North by Northwest 37

Hello again. It's that time of my life when I dread the next unexpected phone call, when I wonder what the next tragedy will be, scared to even think about it, when I'm so tired of dealing with all the loss this year has brought, when four deaths are four too many, four too many, when Jan. 1, 2007 can't get here soon enough -- In other words, this is the Year of Suck.

The death of my five-year relationship has been discussed ad nauseum. I'm frankly tired of it all, so that's that (for the most part, anyway).

******

In less than six full months this year, three actual deaths.

Kenneth Earl McCune.

Born: April 8, 1937. Died: February 24, 2006.

Uncle Kenny to me, my late dad's full brother. Older by six years than my dad, he lived nearly six years longer.

My sister called me more than a week before Uncle Kenny died, letting me know that he was not doing well. The week he died, she called again, letting me know that he had an aortic embolism in his abdomen. It was the size of a grapefruit. The doctors were discussing surgery, but when doing a CT scan (I think?), they noticed a spot on his pancreas. Because of that, they couldn't and wouldn't operate on the embolism before the biopsy results were in.

That was a Wednesday, two days before he died.

Uncle Kenny didn't want to stay in the hospital -- I think he knew his time was short -- so the doctors let him go home. His family knew his condition was serious, and they all got to see him. I'm not sure who was there when he collapsed on Friday, but I know some of my cousins were.

They called 911, and a life-flight helicopter was dispatched. It landed in the blacktop road in front of his house, loaded him up and headed to Columbia. I was at work when Beth called to let me know he was headed to the hospital. I was at work when she called back an hour later to tell me he had died. He bled out during the flight. There was nothing the paramedics could do. There was nothing a surgeon could have done.

My dad was too young at 56, and Uncle Kenny was too young at 68.

Still in California, I left work that night and booked a flight for Saturday morning. I packed up my dark suit jacket, black shirt, gray pants, black tie, black socks and black shoes -- I'm beginning to hate those clothes -- and flew to Kansas City, where my cousin Andy picked me up.

When we got to Uncle Kenny and Aunt Ann's house that evening, it was my turn to comfort, my turn to provide a shoulder, my turn to try to help my cousins make sense of their loss. I failed in the last, because there is no sense in a loss that early.

The wound is still open for them, four months later. The first time his birthday rolled around without him there was hard, but there was a meal in his honor. The first Father's Day was hard. The first anniversary of his death will be hard.

I don't know when -- or if -- they stopped counting the weeks since Uncle Kenny died. I got to 12 weeks after my dad's death, knowing every Thursday that it was one more week since he had died. Somewhere between that 12th week and the 13th, I no longer counted every one. It was the first sign that I was starting to grow a scab on my heart. The scab is long since gone, but the scar will always be there. (And, shit, it's hard revisiting all this.)

I was with my aunt and cousins constantly the next few days. I gave and received countless hugs. Aunt Ann wanted me to be a pall bearer. I didn't want to, feeling strange as a member of a family performing that rite, but out of respect for her, I agreed. Years earlier, I was a pall bearer when my Aunt Janet died of lung cancer. The black tie I wore at Uncle Kenny's funeral is the same one I bought for Aunt Janet's funeral.

Uncle Kenny's visitation was otherworldly.

Uncle Kenny lived all his life in the Clark and Higbee countryside. He was a deacon at Carpenter Street Baptist Church. After getting out of farming, he worked more than 20 years as a driver for Ferrell Gas in Moberly. He was known, loved and respected.

Visitation was supposed to go from 3-7 p.m. We finally got out of the funeral home around 10 p.m. At one point, the line snaking through two rooms and a hallway in the funeral home was more than two hours long. Hundreds of people signed the book. Hundreds more didn't make it that far.

And Aunt Ann stood there and greeted everyone who came to pay their respects, more than six hours in all. I don't know how she did it. She will tell you her Faith -- capital F -- sustained her, and I'm sure that's true. Her Faith is a powerful thing to witness. I don't believe, but if I did I would hope it would be like that.

A day (or two, it's all a blur now) after the funeral, I flew back to California. I was one month away from finally leaving.

******

One day while I was in for Uncle Kenny's funeral, I went with Beth to visit Lanny. Lanny, whom I called Squiggy because the first time Beth told me about him I though she said his name was Lenny because who has ever heard of a person being named Lanny? Hence the Laverne & Shirley reference.

