Winter of 2011 brought with it the regular grey skies and sheets of fog that roll in to Santa Cruz from the sea, spreading out into the valley, snagging on the tips of trees, and gently lapping against the pine lined peaks of the Santa Cruz Mountains . This was a season of change. The weather grew colder and the sidewalks of downtown were quieter with just the feet of the locals. This was my first winter back to the States after having spent the previous eight years living overseas. I had a new apartment, a new job, and a new set of friends. And recently, my stepfather’s terminal cancer had taken a turn for the worse leaving us all wondering about the future.
I loaded my truck with the lumber I’d bought and headed up over Highway 17 through the Bay Area, and north toward my parent’s home in Oregon. I’d just moved into a small studio that would serve as a space for my photography and a place to lay my head. It was all about properly using the space, so I decided to build a simple loft. With Pat’s illness, I wasn’t sure how many more times I would be able to see him, so I thought the loft would be a project that we both could do together. A man who defined himself by what he accomplished each day around the house, he’d been growing increasingly frustrated with his physical limitations, and recently, with his cognitive abilities, as well.
Mount Shasta dumps down into Weed, California, and splits off east through a beautiful, flat landscape of shrubs and bare white branches that catch the sunlight and stand out starkly against the dark underbrush. It was quiet here. I drove along with my window rolled down and my heater cranked up, something I learned during my morning commutes along the ocean in Southern California. The cold air hits my nostrils while my body stays wrapped in the warmth of the heater vents. I looked at the clock and calculated my arrival time, grabbing another pinch of sunflower seeds I bought at the gas station in the last town.
I started to wonder how the loft project would go. Pat had always been a old codger even before he was particularly old. He dominated conversations and he knew something about everything under the sun. His years growing up hard and trauma from the time he spent in the Vietnam War left him rough and closed. He wasn’t one to admit to weakness or mistake, and praise from Pat was hard to come by. But when I’d come home from overseas, Pat had questions. We would sit on the front porch, and he would smoke and ask me about the food or if women could drive and then he’d repeat a story from his time in the army, one that I’d heard last year, probably. But I appreciated his interest and these moments of humility. “I’m still waiting for my coffee,” he would say. “Well, ten minutes ago you said you didn’t want any,” my mom would say. “Well, damn it, I do now.”
Pat was thrilled about the loft project and we decided we would start the next morning. I got up and poured some tea and found my seat in the morning room, looking out the window at a squirrel inching out onto a narrow branch of a pine tree, his tail twitching behind him as he went. “Alright, let’s get out there and get moving,” Pat said under his knit stocking cap.
“Pat, let me just check these emails and finish my tea, first,” I said, wiping my eyes.
“When I say I’m ready to go, I mean now!”
I took a breath and said nothing. I usually just went along with what Pat said and tried to let things roll off my back. And now that he’s sick, any thoughts to the contrary felt so insensitive. I grabbed my jacket and went outside. He had a plan, a sketch he’d drawn up, and it was much more intricate than what I had in mind. His had four inch bolts, a ladder made from 4x4s, and a bed over 3/4 inch plywood reinforced every few inches by a 2×4 strut. There were decorative post caps, and all screws were counter-sync’d and plugged. “This baby will support any of your fat girlfriends. You could get ten people up here if you wanted.” When I told him that I didn’t really want to get ten people up and that I was hoping to do something a little less expensive and little more portable, he snapped. “I don’t do anything half-ass, so you can get that #$% out of your mind right now.”
The work was tense and tedious. Pat was confused and the numbers weren’t sticking like they used to. Measurements were botched and my lack of carpentry skills drove him to fits from time to time. The loft was a beast, and once it started to take shape, moving it around was almost more than we could manage. My mother would peek out the window every few minutes and come out to the garage occasionally to check on us and mitigate the damage. She would give me an understanding look and offer gentle suggestions that would be answered with scoffs.
The next day required another $300 in hardware and couple trips to the store, but a night of rest did us both good and things started to come together much more easily. That evening, we sat in the living room looking out the window at the final product looming over my mom’s little Honda in the garage. “So, what do you think of that? Sturdy enough for you? You think it’ll do the trick?” It was sturdy enough to support a truckload of sumo wrestlers I thought but didn’t say. Pat’s eyes were full of pride as he stared out beyond me, warming his cold hands around a cup of coffee. He looked frail in his chair. The project had worn him out. “Yep, that thing will last forever,” he said. “It’ll last forever.”
Then it hit me. The last couple days had left my nerves raw and my wallet hollow, but now I felt a sudden shame for my pettiness. I now saw that Pat wasn’t just building a loft, he was building a legacy. Something that would outlive him. Something that would stand up against outside forces and win. Something that would weather the attacks of time, of disease, of our damned mortality, and stand firm and proud, and in one glorious piece.
A few days later we took the loft apart and put the three large pieces in my truck to take it back to Santa Cruz. It took a friend and I about 2 hours to wrestle the pieces up the U-shaped stairway in our building, gouging the walls and railing as we went. When it was finally in my room and assembled, we stood back to look at the fruit of our labor. “Look at that,” I said. “That thing will last forever.”
