The room was quiet. It was always an echo above silent in that room. The rest of the house was a roaring hush with the members of my extended family dispersed throughout each room of the house that we called home for 43 years. This house was his castle. It happened to be the finest forest green split-level house that the fabulous fifties could offer a hard-working man. My grandfather dominated every facet of the house for so many years. Though he had recently departed this world late in the evening of April 16, 2001, his spirit exuded the house in its entirety.
It was a mere 15 minutes after the workers from the funeral home had taken his body away that I began my ascent up the short flight of stairs and towards his room. I walked through the darkness of the hall leading up to the room. The walls were decorated with the same olive and hunter-green diamond wallpaper that had dressed the walls my entire life. Adorning the entrance to his room was a personal note signed by the Pope himself and a gun rack featuring my grandfather’s hunting rifles, with a ship in a bottle banished to the top shelf almost out of sight. Each step grew heavier and the darkness more incredulous. The door was closed for the first time in three years. I turned the knob and entered the room. Nothing could prepare me for the rush of emptiness that engulfed his former living quarters. I couldn’t believe that the moment had actually arrived. I walked into his somberly candlelit room. It was empty.
Everything was in the right place. From its scantily decorated cream colored walls to its old champagne shag carpet, it was the same master bedroom it had always been. This was the type of room that you would have seen in a Modern Living Magazine circa 1958, when the house was purchased. There were some modern updates, such as a combination TV/VCR, a four-tiered shelf that featured a cornucopia of medical supplies and medications (both over-the-counter and prescription), and a CD player/alarm clock, which would feature an assortment of classics by the likes of Perry Como and the Irish Tenors. Not to mention some cosmetic cover-ups such as the duct tape that kept cords taped to the ground so that no one would trip. This was to the left of the window that overlooked Harbach Blvd., a teenage Maple tree, and his luscious green lawn. The windowsill housed a snow globe regardless of the season, and an electronic dancing Santa that was a gift from his sister, Kaye, was always a staple decoration of Christmas time. Beside the window with the view of his lawn was a dresser upon which rested his TV, and my grandmother’s beauty products.
There was one mirror in the room. It was one of those classic mirrors straight out of Sleeping Beauty complete with archaic framework. Next to the mirror was the doorway leading to his and her bathrooms that were common in houses of that era. His bathroom featured a mirror, sink and a toilet. His toilet was rarely used as his health declined and my grandfather became bedridden. The sink was used only to get him a glass of water or if he needed a damp rag. Between the mirror and the bathroom was a picture of my grandparents taken circa 1990. I always found it interesting that we stopped taking pictures of him around 1996. The last 5 years of his life have little or no photographic evidence. His suffering left an indelible image in our memories to the extent that we wished not to be reminded of his pain through photographs.
Below this picture was a crucifix that had previously belonged to his father. The Crucifix would slide open in the back revealing a bottle of Holy Water, the blessing for Extreme Unction, and the oils for anointing the sick. To the right of the bathroom door was a clock that featured twelve different birds corresponding to the numbers on the clock. At the top of each hour, a different bird would sing a tune. The backdrop of the clock was white and it was outlined with stained oak. This was fitting for my grandfather, who before his illness had a passion for bird watching as well as woodwork. If you were to remove these items: a mirror, a picture, and a clock, the walls of the room would have been bare. Enough of the olive green paint was already exposed on the walls, exuding a yellow tint to the room. The amber hue of the room was a reminiscent of autumn, yet when the lights were off it had the feel of a harsh winter.
The room revolved around his hospital bed. The hospital bed was top-of-the-line technology, complete with remote controlled air mattress and a contracting frame. It was the vortex of the room and probably the entire house. About an arm’s length from the bed was a green reclining chair that was once his living room throne. Up until two years before he died, we would sit him in this chair so he could get a break from his bed. I usually sat in the recliner next to him and watch whatever was on the television when I had walked in the room. To the left of this recliner was a tray on its side, which was converted to a mini-shelf. Upon this shelf, I would rest a Coke, of which he would always tell me I drank too much, next to several statuettes of the Virgin Mary. Everything was in the right place except for him. This was his room, but all that remained was our memory of him and the anguish of our loss.
It was not always this way. My grandfather was enjoying his retirement with my grandmother at his side. He had fathered three loving and successful sons, and had eleven grandchildren. My grandfather loved life, and for the time life loved him in return. In 1995, things took a turn for the worse. I woke up early one morning to be informed that my grandfather had suffered a heart attack in the middle of the night and was rushed to Mercy Hospital in Des Moines, Iowa. A pacemaker was inserted and many medical overhauls were performed on his weary heart.
At this time he was 74 years old with a stubborn disposition, a burly 240 pound frame, a head of disappearing off-white hair, thick glasses that I always assumed were issued to men when they reach a certain age, and piercing blue eyes that put Paul Newman’s to shame. They called him, “Bull”. The origins of this nickname were unclear to all others, but he managed to tell me several times in the twilight of his life. Actually, he gave me several different versions of how he came to be dubbed, ‘Bull’. My favorite of these anecdotes was that he was ‘The Bull’ on his high school football team.This paralleled a similar story in my life since I was coincidently nicknamed, “The Bull”, for my gridiron exploits. He embodied this nickname and seemed to be proud of having it. Slowly illness crept into his life. Every time he would recover from a previous ailment another one would attack him. There must have been a total of ten extended visits to the hospital in a five year span. The last of these visits came in the summer of 1999 and after this his shrinking body was resigned to his bed in the confines of his bedroom.
