom I’m going back to the pier. Glad Scott is there. Mary loves Scott. She seems OK considering.
    I go back out to the pier, this time with my Dad’s old Marine Corps blanket and the phone again. I call Michael, and tell him about Dad’s dying. He’s great as ever. We talk for a half hour and then I hang up and put the phone down.
    I’ve barely noticed the weather these past few hours but I do now. The wind has really picked up. Must be a storm in the Bay or a front moving in. The river is choppy. The wind is loud.
    I begin to talk to my Dad. The wind swallows my words. I’m sitting on a step at the far end of the pier, looking out into the dark Rappahannock River.
    “Dad, I’m so sorry.” I really let myself cry now.
    “I’m really sorry about yelling at Mom. Please forgive me. Please forgive me. Please” I just keep crying hard.
    Then I felt a presence and I knew it was my Dad, even though I didn’t trust it at first. Then I feel him sitting down beside me on the steps of the pier and put his arm around me. I could feel the light pressure of his hand on my shoulder. And I swear to God I hear him speak.
    “I forgive you, son”
    “You do?”
    “I do.”
    “I’m sorry”
    “I know”
    “I love you Dad”
    “Me too honey.”
    I just sit there on the step at the end of the pier with my Dad for a long time. I’m wrapped up in his old Marine Corps blanket. I feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder. I cry a lot. He doesn’t say much more than he already has. I feel his love.
    “I love you Dad” I say again.
    “Me too honey.”

[Image: “Northern Neck Javelina, Virginia” © 2001]

    After three hours of sleep, I’m up and showered and making my way to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. Mom has been up for a while and has already made coffee for me. God love her.
    “I think your sister has been drinking,” Mom whispers to me.
    “Really? What makes you think that?”  I say as I go to the frig to get some milk for my coffee.
    “She just seems weird. Her words don’t make sense,” Mom continues.
    And is this a big change I think?
    “Can you smell it on her?”
    “No,” Mom says “She just doesn’t make any sense.”
    “Hmm” I say as I go outside to the porch to have a smoke.
    I’m not getting too excited about this news of my sister's drinking. If I hadn’t used up my lifetime supply of drugs and alcohol years ago, I would join her. And let’s just think about this. The man who you revere more than another other man in your life, the man who you have put way up on a pedestal, the man who you loved more than any other, dies a slow death from a fast growing cancer. It’s time to open the liquor cabinet and hit the good Scotch. I sip my coffee. I light a smoke. I take in the early morning River air. Great day, all things considered.
    Mom is making up a chore list for Pamela and I. Mom has already been on the phone calling the entire world that Dad is dead, and my job, as soon as I finish my coffee, is to walk upriver and tell the neighbors to the west of Dad’s passing. Pamela’s chore is to go east and downriver and tell the Rainers and the Mothersheads that Dad is gone.
    I’m still on the porch and Pamela comes out. She does look like shit.
    “I’m goin’ over to da Rainers, now” she mumbles. At least I think that’s what she said.
    “OK. See you when you get back” I say.
    “Byeeeee” she says, a little too much ‘I’ in the ‘Bye’.
    Pamela walks down the porch steps and head off across the cut grass toward the Rainers, a couple hundred yards away. She walks for a bit, then stops, grabs her head and shakes it, takes a step backwards and then weaves her way forward. After a few steps, she repeat this process. Two or three step forward. Grabs head. Shakes head. Stumble back a step. Then propels herself forward agqain. After about three of these, I loose it and begin to laugh, but I hear one big laugh echo off the house and I put my hand over my mouth to stifle it. But I’m still laughing even though no one can here. God damn, it’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in weeks.
    Right on, Pamela.
    It’s Miller Time.

[Images: “His Ashes” (c) 2001
“The Grave Spiral” © 2001]

    Annie and I are holding hands. Neil Smart, dressed in a kilt, is walking among the grave stones at St. Mary’s Whitechapel, playing his bagpipes. Scotland the Brave. The Marine Corps hymn. Another slow reel. Many people are already in the church or in the parish hall before the funeral. Only Neil, Annie and I are outside. The pipes echo through the forest, through the grave stones, through Annie and I. Annie leans against me. I lean back.
    It’s been a busy week, picking up Annie and my uncle Len at the airport, picking up Dad’s ashes at a Richmond crematorium, running errands to and fro for Mom, and actually getting in a little swimming in the Rappahannock. Annie has been having a great time at the River, finding pieces of shells on the beach in front of the house, hoping to find a Rappahannock Indian arrowhead on the shore. Dad and I and others have been finding arrowheads for decades in front of the house. No arrowhead yet for Annie, but she’s still looking.
    When Mary and I got back from Richmond with Dad in a cardboard box, I laughed as I said to her,
    “You know Mom, I had a real good time with you today at the crematorium.”
    She laughed too. “Me, too.”
    The family is actually having some fun.
    Early one morning while Annie and I are cuddling in the old pine bed in my room upstairs, I said to her, that I feel like we’re in a French Movie.
    “You have the old uncle who is deaf as a post, but filled with deep thoughts. You have the drunk sister and her drunk best friend. You have the hyperactive Mother. And we are The Lovers Upstairs.”
    We laugh and I pull her close to me. We don’t get up for quite a while, sleeping in. Sort of.
    Now, It’s mid afternoon, Sunday, September 9th, 2001, the day of the funeral.
    This is probably the only funeral in Virginia today, with a seating chart. Mom has been working on it for days. St. Mary’s is a very tiny church with only so much room. The ushers have the chart and have been seating people for about a half hour. Annie and I are still in the graveyard, listening to Neil and the pipes. We don’t have to worry about our seats. We are front row center.
    Dad’s ashes are in a small mahogany casket as big as a car battery, that sits on a pedestal in the front of the sanctuary. The casket was made by a friend of the family who lives near Mothershead Neck. Beside him on another pedestal is Stuart’s Citadel dress cap. Last night, alone, I went to the chapel and took some black and whites. Just Dad and I.
    Now, the chapel is full from the front row to the balcony, with standing room in the back. Gladstone, Florence, Allison and Polly, and my three cousins, Ted, Jessica and Tim are all near the front as is Victoria. When Victoria, a black woman, took her good seat, some of the more racist members of the congregation appeared shocked. Too fucking bad.
    Annie and I take our seats with Pamela to the left of Annie and Mary on my right. The services begins and Mary stands up and directs the choir, something she does every Sunday. No different today. After a short sermon from Scott, Pamela sings an old folk song about a lover who has died. Annie and I kind of look at each other and try not to roll our eyes. We barely succeed. Then comes the time for my eulogy. Annie give my hand a squeeze. I rise and go to a podium at the front of the chapel. I don’t even plan on getting through this without crying.
    “My name is Stu and I'm a Stuart's son,” I begin. “When I was in college in the 70's, I used to drive home to Raleigh on Sundays, to pick up my next week's check, eat a good meal, and do my laundry. Actually Mary would do the laundry but that's another story.
    Laughs from the congregation.
     “As I would leave after dinner, Stuart would walk me to the Karmann-Ghia I inherited from him, and Dad would always say ‘I love you honey.’ ‘Me too, Dad.’ I would say. We always told each other that we loved each other. ‘I love ya, Dad’ or ‘I love you son’ or just ‘Me too honey.’ We'd say good bye that way and good night that way, and we told each other that we loved each a lot in the past days. I loved him very much and I knew his love as well.”
    Here we go, I think. I hope this flies.
    “I'm also a recovering addict/alcoholic. Stuart was always very supportive of my recovery. When he and Mary would come to Tuc