The Loser's Thanksgiving

Most people he knows would rather be doing something else today. 

The women are doing the cooking (Still! In 2011!) and the men are going because the women are making them.

The Complete and Total Loser is doing what he wants. When he turned 50 a few years ago he decided to slip off the shackles of tradition that require such days to be observed so he spends them solo, eating a simple meal, snoozing and reading. Soon, he'll visit his father in the rehabilitation facility he's been in since a mild stroke led to a fall last week. He will stay in his father's and late mother's house. He has a book to read, a Netflix movie to watch, and laundry to do. It's gotten chilly and he's dialed the thermostat up to 70. 

The Loser's father eats institutional food for Thanksgiving. 

The Loser Dislikes Marathons

Thousands of people, clogging up vital routes, making it hard for The Complete and Total Loser to bicycle to work. Helicopters overhead, loudspeakers with gabby DJs making dumb jokes, bucket-list runners. Why the hell are they held in cities? They should go out where the air is clean and the roads open. 

As the Loser crossed the road a woman said, "Why can't you go around that way?" The Loser is usually very polite and accommodating, but in this case he said to the woman, "Because I want to go this way. If you don't like it, blow it out your ass." Honestly, he never talks that way. 

The Loser wonders what Phileidippides would have said if he'd been told that one day his fatal run would be done by flat-chested women with great legs who do it for fun and later go shopping. Kind of a stupid thing to wonder, actually, but he is a Complete and Total Loser.

Marathoners screw up even pedestrian and bicycle traffic as they compete in an annual race.

Hospital Beds

The room the Complete and Total Loser's father is in is a good one but like all the rest is structured for medical work more than comfort. It has an amazing bathroom with a shower the Loser would kill to have. The view isn't good; an interior courtyard, interesting only architecturally. (The Loser now wishes he had done something about the room his mother died in last month. She could only see a brick wall.) In all the hospital rooms the Loser's seen the past few years however good the view is the patients aren't able to see it. The beds are always angled toward the TV. 

The bed has a perfect mattress and side rails that protect but don't confine. Large tables swing over at a perfect height for reading or eating. And from the panel on the inside you can turn on a radio, a TV, a light or call a nurse to tend to intimate functions. 
The Loser puzzled over how small his parents have seemed in these beds. Yes, they both have been ravaged by time. Both were five foot ten in younger days and sturdy. His mother weighed less than a hundred pounds at her death and his father, 91, has little muscle mass now. So there's that. But still. Small. 

The Loser finally realized why this is so: It's the beds. They articulate, another control. The positions they choose is never flat so their bodies are bent, crumpled, like a snake lying on an accordion, and so they appear shorter than ever. 

The Loser's father rests after a hard day of medical tests.

The Other Shoe

An old phrase has been going through The Complete and Total Loser's head since a few days after his mother's death three weeks ago: Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The phrase is not that old. It's not from the Bible, Chaucer or Shakespeare. It seems more likely, according to the Loser's lazy Internet research, to be from the Vaudeville era and from a boarding house story in which a man drops one shoe noisily, waking his sleep companions, who then brace for the sound of the other shoe. The sound never comes as the man realized the impact of the first so he removes the second shoe with care and puts it quietly on the floor. Time passes. Finally, an irate neighbor shouts for the man to drop the other shoe and get the noise over with.

Earlier this evening the Loser got a phone call from the suburbs from a kind neighbor. His father, age 91 and alone for the first time had fallen. Not too serious, it turns out (he called for an ambulance himself), but he'll stay in a hospital overnight. He's taking medication for shingles and other things and not eating as well as he should. 

The Loser, after consulting with his brothers about their father's condition, will go to the house after work tomorrow and spend the night. It looks now like the Loser will move in to the house sooner rather than later unless his father rebounds enough from his grief to eat right.

The phrase refers to waiting for the inevitable, waiting to get something unpleasant over with so one can continue as before. It's a cheery phrase because it implies that the unpleasant thing will happen fast, like ripping off a Band Aid. This is inaccurate, however. The dropping of that second shoe won't happen fast. It will descend toward the grimy boarding house floor as if falling through syrup, yet it will, despite its slow speed, make a jarring bang when it hits.

