The Strongest Man I Knew

It’s Christmas Eve in the ICU and they tell me my father is dying.   There is a small spray of pine branches in a glass vase my mom brought from home perched along the windowsill.  His childhood stocking with “Chuckie” sewn in yellow thread with felt appliques of trains and teddy bears is pinned up on the bulletin board.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t know it was Christmas.   It’s the one floor where they don’t pipe holiday music through the hallways or the Rock-a-Bye-Baby nursery rhyme over the intercom after a birth.  It’s the floor without clocks on the wall and with a conspicuous Kleenex box at every bedside. 

I glance around room #5423 and wonder if it will be that last space my dad will inhabit.  The sterile white walls, the tan checkered curtain ripped in several spots along the track – the last objects he will see.  The scent of bleach wipes and cafeteria meatloaf – the last he will smell.  The endless beeping of machines and the suctioning serenade of his oxygen mask - the sounds that will escort him to another realm. 

His body is tired.  Years of depression and mania and heart disease and Parkinson’s and now embolisms and pneumonia.  Decades of pills rounding out square plastic compartments:  red ones and oblong blue ones and tiny yellow ones and white ones so oversized they’d have to be quartered so he can swallow them.  He’s been leaving us a little bit at a time for fifteen years - his presence slowly dissipating like the air from a carbonated can.  After I graduated from college, his first bout of clinical depression reduced him to a life inhabited within the confines of the basement.  His bed became a 5-foot navy and burgundy sofa.   The two obscured glass block windows, his only indication if it was night or day.  As our worlds as his children opened up, his became more and more compressed.  As we moved out, started careers, got married, and had babies, he aged, atrophied and began to evaporate.   

It’s surreal really - for him to be dying in the same hospital he was born in.  Charles Raymond Dressel - ushered into the world on Sunday, September 11, 1949, a day that would fifty-two years later be marked with unprecedented tragedy.  My grandparents saved the hospital bill.  $49.00 for a week’s stay.  Five dollars a day for the mother and two for the baby.   Now, we are all sitting here waiting.  My mom, sister and brother, politely rotating chairs and giving each other futile hand pats. I can’t remember the last time all five of us were in one room. The nuclear family without the grandkids, without the spouses, without my 90-year-old grandmother.  Just us.  Watching him sleep.  Checking the green neon vitals on the monitor.  Each one of us, wrestling with our own regrets, sorrow, pity, and place in the world without a father or spouse. Coming to grips with the fact that an axis is shifting underneath us.  Coming to understand that a man’s life is ending at 66 and that his grandkids will scarcely remember him.  Time feels heavy, suspended like an old movie reel that might spin out at any point and turn the screen blank.

Growing up, my dad epitomized brute athletic strength.  He was Chicago’s high school senior athlete of the year and went on to play three sports at Princeton.  He was a heavyweight wrestler, a defensive end, and shot put thrower.  Soon after, he was the dad who did push-ups whenever we piled on his back in a giggling heap.  He could scale the climbing rope in our backyard in 10 seconds flat and he did chin-ups with us hanging like monkeys from his ankles.  He transformed the laundry room into a workout pit with weight plates the size of car wheels and I’d spy on him sometimes from behind the furnace.  I’d stare, half-terrified of the bulge in his eyes and the puffs of air that would escape his lips as he’d hoist the bar above his head and then back on the rack.  In the summer, he’d dive underwater in the pool and propel us up into the air with our feet balancing on his palms. “Standing on the hands” he called it and we perfected it to the point that he could eventually balance us on only one hand. Simply put, he was the strongest man I knew.

The day before we admitted him to the hospital three weeks ago, he stood on his own for the final time attempting to get from the couch to the toilet and fell against the bookshelf displaying our childhood trophies. Softball, wrestling, volleyball, basketball, baseball, football.   All brass-hued plastic badges of our athletic prowess as youngsters, a shrine of long-forgotten accolades.  I remember how proud my dad was of each of them.  The MVP orange and black Princeton football that was presented to him during a senior match against Colgate sat squarely in the middle of our figurines on pedestals.  And they all came crashing down around him.  Miniature bats and feet and balls snapped off.  Name plates came loose.  Dust danced in the air.  

Afterwards, I went to assess the damage and figured they should all just be tossed out.   I picked up the fragments of cheap plastic and turned them over in my hands.  They all meant something.  I couldn’t help but think of all the teams he coached, practices he instructed, stands he cheered from, and endless evenings he spent under our backyard lights, squatting on a bucket in full catcher’s gear, tracking my curve ball.  That was what my dad excelled at.  Sports.  And it’s what we did together.  Those trophies exemplify his prime.  His purpose.  His offering as a father.  His happiest memories.  And I realize as I stare at him, lying helpless as an infant, labored and listless, that they were also some of mine. 

The buzzing of machines and the ringing of a phone in the nursing station startles me back to the present.  I stare at his little pine tree.  Christmas Eve.  In my head, I hear him singing, “Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”  One of his favorite carols.  I wonder if in his dreams he can run again – catch a football, move, dodge, scale a rope, pin an opponent. I wonder if he can swing us around like dolls and do standing on the hands.  I wonder if in his dreams, he is a man again. I wonder if he might dream about teaching his grandchildren to hit off a tee, round the bases, and throw with their shoulders turned the way he did for me thirty years ago.  I hope he can see it.  Their smiles. Their first-hit-out-of-the-infield victories.  Their exhilaration.  Their trophies.  I hope it brings him some peace as he drifts in and out of consciousness in this somber room, #5423.   I can only hope that they will be the last thing he sees.  

