days with daddy

my fridays with daddy have turned into mondays and other days. it is a roller coaster, and though i wish i could find a more literary term to describe it, that seems apt. how you begin the long slow crawl to what you think is the top, then all things ricochet, up down sideways and backward. then up, down again.

i remember the first roller coaster i ever rode, in myrtle beach back when i was a senior in high school. that trip, like this one with daddy, was all about uncertainty, and it did not end as i would have wanted. i was supposed to love riding the roller coaster, but i didn't. i was scared but i didn't want anyone to know it, so i got back on again.

that's what you do, isn't it? you get back on and see if the next ride will be different. at least that's how it is for me right now. i'm willing to ride again. because i keep thinking one of these days soon it's going to be a joy ride with daddy, and not the scary one we have been on.

years ago, my father and i took a joy ride. it was Ash Wednesday, and when i was little, daddy took wednesday afternoons off. my brother and sister were in school but i was 4, so the two of us set out in a cold rain to ride an hour or so to visit my grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins. as we drove north, the rain turned to ice, and before long, snow covered the road and the telephone poles leaned toward one another, held up only by the power lines.

i could hardly be a reliable narrator recalling a memory when i was 4, but when i think of that day, i see the wipers swishing hard as the whole world turned white, daddy leaning into the dash, his hands gripping the steering wheel. we didn't turn back. daddy kept that car on the road and somehow we reached my grandparent's house. when we arrived, the lights were out, and we found them huddled around a pot belly stove in an upstairs bedroom, trying to stay warm.

it would turn out to be a legendary storm, the Ash Wednesday Storm, a northeaster that battered the outer banks and caused damaged that took years to repair.

now daddy and i are in the middle of a different kind of storm, but in many ways it's the same: he's driving on icy roads, i'm holding on to the seat for fear of slipping.

on the first day of this week, i sit by his side, watching him breathe in and out, look at his blood pressure (good) and try to cool off from beneath the hot yellow gown and purple gloves i have to wear to guard against infection. he is hard to wake, though when i left him a few days before, he stayed awake for much of the day.

so the only certainty is that there is none.

except maybe in the cafeteria. my father has been housed in the hospital now for 47 days. and he has many, many days left. so sometimes when they say it's time to do this or that to him, i end up in the cafeteria, alone, watching, trying to eat something.

the man next to me speaks into his phone, which he lays on the table as he eats a very large salad. his words could be my own: sleeping mostly, i don't think he knows i'm here. concern. sleeping. update. all words i have used myself in the past day. finally he ends his conversation with 'drink plenty of fluids and get some rest.'

i imagine he is talking to his child, updating him or her on the grandfather's life now in ICU, or somewhere on the floors above where we sit. i say a prayer for them, quietly, because i know what he and his family are going through.

looking around, i recognize: the young woman wearing a beautiful Muslim scarf. she is on daddy's lift team, comes around every few hours to shift him in his bed and who now calls him Pop B, just like she is a grandchild. the hospitalist is there, the one when daddy first arrived those many days ago. he saunters up to the cash register, just as he did that first day to daddy's room... sauntered, hands in his pockets, posture that made me feel he didn't care very much about his patient. one thing my daddy doesn't do, never did, is saunter.

everyone else caring for daddy is engaged and concerned, wanting not to pass the time but to make this critically ill man better. and so i tell the nurses and the therapists and the doctors about where he practiced and how long, try to paint a picture of this man who to them is an very sick and aging man. a man can't speak for himself right now.

i know nothing of medicine, but the longer i stay here with him, the more i just want to somehow to story him well, if that makes sense. telling his story, somehow, has to make him better. right?

friday comes, and it is once again my turn to sit. when i arrive, they've shifted daddy's bed into a sort of chair, and he has the paper in his lap. he wears his glasses for the first time in these 47 days, looks so much like himself that i'm startled. i've brought him a soft ball to squeeze because right now he can't use his hands or arms very well, and squeezing the ball will help him grip the wheel again, navigate this icy road. i drop the ball into his hand and say 'squeeze' and he looks at me and does just that.

behind me, players in the ncaa tournament travel back and forth across the floor, tossing another ball, and every now and then daddy looks up. his team is not in the running, but mine is, and i pretend for a moment to be daddy's coach. we work with the balls, he nodding his head, squeezing and dropping, moving his arms just enough to show me he can. i hold my phone in front of him, showing him a picture of his newest great-grandchild and ask him to hand her the ball. he moves it over and places it in front of the picture, smiling at her, his lips forming the thin line i have known my whole life.