Reading and the Time

He's reading a little better but the Complete and Total Loser is still dozens of pages from finishing The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a novel he began reading months ago. That's his "home book." When he visits his father in the suburbs he reads the David McCullough biography on John Adams. It was the last book his mother read. It's a nice escape of sorts, a trip to a past in which there were smart people in times that were simpler in some ways.

Meanwhile, he wants to get one of the cheap new Kindles, the one with a touch screen. Stupid, and the Loser doesn't need it; he has a backlog of books to read which, if stacked, would be taller than he is, which is five nine on his good leg. He knows it would be stupid to spend over $100 to satisfy his gadget curiosity and that if he resists the impulse it will fade in a week or two.

A Web site he likes tells the time. It's clear, pared down and it appears huge on his computer screen. He also likes the time site his government has, though it seems to make his browser crash. But it has a small world map with a parabolic representation of where the sun is shining and where it is dark that will explain more about the seasons and movement of the Earth than many books. If you look at it long enough, you can see the world turn.

Signals

The time is early last summer -- or was it late spring? -- and the Complete and Total Loser's mother, dead for seventeen days now, has summoned a tree service worker to talk about tree removals in the back yard. She has always been a high-maintenance control freak, a label she ignored rather than disputed, and having needless work done in and around the house is a way for her to get attention as her powers diminish.

She wants three perfectly healthy trees removed but her timing in having the tree man come is bad; the Loser, the family nature lover, is there. After the man examines the trees, the Loser asks the pertinent question: Is there any benefit to removing them? Are they diseased? Do they present any danger to anything? The answer is no on all counts and the Loser gets the man out after some minutes of heated discussion between he and his mother.

He ends the discussion after the tree worker has left with this:

"Mom, how much longer do you think you're going to live in this house?" Her health is failing precipitously and she's talked of moving to an assisted living facility.

"Five years," she says, though she doesn't say it like that. What she says is more like, "Five years?" Her eyes widen.

The Loser sees in her face at that moment a mix of helplessness and denial that pangs him but he suppresses at the time.

"OK," the Loser says. "Five years. So why not let those perfectly healthy trees stay there and let whoever moves in after you and Dad move decide what to do with them?"

She doesn't mention the trees again for what turns out to be the rest of her life.

The Loser is beginning to see that exchange and other things as signals of her impending demise. Some are subtle and just entering his consciousness. Others seemed obvious then but the Loser preferred to perceive them differently at the time. (What good does dwelling on gloom do?)

On one of his weekly visits the Loser's mother says, "I found something of yours the other day." It was a tiny wooden chest, a souvenir she'd gotten in Florida in the mid 1960s and given to the Loser. It's the size of a stack of four decks of playing cards and the Loser used to store his boyhood coin collection. It had been missing for decades and he'd thought of it sometimes but assumed that it was just one of those things that gets lost as the years pass. Where had she had it? Why did she find it now? Was she going through old things? If so, why?

Unmoored

It's upscale, the area the Complete and Total Loser's father's house is in, but like any crowded suburb these days diversity is key to commerce and profit. This means that despite the region's population of the upper crust, old monied and elderly residents there are enough working class folks around to support a Wal*Mart. And a Hooters restaurant.

It's been there for years, the Hooters, and it stands out on a corner near a huge shopping mall. The Loser and others drive by it while on their way to classier places. On Tuesday, the Loser drove by when he went to pick up some speaker wire at a Best Buy. (There are people who work at Best Buy, nice enough guys, who are unaware that their store sells something as low-tech as a 50-foot spool of speaker wire, by the way.) 

He's passed it many times, but this time, two weeks after his mother's death, something strange happened: He almost went in. 

As the Complete and Total Loser's faithful readers (number: zero) know, the Loser is not successful with women. He's never had a girlfriend and he hasn't had sex since 1997. He knows that the shallow stuff -- prostitutes and the like -- will not fill the void in his life and that trying to do so will only look pathetic to others and himself while magnifying his loneliness. Still, he was tempted. Why not go someplace and be waited on by a smiling woman in provocative clothes? he asked himself. The fries are excellent, he's heard, and while he's no fan of chicken wings (horrible, greasy little things only palatable when drunk) there are other items he'd probably eat. 