Pat asked me about the loft every time I spoke to him throughout the next year. He could no longer take on projects that were so physically demanding, so he began to make candles. He bought molds, waxes, and scents; glass jars, wicks, and a display shelf for his creations. He struck up a deal with the local coffee shop to sell his candles, but times are hard and people around here are just getting by, so not many sold. Pat made regular trips to the shop to chat with the kind and sassy owner, Teresa, and to check on his display, straightening candles and rearranging the shelves so they looked just right. Teresa wasn’t selling much coffee either. She talked of closing up shop and moving to the coast.
That Christmas, I got two candles from Pat. He had chosen three primary colors for the first one, while the second one was a pentagon of deep purple. He took me to the workshop and showed me how the wax was melted and layered in the glass jar. He showed me all the other candles he’d made and told me who each one was for. His hands were shaky and his fingers stained yellow from years of smoking as he turned off the light and pulled the door closed to head back inside. That evening as we sat on the front porch, I could see his mind was leaving him. His sharp wit seemed scattered and he would sometimes trail off halfway through a thought. “Yeah, those damn Koreans can make good products,” he said as we were talking about the new LG oven we’d bought. “But don’t try to read the manuals! Did you ever try to read the manuals? They don’t make a damn bit of sense…. and I just want the pain to go away.” Then his eyes closed and he nodded off to sleep.
The next summer, I moved overseas again. I had to demolish the loft to get it downstairs, something I never did tell Pat. He was furious when he found out I didn’t take it overseas with me. Each time he’d bring it up, I’d change the subject. When I got home for Christmas, I found a different man in the seat where Pat used to sit. His eyes were sunken in, and a trail of tubing from the oxygen compressor followed him through the house and got tangled on the legs of his walker. Pat had begun to push my mother away, his words angry and full of venom. His frustration made him even more stubborn. Sometimes she would call the neighbors to help lift him when he had tried to make it out to the shop without his walker, tumbling into the gravel path along the side of the house. He’d wander out to the porch in the middle of the night and fall asleep with a cigarette in between his tired, bent fingers.
He would nod off often, sometimes in between sentences in a conversation. And recently, he had begun a new and troubling habit. In his dosing, he would chant, again and again, slowly, rhythmically, in a voice full of desperation, the word “no”, until he would eventually wake himself up. It was this verbal battle against death that we would hear throughout the house all day long, every few minutes. No, no, no. Not angry, but sad and dry like the fall leaves.
The week before Christmas vacation, the purple candle burned down and went out completely. It was all used up except for a bit of wax stuck to the sides of the jar. As the days approached, I got occasional updates from Mom. Pat was not eating, and he was mostly bedridden now. I boarded the plane knowing that this might be my last Christmas with Pat.
When I pulled up outside the driveway that Christmas Eve afternoon, I met our family friend, Sandy. “Are you prepared for what you’re going to see in there?” she asked me.
“What am I going to see?”
“Well, he’s very thin. Not much more than skin and bones.”
I walked in and found his tiny form in a hospital bed that had been set up in the living room. His chest rose and fell, a labored, rattling wheeze escaping past his sunken cheeks and lips. He was sleeping and had apparently been doing so for the past day. On the table next to his bed, wrinkled and stained with coffee, was a stack of letters that we all had written to him a couple weeks before. Sandy and Cindy thought if we told him what he meant to us, if he knew we’d remember him, maybe he’d be able to let go. Mom said she’d come into the room several times over the past days and found him reading them. She said that one day, slightly panicked, he told her to call me because he thought he’d misplaced my letter.
Mom took his thin, pale hand. I stood back at a distance, looking on, uncomfortable, separate, awkward. This didn’t seem like Pat, and the distance between us seemed immense and unnavigable.
“Come say hi,” my mom said.
It didn’t seem right. I didn’t want to wake him or maybe I didn’t think that he would wake up. I came close and took his hand. “Hi, Pat,” I said. His eyes opened, but they weren’t aimed. They were rolled back and trying to right themselves. They settled on me. He opened his mouth but some moments passed before the sound came out. His voice was faint and skeletal.
“Hi.”
“Are you comfortable?” Why did I ask if he was comfortable? I was just filling up the silence, and I felt stupid for my question. He looked like he wanted to answer, and then he closed his eyes and was off again.
I went to bed that night thinking I might never see him again. The next morning, it was Christmas. The light through my window was hazy and reluctant. As I left the bedroom, my sister who had slept on the couch next to Pat’s bed, met me in the hallway. She said she thought Pat had just died. She’d seen him take one breath… another breath… and then the third one never came. We got Mom and stood next to his bed. He was still and there was no pulse. The room was strangely calm. I glanced up at the ceiling looking for traces, looking for Pat. I’d read about people in near death experiences hovering over the room, looking down, giving us one last glance. But there was nothing.
Just before she woke up, my sister had had a dream. Pat had died and a woman and man were working busily around Pat’s bed. Suddenly, he sat up laughing and shouted, “I did that three times!” If this dream was some kind of a window into the supernatural, Mom thinks it may be referring to two other times when Pat almost died: once in Vietnam, and once in a terrible car accident. And now this time, the third time.
Later that day, when all had calmed down, and we sat in the hollow void, we tried to make sense out of this moment when everything faded. Pat fought and held on longer than anyone anticipated. He beat his original prognosis by 17 days. He had waited until both my sister and I were here to make his exit. It was for my mom. He wanted her to be surrounded by love. And that’s when he gave us one last glance. It was his gift to us despite his own suffering. Yet he was still ornery enough to do it on Christmas.
Photo by Carol Lanctot
the rogue and peasant slave 