'remember the story of the little engine that could?' i ask him, and he nods. 'that book is as old as you are, daddy.' he was two when it was published. might have read it as boy.

ok, daddy, i think you can, i say, urging him to try one more task — to touch his finger to his nose. i'm allowed to lift his elbow but he has to do the rest. we try but he can't quite make it, so take a time out. a few minutes later we try again, and i say: i think i can i think i can... until his narrow finger meets that nose.

so much of his recovery now depends on this kind of work. this knowing that he has inside him what he needs to keep from slipping back down the icy road. what he needs to get well.

by the end of the day he can put the ball in my hand and pick it back up.

have to hit the road, daddy, i say, exhausted myself from being his coach. i'll be back on monday, ready to let him steer once again, while i sit holding onto the seat.


susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

good flying weather, part II

when my mother talked about her wedding day, she would say this: we were married on Flag Day. and that made it easy for me to remember. one of my favorite things to do as a child was to open the secretary drawer in the living room and pull out their wedding album, scouring the pictures for glimpses of the parents i knew. my favorite photo has always been the one when they are leaving the church (i wish i could show you that here) — arm in arm, my mother in her ballet-length crinoline — arm in arm with the skinny boy who would be my dad — looking a little stiff and more than a bit pale in his white dinner jacket. (the next day, he graduated from medical school and moved further away from his family with a girl he'd met only six months before.)

but my mother is smiling a hollywood smile as she steps off the porch of the church that one day i would attend. beaming, she is, a real beauty like she has never been happier in her life. i suspect she knew just what she was ahead.

today is flag day. of course that we wave the flag to honor all who have served under it — including my father, who joined the navy a year after that wedding and would deposit his wife (and new son) with my grandparents before he set sail around the world as the 'doc' on a destroyer. for us, it also means that on flag day, my brother and sister and i get to celebrate the fact that because a skinny boy from gates county, n.c., and a city girl from florida with good-looking legs, happened to meet each other at a dance, we got to be.

their union has lasted for 59 years today. (though i haven't yet called them, i suspect neither has walked out the door.) next year we are planning a throwdown with the FAM, but as they pass yet another year betrothed, i just want to fly that flag a little higher, wave it a little more crazily because i mean 59 years? with one person and nary an argument? twice as many years (and then some) than they ever were apart. i haven't even lived that long but i know it's not such an easy thing to do now is it? just sayin'.

when they'd been married for 50 years, i wrote about them. "they've been through what i've come to understand as several marriages," i wrote, "albeit to the same spouse. the newlywed year, when they were alone and getting to know each other. The next a year later when my father joined the navy. the third one came when they finally settled in a town where they didn't know a soul and made a life together. the last one, crowded with church and children and grandchildren," and now great-grands, "began when my father retired. It may be the best yet."  now that my own children are grown, i realize they actually had another marriage, then one when i moved out of the house and got married myself, forcing them to get to know each other for the first time since way back when they were turning 25. they built a beach house that year — my father's dream — and maybe yet another marriage began when they reluctantly sold it.

throughout every stage, they have been an example for many, including my daughter, who wrote about them last year here.

vance and bj are not storytellers, as i said when i wrote about them in 2002 — never outwardly shared their secret to a happy marriage with us. "they've simply lived it, hoping we would learn by watching."

i guess we did learn a thing or two. my brother and his wife have been married 33 years, my sister and her husband 32, and my husband and i will mark our own three decades together this year.