He realized something he'd already known on some level: We live, many of us, by our parents' prescriptions more than we know. The Loser is no mama's boy. They ended on a good note these past few years, though his bitterness at his failed life sometimes took its aim at her. But he's gone months barely speaking to her and was hardly the doting son for years at a time. He lived overseas for half a decade without one visit home.

Wanting to go to a boob joint after her death made the Loser realize the extent to how much her judgment has meant to him his entire life. Without her alive, he feels free in ways he'd rather not.

The funny thing is, she'd probably have encouraged him to go to a Hooters. She'd always hoped he'd meet a nice girl and find love and expressing at least some interest in the company of women would have made her happy.

Dying Scene 2: Swabs and Bubbles

She will never eat again. Her choice. Really, looking back, the Complete and Total Loser's mother was eating a minimal amount for months, always with a current excuse.

"My stomach hurts."

That kind of thing. She was wasting away, not that everyone looks strong and thick at 80. She wanted strawberry smoothies and other fluids but barely touched protein, saying her daily Boost, the drink for seniors that has around 300 calories, was adequate.

She will drink, on this morning of last full day of her life. The Loser, at her request, holds a cup of water with a straw to her mouth and she takes a few sips. She still knows who the Loser is, he can tell, but doesn't really acknowledge him directly. By noon she doesn't drink but asks for swabs.

The swabs are little sponges about an inch and a half long by an inch on the end of a plastic stick. You dip them in water and bite on them to release the water or juice on them. They're a safe alternative to crushed ice, the Loser guesses, and you'd never see them outside a hospital.

For hours, the Loser dipped the swabs in a Styrofoam cup of water and puts them in his mother's mouth. She squeezed the swabs between tongue and pallet to get water. Her tongue was dark, almost black. After some dips, the swabs get gunky. The Loser throws them out and opens a new one.

Meanwhile, the Loser's mother wore one of those double plastic tubes in her nose for oxygen. There's a little box on the wall with water in it. The oxygen bubbles through the on its last leg from someplace beyond the wall to his mother's failing lungs. The bubbling is a steady, pleasant sound, soothing, like sounds from his parents' small koi pond.

Big Boy Shoes

"My wife died five days ago," the Complete and Total Loser's father tells anyone who will listen. 

It's a lie. The Loser, his brothers and his father are two weeks out from her death. It's a forgivable mistake, given that after 59 years of marriage two weeks might as well be five days, but the Loser dislikes it when anyone imparts sad information to get sympathy from strangers.

Grief, to the Loser, isn't some bad substance that lessens when you spread it around. It's a private thing that aches within, and sharing it with others is a sign of weakness. The Loser has always reacted with anger when his father shows such signs. It's important to the Loser that he respect his father. Why would the guy coming to clean up fallen tree branches need to know this? What difference could it make to the woman at the shoe store?

About the shoes. Why are the elderly so stubborn sometimes? The Loser's father has been wearing beat up moccasins for months now. He put on a decent pair of shoes for the funeral a week ago and a pinched nerve burned for days afterward. The Loser kidnapped his father today, driving him to a shoe store after his father voted and insisted that he try on a few pairs. The store specializes in making comfortable shoes and it's where the Loser, a cripple, of course, buys his left shoe every few years. His father fought this the whole time, only grudgingly entering the store.

The woman was nice and used to dealing with the elderly. She listened to the Loser's father, shared her own stories (her husband of 32 years died of an aneurysm two years ago), and let the old man's crankiness roll off. By chance, two other women came in the store at different times and both raved about the shoes there. One, on hearing of his father's nerve problem, urged him to get the widest shoe he could and not, under any circumstance, let a doctor persuade him to seek a surgical solution. He bought a wide pair.

Now the Loser's father is sporting black leather shoes. The closures are Velcro, which makes sense when you're 91 and no longer fond of laces. The Loser slipped the proprietor his debit card and had her ring up the sale as fast as she could. 

The Loser's father carries his late wife's ashes, delivered minutes before, from the kitchen to the bedroom.

 

Life with Father

Single his whole life, The Complete and Total Loser has no reason not to spend his days off, Monday and Tuesday (the Loser works in retail, low level), with his father, who's 91, since his mother died October 25. 

This is week one.

The Loser came back to the suburban house Sunday night after five days in the city. He was worried about what he'd find. Yes, his father has taken care of himself and his mother for the past year, two, sort of, but life without his wife of just under 59 years -- how would that be?

