by Eutychus55
My family has always had a rather cavalier attitude towards disaster. I had an automobile accident once. A drunk driver broadsided me as I was turning into a shortcut home. The whole driver’s-side window flew into the side of my face. Later I was sitting in the living roon waiting for the police to finish whatever they had to do and for my father to take me to the hospital and the only thing I could think of to do was to look down at my watch and say "Hey, my Timex is still working!"
Everyone laughed, but it wasn't a laugh of shock or even a laugh to relieve the tension. It was more a natural laugh as if everyone would have been surprised if one of us hadn't said something like that. It's not that we laughed in the face of disaster, but I think from my father we'd developed a sort of zen acceptance of dealing with whatever was going to befall us with a sort of stoic grace. And nothing really gravely disastrous had really ever happened to us anyway.
So, I worried how we were going to deal with it when my sister began getting too fatigued climbing some stairs one day and discovered she had what was considered to be a terminal cancer around her heart.
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Claudia was sometimes known as Hank. Even more so, my other sister Dorothy was called Sam. The story goes that one morning they were going to sing a duet in church and the pastor, a lovable Yankee named Frank Chase got up to introduce them and couldn't remember their names. He got up to the pulpit and just stammered "Thank you ... um ... Sam and Hank." The names stuck and for most of the rest of their lives they were always known as Sam and Hank.
I also had a brother named Mike who was the most infuriating scholar you would ever meet. He never went to college much; I don't believe he ever graduated. But if there was ever anything he wanted to learn he would just pick up a book and learn it himself. He works now as a computer consultant back in the Ozarks somewhere, but never took more than a modicum of classes in college about it. Just learned it on his own.
But you could also never tell him he was wrong, and it got to be a game of one-upmanship in the social structure of the family. I remember one time he bought himself a Snickers bar and hid it in the refrigerator to eat later. When he got back to it, it was gone. No one admitted to eating it and for the longest time we never could convince him that he must have eaten it himself. Even in the face of the evidence he wouldn't back down. Eventually, though he figured he must have eaten it but this was years later.
I don't remember my father crying much and I always considered my mother to be the emotional one of the family. Of course, with my father being in the Navy and being gone for anywhere from six to nine months out of the year, it's a wonder I remember much at all of him until he finally retired. Mom had to raise all four of us single-handedly for most of our younger years. That, and having to move every two or three years, must have made her stronger than I realized.
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I was living with Claudia in Providence when I got the call. She became worried when she had started to climb some stairs at work and couldn't catch her breath. She went to her doctor who did a few tests and told her to immediately check into the hospital. The next time I heard from her she was in the intensive care unit. A tumor had formed around her heart and every heartbeat had turned into a struggle. Since I was there, I had to call mom and dad and give them the news.
None of us had ever been in the hospital for anything this serious before. I used to get dad's fishhooks stuck in my fingers when I was younger which prompted some quick visits to the local medical center, but that was really the extent of our medical problems. Dad always seemed like the more calm of the two, so when I called I asked to talk privately with him to give the news and tell mom later.
But when I called back an hour later, mom was calm. It was dad who was crying as if there was no tomorrow.
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Claudia eventually survived her cancer and is still living somewhere in Washington state, as is Dorothy. Dad ended up having heart problems himself and had to have a heart valve replaced with a mechanical valve. He always tells us that if anything ever happens to him, we can always sell him for scrap metal.
And Mike? I suppose I should let you know. It was me who ate your Snickers bar. It's been almost thirty years, but I finally got one up on you.