Shortly after Zachary died I began to have irrational fears of Lilly dying in some freakish way. During the seven months at CHOP before Shawn’s eventual cancer diagnosis, I spent a lot of time searching for human horror stories. They aren’t hard to find. I read stories of kids drowning in washing machines and school bus accidents. I was drawn to the chaos and disorientation in the descriptions of the experiences. I wanted to know about the small things that can lead to big chaos like a child wanting to please his mother by remembering to put his dirty socks in the laundry and ending up dead because of it. I wanted to learn about his mother’s description of the actions and events and emotions that immediately followed reaching into the washing machine and finding his arm.
Friday’s nor’easter kicked up quickly in our area in an unpredictable and disorienting way. Schools were open. Then schools were closed but the kids couldn’t get out. The buses couldn’t get the kids home and parents couldn’t get to the schools to pick them up. I’ve seen storms like this before but only a few times. As far as I know, everyone eventually got home. Tired and hungry and needing to pee, but alive and able to sleep and eat and use the toilet when they got there. We all suffered but we all made it out.
I dragged my feet leaving work after it had been announced that the college was closing early due to the storm. I stared out the window at the snow and ate the cottage cheese and blueberries that I had brought for lunch while most of my coworkers were packing up and wishing each other a safe drive home. I looked at my phone’s weather app and wondered why the snow on my phone was falling slowly downward while outside the window it was falling forcefully sideways. I called Bill and told him what I knew about what was happening. I tried to call the school to tell them that I want to pick Shawn up on the way home but the lines were down.
I stared out the window some more.
I thought about Lilly who was about to get on the bus.
I thought about the dead kid in the washing machine.
I walked to my car and the wind blew me sideways.
My eyeglasses were covered with ice.
I wanted to be home.
I wanted my kids to be home.
I sat in my car for a couple minutes and screamed and cried and banged my hands on the steering wheel like I’ve done in the CHOP parking garage so many times.
I brushed the sideways snow off my windshield and headed for home.
I changed routes several times for an hour and forty five minutes.
I got home.
I stared out the window at the now upward snow.
I waited.
I thought about the dead kid in the washing machine.
I looked out the window.
The storm door opened and then the front door. Lilly came in, soaked and snow covered.
I breathed and said “I’m happy you’re home.”
We started with fish. An aquarium for Bill’s birthday in November. The kids and I wanted to give it to him, fully stocked, as a gift but we soon realized that we didn’t know nearly enough about aquariums to make it a surprise. Bill did, though, so we told him the plan and we all went together to get the supplies and the fish. Picking out your own birthday gift isn’t such a bad thing when it means that you are encouraged to get exactly what you want, even if it isn’t necessarily the most practical decision. He chose two Angel Fish and a Plecostomus, to keep the tank balanced. The kids named them Zebrah (pronounced like Deborah), Goldie, and Cheetah. Everything was great for a couple of days. Then they began to slow down, float more than swim, and soon enough Zebrah and Goldie were dead, too. We went to an aquarium hobbyist store, figuring that our mistake might have been getting the fish from a mass market pet store. We talked to an expert there. Our aquarium was good, he said, we were doing all the right things. We brought home Grape and Warrior. They looked even better than the previous fish, graceful and strong. They, too, were dead within two weeks.
At my father’s local memorial service a montage of the music that had been in rotation on his car stereo when he died played quietly in the background, including the Peter, Paul, and Mary version of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind. Shawn picked up on the line “how many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?” and told me that he is going to be one of the last people in the world to have cancer. Later he told me that he wonders what new diseases there will be when he’s twenty years old. Shawn thinks about some pretty big things for an eight year old kid.
She finally seemed happy here as the only animal. Our last cat got out and never came back on the day that we moved into this house. Shawn and I weren’t even here. We were inpatient at CHOP. We suspect that he became disoriented and couldn’t find his way back to our new house. The cat before him died from cancer when he was 6 years old. At the time, we were in the middle of getting our house in Philadelphia ready to sell. We didn’t even notice that he was sick until he curled up next to me one night and he was skin and bones. He was dead two weeks later.
fast friends, first meeting in a “sibology” group, and later having wheelchair races in the hallway. That kid came to our doorway several times on their last day to ask if Lilly was here yet. Finally I found out what time Lilly would be here. I went to their room to tell them. It was being cleaned. The bed was already crisply made for the next kid. All the kid artwork was off the walls. They were gone.
Blue Wristband Parent 