"what makes marriage last, after the kids are grown, the parents gone, the paying work behind you?" i asked nine years ago. i wish i knew. i only know it's not nearly as easy as the couple who married at 24 on Flag Day have made it seem.

their days now are filled with doctors appointments, with worry about the health of neighbors, about grandchildren with new jobs and new babies, and i imagine, about how many more years they have to together.

their favorite days are spent when all or some of the FAM can be together — like this past saturday, when they got to meet our newest member. my own grandparents met every single one of their great-grands, so since i don't have a grand yet, i'm expecting them to stick around for a good long while.

what joy it must have been to them, to look into little LG's beautiful blue eyes and know that because of them, she got to be, too.  and that the grand ol' flag first unfurled 59 years ago today has some good flying weather left in it yet.

you are what you leave us to read about you

my dear friend says that when she dies, she wants the following in her obit: her name (not her age), her funeral arrangements and her survivors. period. no mention of the fact that she knows how to castrate a bull — wearing her evening clothes under her coveralls if she has to — play a concerto and the showstopper from Mame with the same fervor, or though she dislikes most sports except fox hunting, she has been my cheerleader since the 8th grade.

i am a student of the obit. ever since i can remember — even before i became a journalist — i would scan the obits looking for interesting people. because in the paper, that's where they all are. not on the front page, not in the crime stories (however interesting those are) or on ET or any of those celebrity shows, but there, in the back of the B section, inked in black on gray paper that crinkles when you lean on it.

some days the obits make me chuckle. like one of my very favorite obits, which included the line: and she died with her favorite child at her side. Other parts of that now infamous obit include a father who was so distraught an invention of his had been stolen that he put his head in the oven on thanksgiving, ending his life. but the family ate the bird anyway. What. They were hungry. and this was not his obit, but his daughter's.

i remember being in the shower when my husband came upstairs and said: you have to hear this. (we are both obitophiles), and when I called AB to share it with her, she thought I had written it. (high praise indeed.) that one garnered what felt like dozens of letters to the editor, outrage at the newspaper for printing such a thing, (because the obit not so subtly implied that the unfavorite daughter was gallivanting around the globe while her mother took her last breath (really). other letters came from neighbors of the deceased, who knew her to be just the kind of woman who would poke fun at her own death, with the blessing of her children — favored or otherwise.

Sometimes the social announcements provide fuel for a chuckle, too. Like the couple who after 50 years of marriage, decided to renew their vowels. I saved that one because it spoke to me somehow. All those old vowels have gotten a pretty good workout over the centuries. It's about time somebody renewed them.

but in the obits, i have met some remarkable people. i wish i could tell you about them all. like the man who felt his lasting impression should be the fact that as a boy he got to view the car where bonnie & clyde were shot to death. or the seamstress who had made wedding gowns, setting every single seed pearl by hand.

just today, a woman named pearl was known for sending beautiful pressed flower cards to her friends. and barbara, bless her heart, made memorable icicle pickles. shades of aunt bea, (sort of)

last week, though, an obit touched me like no other i can remember. first of all, it was for a couple.

clem and mary crossland. self-described country mice, dr. crossland and his wife raised five children, among them the physician who would care for them in their end days. they died four days apart, dr. c, quite clearly, of a broken heart. the first line that struck me was this:

"they left as they lived — together, with the lady first."

well, that had me weeping.

and this: "they raised five healthy children whom they lived to see become educated and contributing adults, something that is denied to so many mothers and fathers."

about their mother: "throughout her life, our mother reminded us daily of the admonition from St. Luke: 'For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.'"

my mother never said these things directly to us, but she has lived it.

and then: about the good doctor:"he was an intellectually brilliant and personally humble man who was a superb diagnostician of conditions of both the body and soul."

well. but that is my father. plain and simple. beautifully said.

the obit ended with this:

"there are some debts that are so enormous that they can never be repaid in full, even in a small measure – and the devotion of one's family is one of those. In honor of our parents, we ask that each of you pay it forward by treating your own loved ones with dignity, kindness and compassionate care for as long as you have the strength and resources, for you will not regret a day that you do so."*

of course i was sobbing by then, handing the paper to my husband, who sat across the breakfast table from me, his eyes blinking. 

i found myself thinking all day, and the much of the next: what would my children have to say about me? 

dr and mrs crossland have not left me, not yet. i didn't know them, but i thank their children for giving me a chance to try.

read the full obit here 

My Daddy Doesn't Have FB

My Daddy doesn't know very much about a computer. Every so often he calls me to help him set up his stationery over the telephone, and Mac person that I am, I try to explain to him the nuances of the PC. So of course something like Facebook is lost on him. Every now and then I tell that when I post a picture of him, people who know him will write me and tell me how much they think of him. He's always puzzled by that. Why would they care enough about him to do that?

