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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
March 27, 2005
Published as Family History
in a WIP dated October 17, 2000.
© 2000 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Last Portrait by Dad, 2000
© 2000 by Bud Grossmann
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OUR DAVID HAS DIED
In the hours after my son passed away, on the afternoon of August 7 of this year, I made many phone calls. Late that night, I composed an e-mail message reciting the essential details of the event:
David Eng Fai Wong Grossmann, born October 19, 1981, died at home at approximately 2:20 p.m. Hawaiian Standard Time, on Monday, August 7, 2000. He had recently been hospitalized with pneumonia. We thank our Lord for David’s good life on earth, and we find comfort in the promise of life eternal.
Phone calls, e-mail. What ever happened to ink-on-paper, good old-fashioned letters? In the last year of my son’s life, I sent out hardly anything at all. Now, ten weeks more have slipped away.
Yesterday, on the phone, a friend delivered a Snap-Out-of-It lecture about my writer’s block. “I don’t have writer’s block,” I insisted. “I have mailer’s block.”
All these months, I’ve been scribbling words on scraps of paper, sometimes filling full sheets of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven with poetry or prose. What I have not been finding the ambition to do is to type out a two-pager, submit it to my editors, make the changes they persuasively propose, print a final copy, run it through the Xerox machine, punch holes for three-ring binding, fold each crisp, tinted sheet, slip it into a white envelope and slide my tongue across the flap, rubber-stamp the return address, peel and apply an address label, press a postage stamp on the upper right, and drop the finished product in a mail box.
Mailer’s block. How could I have mailer’s block? Now that my beloved boy is gone, I have all the time in the world.
Here is an unsent letter, something I wrote in January:
At age eighteen, David is frail with heart problems related to Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy. He goes to school, but for only one class each day. He gets around in a power wheelchair and leads a reasonably full life, but he requires assistance in dozens of everyday tasks.
Some of that assistance, like picking up a pen, takes but a moment. My son’s quiet voice calls from the intercom on my desk: “Dad. I dropped my pen. Can you please come to my room?” No problem. Takes only a moment to pick up a pen. (That is, if we don’t count the travel time. It’s about thirty-five steps, I just now verified, from my desk to David’s. About twenty-five seconds going, twenty-five seconds back, if I don’t get sidetracked somewhere along the way. Ah, but it’s those sidetracks that steal away my days!)
Some tasks—noseblowing, for example—take longer than a moment. “Dad, can you come get me a Kleenex?” He’s in bed, resting after lunch. When I get there: “Can you lift my arm?” Honk, blow. “Thank you. One more, please.” Honk, blow. “One more.” Honk, blow. “Another, please.”
Every evening, we have bedtime rituals. After Dave has showered, and after he’s had a snack and has flossed and brushed his teeth, I move his bony body onto his bed. He’s eighty-five pounds. Not much, but enough to send a sting through my lower belly, reminding me I’ve worn out the warranty on a hernia repair. Dave and I do his “stretchies,” a few gentle leg lifts, a few cautious flexings of the ankles. After those, David asks me to put him into a sitting position with his legs crossed, Indian-style. He then begins a repetitive process of flopping forward (and having me raise him up again) so he can settle his butt precisely where he wants it on the mattress. One evening, after the stretchies, I told him, “Dave, I don’t have time tonight to do seventeen lifts. Let me ask your mother to help you.”
He said, “Dad, it’s not seventeen lifts. I’ll be quick.”
So, okay, I stayed. But I was curious. I figured he was probably right, that I was exaggerating when I said “seventeen.” But I wondered exactly how many lifts it really would be. Flop, lift. One. Flop, lift. Two. I counted them. After Dave was lying comfortably, I continued to count when he asked me to lift his arms, one and then the other, so he could scratch his head. When he asked me to rearrange his permanently bent legs and place his feet just precisely so, I quietly counted every lift. When he asked me, I lifted his shoulders and fluffed his pillows.
At last my son said I could summon his mother for her part in the ceremonies. She would bring a drink of water, massage Dave’s hands, read a story, turn out the light. I announced the count: “Twenty-two lifts, David! It wasn’t seventeen lifts, it was twenty-two!”
The kid chuckled. Unapologetically. “Dad,” he said, “you can’t count the ones that don’t hurt your stomach!”
One midnight in June, in a San Francisco hotel room, on a trip with Dave and his high school senior class, I counted bedtime lifts once more. Fifty. Exactly fifty lifts, big and small, before my son let me turn out the light. By August, the numbers were beyond tabulation. But now, in October, zero.
Zero.
Zero.
Zero.
No more lifting.
And yet I wonder: Why can’t I lift an envelope and drop it in the mail?
♦
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Words of the Week
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Thanks! BUD GROSSMANN
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