Lanny was dying of cancer.

Lanny Lee Young.

Born: Dec. 12, 1952. Died: April 2, 2006.

Lanny went to two Missouri football games (2004-05) with my Mizzou crew and one Chiefs game in 2004 when K.C. kicked the living dogshit out of Michael Vick and Atlanta. Lanny got us parking passes for the Mizzou games and made an amazingly good pot of baked beans each time.

Lanny was a contractor in Columbia, a builder of homes priced from $250,000 to more than $1 million. He had an amazing sense of style with the homes he built, combining colors and surfaces and textures to create a whole much more than the sum of its parts. Three-story fireplaces. Kitchen cabinets and countertops. Wine cellars. Landscaping. He could do it all.

Lanny was a Harley rider. He and Beth rode his bike to the Chiefs game, and when we left her house at 8 a.m., it wasn't even 40 degrees. I drove his double-cab Chevy with the heated leather seats, and they followed behind on the bike. Rolling up Interstate 70 to Kansas City, I passed a semi on the right because -- say it with me -- the guy wouldn't get over. Of course, the semi tried to keep up with me and not allow me to pass, so I'm finally doing 95 mph until I get past him. Once I got ahead of the semi, I dropped it down to 85. I saw it in the rearview mirror when a cooler lid flew out of the truck bed, and I was scared it was going to decapitate Lanny and my sister. I pulled over, and my sister, frozen of face and shivering, walked back to ask us not to go 95 because it tended to be uncomfortable. They led the rest of the way to Kansas City.

Lanny was a drag racer with his own car, and he got my sister hooked on NHRA and John Force and all things fast and fuel-burningly loud.

And Lanny adored my sister. When I forgot the tickets to the 2005 Missouri game, Lanny drove me back to Beth's house to get them. He told me how much he thought of Beth, of how much she meant to him. I didn't know what to say.

Lanny didn't look good when we went to visit. The cancer had spread from his pancreas and was attacking his liver and other vital organs. He was jaundiced. He had lost too much weight. His hairline was receding, and the hair he had was rapidly turning almost all gray. Before, it was black streaked with a little gray.

My god, I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say much while Lanny and Beth talked. When we left, Lanny shook my hand and thanked me for coming. Christ, he thanked me.

It was the last time I saw him.

I drove out of California on a Saturday. The next day, Lanny, too young by far at 53, died.

I missed the call from Beth while I was out drinking and eating in Albuquerque, N.M. I called her the next morning, and she told me the news, the news she knew was coming but still wasn't prepared for when it arrived. She hadn't slept, she said. While the kids went to school, Beth stayed home and tried to get some sleep on the couch. She couldn't even use a sleeping pill to help because Brett and Hilary would be home from school in the afternoon.

I missed Lanny's memorial service, but Beth went, and our cousin Brianne went along for support.

Lanny was good to Beth and the kids, and, in the end, that's all I needed to know.

******

And the last death hit me the hardest.

Helen Gertrude Apel McCune Smith.

Grandma.

Born: April 8, 1916. Died: June 12, 2006.

Simply, the finest, best person I have ever met. She gave our family the greatest gift: an example of how to live your life, of how to treat others, of how to be a good human being, all just by being herself. Sadly for me and the people I know and have met, I have never come close to living up to her example.

Grandma never met a stranger. I don't know how many people she took in throughout her life, how many she opened her door and home to, how many stayed with her for months at a time. More than I'll ever know.

She always had room for more love in her heart; if we loved someone, she loved them, too, without reservation, as close to unconditional as you can get with someone who isn't your own flesh and blood.

Grandma let you follow your own path, make your own mistakes, but her door was always open to take you in when you needed shelter from your own personal storm. She never turned anyone away, and her table always had room for one more mouth.

Grandma wasn't just Grandma, she was a friend and confidant.

And with my fumbling words, I'm not doing her justice.

******

When I was a kid, summer was my favorite season, and not just because school was out. Summer was when I got to spend a week -- or more -- at Grandma's house. No matter what our situation was at home, Grandma was always there.

