Dear ol' Steve

Friday, December 16^th, 2016.

Nikki and I are at her dad’s house to celebrate the birthday of her Uncle Mel. Not a blood uncle, but the man who has been her father’s best friend for something in the neighborhood of fifty years. Her dad was the best version of himself that night; jovial, sentimental to tears, and anxious about how dinner was going to turn out. He never varied much from the same few recipes, but he always made them well. Prime rib and grilled shrimp were my two favorites.

He was a man who’s been fighting cancer since 1977. Then again in 1997. Then 2007. Then 2012, and 2014, had a major surgery in 2015 . . . you get the idea. He was complaining that night he’d been too easily fatigued lately, but otherwise feeling fine. He told long form jokes with puns as punchlines and teared up at the dedication Nikki had written to him in the foreword of her novel.

We finished dinner and started making overtures about dessert, so he walked alone into the kitchen. A few minutes later the hollow floor shook with a thud. We called to him. No answer.

I was closest, so I was first. I found him face down, hands at his sides, unmoving. I knew he was breathing because he was, of all things, snoring. I rolled him over; the left side of his face was a nightmare from the impact. We called 911, and not long afterward seven large men cut his sweater open to expose his chest, put him into a neck brace, loaded him onto a backboard, and shuffled through the snow to the ambulance.

He made it to the hospital long before us. Nikki and I were directed to a family waiting room where we were met by the doctor. When the doctor timidly asked if he is usually appropriate we laughed and relaxed. She told him no, he usually flirts with the nurses and calls the doctor a bastard. We were told that he wasn’t cooperating with treatment so would we please intervene and get him to behave.

It was not what we were expecting.

We heard him shouting from down the hall. Demanding to be let go. Hurling insults. We went into the room to find him being restrained, one person holding each arm to pin him to the bed. He was struggling to get up. He wouldn’t understand that they needed to treat the broken bone in his face or clean him up. Nikki tried talking to him to calm him down. He kept shouting, asking who she was and complaining that his blood was going the wrong way. Before long she got overwhelmed and left.

I stayed a bit longer to see if I could get through to him, but I didn’t know what I could do that no one else had. Everyone else kept saying his name, but if he couldn’t see or recognize people, he would take my voice as one more among so many strangers. So I tried something I’ve never done before.

I’ve never called my girlfriends’ parents anything at all because I didn’t know what was appropriate. Not their first names, not their last names, not even Sir or Ma’am. I was so scared of being too familiar or unaccepted that I never addressed them; I would simply find ways to approach and start talking. I don’t know if anyone noticed. That wasn’t going to work here.

“Dad?” I tried. It got his attention, and he turned to me agape.

“Who the fuck are you to call me ‘Dad’?” Positively dripping with poison. He stared, waiting for an answer.

“I . . . married your daughter.”

Silence. And then, “Bite my ass!” I fought the urge to tell the medical staff that we actually get along really well.

The story of the next few months is a saga of anguish, despair, and struggle. He was comatose for the next few weeks before finally emerging as the Mr. Hyde to his previous Jekyll. Angry, belligerent, combative, and insulting. Unaware or unable to admit how impaired he was, we kept having to make decisions which hurt his feelings and he didn’t understand.

We finally got him on the right treatment. Much to our surprise, slowly but surely, he started getting better. By the following October he was fully independent again; got his driver’s license back, no more nursing home or in-home caretakers.  It was during that stretch in April of last year that I got my first ever Facebook message from him.

“Hey, Mark please give me a call. Have a story for you.”

This was his code for “I want to tell you a joke.” His jokes were the stuff of legend, but not because they were any good. They were always the sort of joke you’d get in email forwards in the 90s with dozens of ‘fwd: re: fwd: fwd: re:’ in the subject line, and they were ALWAYS clumsily set up puns. What struck me most about his stories is how much joy he expressed in the telling. He was like a grandmaster emcee holding his audience enrapt, and it was always a pleasure to watch him work. I called. He answered.

“Mark! So. A guy walks into a doctor’s office.” I knew it. I loved it. But this time it was different. The joke he told was dirty. Downright filth. Very adult. He’d never told a joke like that before. I sat on my couch and listened, grinning ear-to-ear, absorbing the fact that in the five years I’d been with his daughter this was the first time he and I had ever been on the phone together. I finally felt accepted by him, embraced fully as a member of his family.

When the punchline came I laughed my ass off. “I’ve never heard that one before,” I told him honestly.

“Well,” he said. Now you know something you didn’t know before. Talk to you later, buddy.”

“Goodbye, Steve,” I said, and hung up. Then I realized what I’d said.

Now he’s taken a turn for the worse again. A few months later he was no longer capable of living without assistance, his home too dangerous for him even with live-in assistance. His mind left him again. We sold his car, put his house on the market, and re-admitted him to the nursing home where he spent a few months before recovering the first time.

I left Nikki five days after the anniversary of his fall, and four days before Christmas.

She and I haven’t spoken since then. From time to time I’ve wondered if she’ll tell me when he dies. It’s a thought which I’ve largely been able to ignore – until last Sunday when I awoke to a voicemail from his nursing home. I’d missed a call at about 5:45 in the morning. There had been “a change in his status,” and they really needed to talk to Nikki but couldn’t get a hold of her.

I called to learn that his behavior and physical presentation had changed such that the night nurse wanted to call 911, but they needed permission. I was told that they had gotten a hold of Nikki by then, and he was currently at the hospital, but there was no further news at the moment. It was the last thing I heard about him.

Steve Pill is a good man. I miss him. That’s all.