**After rallying overnight, my dad was transferred out of the ICU into a different room on December 26th. He continues to have good days and bad days, but we are hopeful for forward progress.  The pine branches and his stocking came with him. 

A Do Over

This spring at a hotel in Chicago I watched Stanford sophomore, Emma Rose Coleman, take the stage in red-rimmed glasses and perform slam poetry - an evocative and lyrical piece about her life on campus.   It was one of many inspirational moments amidst 400 fellow alumni at Stanford Connects, a day propelled by discussions on everything from black holes to robot ethics to climate change. Thirteen years separate me from The Farm and yet that afternoon listening to scholars, students, and faculty share their passions and pursuits, I time-traveled.   Emma’s poem settled over me like morning dew.  I was catapulted right back, bicycling feverishly through the quad, ponytail swinging - The budding writer.  The quintessential Fuzzy - brimming with promise and expectation and a touch of naivety.   I prickled with undergrad electricity.  I was infused with an almost manic energy.  I felt like I could take on the world.  And by mid-day, the four years  I spent at Stanford seemed palpably fast, short and insufficient.  I knew I had lived it.  I knew I had loved it, but I was a bit envious of Emma.  I wanted the chance to do it again and this time, with more gumption and boldness and conviction.  I wanted a do over.

I longed to sit down with that lanky freshman girl who abandoned her creative writing seminar that first fall because she felt young and timid and exposed.   I wanted to tell her to stay.  To tough it out. To whisper in her ear that she was good enough.

I yearned to comfort that devastated senior who moped around for weeks following a break-up.   I needed to show her a few snapshots:  Her, standing barefoot and beautiful in her wedding dress. Her, cartwheeling along the surf of the Arabian Sea. Her, interviewing for her first job.  Her, watching her three-year-old pedal a tricycle down the driveway.  I ached to show her how large the world looms.  I wanted her to know heartbreak, but understand that it would not break her.

I wished to tell that sluggish sophomore who slept until noon to get off her butt.  To go to that tennis match, to that lecture in MemAud, to her professor’s office hours.  I wanted to remove the net, lift the fog, shine the beacon on the fact that she was living in one of the most innovative places on the planet.  A place teeming with opportunities. With ground-breaking research.  With humble brilliance. A place inhabited by the world’s coolest nerds.   I wanted her to immerse herself in the campus’ heartbeat.   I wanted her to be worthy of her admittance.   I wanted her to have the courage to fail.

As much as I enjoyed the networking and the quirky micro-lectures that day in Chicago, I struggled too.  I listened to the almost farcical acceptance rates and staggering statistics of qualified applicants and was reminded what a rare privilege I had been given.   I reflected on my journey since graduation and what really stung was what I had not yet accomplished.  

Today I have a sales job that affords me the ability to work from home and spend quality time with my kids, but it is not at all what I thought I would be doing.   I had big plans.  Write a book.  Attend law school.  Climb the ladder.  Do what Stanford students do.  Excel.  Succeed.  Inspire.  Set the bar.  Instead, my life seemed a little less glossy, laden with diaper blowouts, lukewarm macaroni and cheese, and mad dashes from swim class to tot camp and back to my email inbox.  I found myself doubting.  Have I contributed enough?  Challenged myself enough?  Have I given back and done myself proud?  Have I pursued my passions?  Am I a good enough mom?

    

Looking back, there here is no denying my Stanford experience was exceptional.  In high school, I was robotic. Like many of my fellow classmates, I studied compulsively, played sports and followed the rules. But, in college, I let my hair down. I was still serious, but relished interludes of pure adolescent fun.  I went out for greasy Jack-in-the-Box fries at 2am - on weekdays!  I tried my hand at polo, mastered pool on a wobbly dorm table and took up jogging around Campus Loop - albeit slowly.  I took an epidemiology class for non-science majors and got to hold an actual human lung.   I traveled down the coast during breaks, camped outside for 6^th Man basketball tickets, and rang in my 21^st birthday in Vegas with three friends and $76 in my bank account.   I let myself be flawed.  I flirted.  I flourished.  I fell on the ski slopes.  I fell in love.  I fell off my rusted, sea-foam, Schwinn ten-speed bicycle, on several graceful occasions.  I fell hard for Stanford. 

So, yes, I would do it all again.  But, as the day drew to a close in Chicago, I realized, not at the expense of my present.  Last week, I got to see my eight-month-old crawl for the first time.   I was witness to it because she made her inaugural move on our living room rug during my lunch hour.  I recognized that the choices I made, the mistakes I committed, all perfectly paved the most imperfect path to my current life.  I know any minuscule shift in whom I met, what I studied, where I sipped my CoHo Frosty Mint on some innocuous Tuesday morning could potentially have reconfigured an entirely different outcome for me.   I am old enough to embrace the fact that you can never really go back.  I am wise enough to recognize that the honey-drizzles of nostalgia can make the past taste sweeter than it actually ever was.

My college experience was meant to be lived once and while I was young.  It was meant to catapult me into the world and mold me into an adult.  It was meant to be lacking and languid at times and exquisite and emphatic at others.   Still, I would like to challenge my thirty-five-year-old self to some slam poetry from time to time.  To get out of my comfort zone and think again.  Dream again. Let my hair down again because the gift of the present is that everything is forward motion.  I have nothing to regret yet - except if I were to ever indulge in another nocturnal French fry binge.  Because, let’s face it, no one has the metabolism of an eighteen-year-old.