Grandma was my fishing partner in a wide-brimmed hat. I would go catch grasshoppers or dig up worms, and then we would grab our fishing poles, tackle box and a bucket and head off through the woods to Mr. Fehrley's pond. Or maybe we would load up in the car -- including the 1970s Grand Torino with the 351 engine that was a dead ringer for the Starsky & Hutch car except it was gold instead of red and white -- and go to one of the many ponds or lakes she had access to. Or we would hit Perche Creek, where I once caught a painted sculpin and put it in a soda bottle to take home.

Grandma took me blackberry picking and gooseberry picking, putting the berries in a small plastic bucket with a wire handle. In the spring, we picked greens, otherwise known as collard greens in the south, otherwise know as spinach that grows wild for city folk.

Back when people drank soda out of glass bottles and threw them in the ditch, we would slowly cruise gravel roads in the summer so I could gather the bottles for their 10-cent deposit. I used the deposit to buy fireworks, and I always wanted to go to a certain stand in Prathersville north of Columbia. Grandma always took me there.

Grandma played countless games of Monopoly and Yahtzee and Sorry and Trouble. And the child's card game Pairs.

Grandma was the youngest old person I knew.

Grandma made breakfast every morning, and every morning that meant biscuits and gravy. I can still hear the sound of her glass coffee pot percolating over a flame on the stove, and I can smell the cured ham frying in her cast iron skillet. I can see her sitting at Grandpa's left side at the kitchen table, can hear them as they bicker like old couples do. Gandma also fixed dinner (you call it lunch) every day. And then supper. Chickens that we killed ourselves, fried in lard, sinfully good. (I was fat as a kid.)

I used to gather eggs in the hen house, but I was scared to check under the chickens that were still sitting on their nests. Grandma would just reach in there and pin the chicken's head against the side of the nest box with one hand and reach under the hen with the other. It probably would have been easier for her to just gather the eggs herself, but she knew how much I (and Beth, when she stayed with Grandma) liked to do it.

When I think of Grandma, I think of the young old woman of my childhood.

******

After my dad died, it was only a couple years until Grandma had to go to a nursing home. The woman who traipsed all around the country with us kids had to use a walker to get around. Soon she wasn't strong enough to use that and was confined to a wheelchair. It broke my heart every time I went to see her, to see how sad she often was, to see her confined to the nursing home, to see her somewhere other than home. It broke my heart as she slowly became a little senile, repeating herself if you were with her more than an hour. But she always knew me and was always glad to see me and always told me she loved me. And I told her the same.

I loved her, but in time I selfishly began to dread my visits with her. It hurt me to see the woman who was so vibrant in my memories become muted, gray, in the nursing home.

******

The day before she died, Beth and I and the kids went to Grandma's extended Apel family reunion. It was windy and cold, so Beth and the kids left early and went to the nursing home to see Grandma. I followed about 20 minutes later.

When I got there, Beth warned me that Grandma wasn't Grandma, not in her present condition.

I went in the room.

Grandma was lying on her bed, gaunt. Without her teeth, her face looked even more drawn.

I couldn't get my breath. Short, quick inhalations were all I could manage. A giant weight fell across my chest, and I was on the verge of bawling, on the verge of hyperventilating. Tears spilled down my cheeks. She was so much worse than the last time I had seen her.

I went to her bedside and grasped her hand. She squeezed my hand. Her right eye was dull, but her left eye was still bright blue, Apel blue like my dad and my sister. I leaned in close and said "I love you, Grandma." "You, too," she said. God, I couldn't stand to see her like that. I leaned in again and said, "It's OK," the hardest two words I've ever spoken, the two words that let her -- and me, finally -- know it was all right for her to let go.

The rest of the day is a blur of family members coming and going, of hugs being exchanged, a procession of people to her bedside to pay their respects -- to bear witness. I held her hand, even after she became non-responsive. You could hear the fluid in her lungs as she breathed, and every time she took a hard, sharp breath, I thought that would be the end, that it would be her last. I was torn, wanting to stay, not wanting to stay. Uncle Ray, her last son, and his wife, Aunt Carol, were in it for the long haul. As was Aunt Ann. I was supposed to work the next morning, so finally, about 12:40 a.m. Monday, I kissed Grandma one last time and told her I loved her.

I left and went to Beth's house in Columbia. On the drive home, the full moon shined bright and danced among the clouds as I chased it south.

******

At 8:30 a.m. Monday morning, three minutes after Uncle Ray asked god to finally take her, Grandma Smith died. Her heart was the last to go. Her heart was the last to go.