If only he knew. I grew up knowing that Daddy was one of those men in town who (whom? I never really know) everybody loved. The town "doc" for at first, 42 years, then again for another few. He finally retired for good last December at the age of 81. He spent his last few years as a physician holding his stethoscope to the chests of some of his oldest patients, who now spent their days in the nursing home. He had treated some of them for the entire life of his practice, and then after he retired in 1997, he was there to comfort their families when they died. So many folks missed him, he agreed to go back.

Though Daddy used to play some golf, his knees are bothering him a bit these days, so much of his time is spent in his favorite chair, napping and reading, watching Fox News, and holding Ruby, the King Charles Cavalier Spaniel my sister brought he and my mother all the way from Iowa a couple of years ago. (I will admit that this was the best present anyone has ever given them.) She is the best dog, cuddling close to him, happy just to sit, and he is happy to hold her.

Today is his birthday, and in celebration of all that he is to me, to my family and to the town that raised me, I'm going to try to post a story I wrote about him when he retired the first time. (It is a jpg, so it might take some adjustment to read, i.e: can your read sideways?) If you can't read it, email me.)

Daddy has a long distrust of journalists, despite raising one, so that fact required that before I wrote a word I had to submit my questions in advance, and for two days early in 1997, I sat with him, and with my mother, and talked to them about his years as one of three doctors in my tiny town. (In his last 10 years, he was the only one. ) What he didn't know was that I had been pulling stories out of him for some time. The result, I believe is my best work. Some of you may remember it. It ran in the N&O on Father's Day, and Daddy was so afraid of the backlash that he went all the way to Alaska to avoid being home when the phone rang. And he practically never goes anywhere. He would tell you that I fabricate. Of that, I'm sure. But perception has always meant the truth to me, so there you go.

At the time the story ran,  people from all over the state sent him letters (back when people actually wrote letters, in long-hand.) Every day he received letters from friends and strangers, thanking him for his service, for being that breed of small town doc who cared for so many. "Why are they writing me?" he would ask when I visited. I knew, but he never seemed to figure that one out. One day, though, the letters stopped, and I think he was a little disappointed.

Some people wrote me, too.

One of his friends, Harry Carpenter, who died not long after the story ran, wrote this:

"Perhaps his family and friends can help him understand what a great man we see him to be, and perhaps we can show him how very much we appreciate his stewardship in taking care of ordinary sick folks. A few of these folks undoubtedly also appreciate the measure of the man, a great many more probably take him for granted, and a disoriented minority may have actually taken advantage of his good nature."

My brother is a doctor, and my nephew is learning to be one. On the day Kip graduates from med school in May 2012, he will be the third Graham Vance Byrum to have graduated from Wake Forest University, and from what used to be Bowman Gray School of Medicine. He has some very large shoes to fill, and I don't mean the size 13s Daddy wears (I think Kip wears the same or larger.) My husband, a pr flack, is already planning his pitch. And my sister and I will make sure our Daddy is there to watch his oldest grandson receive his stole. But my brother will tell you that neither he nor Kip will ever be the kind of "Doc" Daddy was. They just don't make them like that anymore.

Daddy doesn't have FB, but I posted happy birthday to him this morning, and so far a couple of dozen people have sent him good wishes. Carol, one of his former nurses who is about my age, says he does still come by the hospital to visit, and that they miss him. I think he misses all of them — his patients and office workers, his nurses, his medicine — as much as they do him.

Happy Birthday, Daddy.  
sbr