There was always darkness in this room. For several years after this first major ailment piled upon his early stages of Parkinson’s Disease, my brothers and I could help our grandfather up and down his stairs. With each passing day his health dwindled. My visits were so frequent that I didn’t really notice this deterioration at the time. Each year he was physically capable of less and less. First, he lost the strength to drive. Then, he lost the strength to walk without assistance. By 1999, it reached the point that if we wanted to take him downstairs we had to lift him from the bed to a wheelchair, from a wheelchair to the stairs, from the stairs to a chair, which we carried down the stairs to another wheelchair, which we would put in his living room. He was dying in a physical sense, and you could tell that his mind and vitality weren’t far behind.
In a mental sense, things slowly fell apart. At first my grandfather could carry on conversations, but gradually he could only muster the communication skills to answer one or two questions. Then he was merely capable of speaking, but only in a low whisper that could only register on a stethoscope. If you were to ask him a question it would take less than a minute for him to answer, but nearly ten minutes to decipher what he was saying. This man we called Bull had grown weary. By the spring of 2001, he weighed roughly 115 pounds and was a shadow of his former self. Mortality was catching up with this strong-willed man, but he wasn’t about to let death conquer him until he felt he was ready. Slowly, but surely, the medication turned his mind into a prison cell. His brain was alive and well, but he could not express himself to the outside world. The room was as much a prison to me as his body was a prison to his soul.
Every day was like a visitation to an incarcerated man. I would drive through the shade of lazy, Dutch Elm on NW 81st Street to his house nearly every day after school sophomore and junior year. I even visited him before football practice every other day during the fall of my junior year. The only word capable of describing the atmosphere of the room was bleak.I would sit in this chair day in and day out for at least an hour. I would do plenty of other things to keep the house in order; I would landscape the entire lawn, vacuum, do the dishes, and run errands for my grandmother. Despite all of this, I believe that he appreciated the fact that I would spend time with him. Of course, that’s not to say that he always loved having me around. I would have to field such questions as: “shouldn’t you have a job? why hasn’t my lawn been mowed? is that another can of Coke? why do you spend so much time at the picture show?”
Such verbal assaults were pleasant compared to the hostility he had towards me during medication induced hallucinations. The Bull could say some mean-spirited things thanks to the heavy doses of medication. In fact, he would often relive old memories and mistake me for someone else. On several occasions he identified me as his brother, who had been dead for 25 years or any one of his sons. Then he would mistake me for a war buddy and tell me that ‘the tanks were coming up over the ridge’. Despite all of these definitive moments, the story that has gone down in family lore was of the time he ejected me from his house for making a mess and not closing up the shop. This is what was happening in his mind, while in reality, I was sitting in the recliner next to his bed watching a John Wayne movie. He became indignant, so I obeyed the wishes of a bedridden man, and sat in the living room until my grandmother returned from the grocery store.
I relived all of this in the blink of an eye, but would return to the emptiness of the room. A single candle, lit as he slowly departed this world for a better one, was glowing across the room. I kept looking over at the bed where he used to be. He would lay on this bed lacking the strength to pull himself up, only being able to leave the bed with the assistance of his brawny grandchildren. This was when the hospital trips became less frequent. This was when rehabilitation ceased. Hope was fading and everyone wished to make his remaining time in this world as comfortable as possible. It was inevitable that he was going to die some day, but when you’re seventeen years old, you pray for miracles. Despite our misconceptions these prayers are often answered. It’s just that people don’t receive the miracle they requested. They receive something that is more difficult to grasp.
I experienced a miracle through the time I spent with my grandfather. The true miracle occurred for me observing the strength of his spirit rise as his physical being crumbled. It is often said that this is when people lose faith, but I found that his faith was strengthening us both. I was determined to have a solid relationship with my grandfather before we lost him. I was willing to spend as much time as God found necessary to let my grandfather know that I really did love him. There was a grace that came over me, each afternoon that I spent sitting in that room with him. Regardless of the situation, whether we were watching a baseball game or Notre Dame Football or an old John Wayne western, there was an unspoken rapport between us. I learned that I could not help him physically, but that I could support him spiritually.
I was left in this room alone. Only hours earlier, I stood at the foot of his bed in his time of dying and watched the almost the entirety of my extended family weep. The two people who held their pain inside were my father and I. We served as bookends to the bed gazing at him, occasionally glancing at one another and giving each other the nonverbal acknowledgement that it was alright to keep it inside. Somebody other than the man who was dying had to be strong. I was reminded of my own mortality, since looking at him on the bed seemed like looking into the future of how I might appear on my deathbed. I am known for my remarkable similarities in appearance with my grandfather as a young man. Through my experiences with him, I absorbed much of his deep belief in God. Despite the strength of our bond, I could not help but be overwhelmed at the stark emptiness of his room. Our bond transcended death itself and remains today. Though at the time, all I could do was sit in the chair and take mild comfort in realizing that his pain had been alleviated.
Patrick McConville 