Undecided. The house is tidy. The Loser found his father in his favorite position; standing in front of the TV in the kitchen, watching it, eating cheese, sipping a drink. The sink is empty, the dishes washed. Fine. 

But. He hasn't watered the plants the Loser brought inside last Tuesday during the cold snap. He hasn't eaten any eggs and the bread is all still there. There are four messages on the answering machine going back three days that he hasn't heard. He is clean and he talks of throwing away tax records he's kept for ten, fifteen years. 

He's hard to reason with. Always true, but it seems worse. The example: He wore dress shoes to the service last Monday. These days he's been wearing loose shoes, little more than slippers, everywhere, complaining of edema. At the end of the day, after wearing the dress shoes for less than five hours, he had a sharp pain in one foot. The pain, six days later, is subsiding but still comes and goes. The Loser offered to take him to a shoe store that specializes in comfort shoes and the old man flat out said no. No. Doesn't need them, he said. It took the Loser several minutes to persuade him to go and even then it's a maybe. 

After his father went to bed the Loser checked his email and found this from an old family friend a few years younger than his mother:

I did call your Father once and he said he didn't want phone calls. I asked if he wanted to have lunch with Joan and me next Wed and he said NO. But I will call on Tues and ask again. I know it is soon for him.

The Loser is starting to worry. 

Dying Scene 1: The Perfect Touch

The nurse is slim and carries herself well. She's around 40, maybe late 30s, and lean, trim. She's the Complete and Loser's type, but he's not really thinking along those lines now as this nurse is caring for his dying mother. 

The nurse, her name is Lauren, is the day shift nurse and works a 12-hour shift, which she tells the Loser she likes because she can get involved with her patients and get a better feel for what's happening with them. It also means a four-day week, but her schedule is complicated and she works weekends sometimes. When the Loser worked in a hospital in the 90s it was a pediatric hospital and the nurses wore a variety of brightly colored scrubs. This is not a pediatric unit and the nurses wear tailored scrubs, all dark -- but not navy -- blue. They look professional in these. (One poor nurse is so fat she wears a maroon top as they don't make a uniform her size. The Loser's heart aches for her.)

When she says goodbye to the Loser at the end of her shift, she reaches out with her left hand and sort of rubs his right arm up and down a few times, ending with two pats. It's the perfect way for her to touch him. It's human contact and consoling, but its duration and method don't indicate intimacy. 

The Loser's cynical enough to know he's not the first to merit physical contact with this nurse, but charitable enough to think it's not a practiced method she's been taught. 

A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney

Andy Rooney, dead at 92. The Complete and Total Loser liked him. Not for his observational powers or writing ability but because he is the last of his era to appear on a weekly, national news show of the reputation and reach of 60 Minutes. 

The Loser, with his own current loss (see any previous post of the last few weeks) hadn't known Rooney was ill. Now he can only see Rooney's death through his personal filter. 

Both Rooney and the Loser's father had a solid purpose in life; Rooney, his broadcast; the Loser's father, his wife's care. Both lost those purposes. Both are over 90. One is dead.

Uh-oh.

Andy Rooney

Back at Work

Today was the Complete and Total Loser's first day back at work since his mother died last week. Remarkable, how ordinary things seemed. Polite expressions of sorrow from some coworkers, some conversations with others. The youngest among them remained silent, which the Loser found curious at first until he remembered that such an event is new in scope to them and even those who've experienced such loss have done so under a filter of youth and their experience is remote from the Loser's. 

He is an expert on loss now, of course. This stage of it, anyway. His expertise will fade over time as he adjusts to the new reality of having only one parent. 

The Loser Writes on a Train

The Complete and Total Loser grabbed a free alternative weekly from a box before the train to the city arrived. He opened it once seated and found he'd read it days before. So he took out the small book with blank pages he'd been using to make notes and to-do lists in over the past week and wrote instead. 

It's been a week. I'm on a train, one of the old ones with dirty, sagging seats, on my way back to the city. I left my second bike at Devon Station. Will it be there and intact on Sunday when I return? Can't say. Don't care. 

A plus to the old trains: No loudspeakers blaring out the stops at ear-splitting decibels due to incompetent microphone use. It's like the old days, the conductor announcing, except the conductor is black.

Two seats in front of me is an African-American man, an albino. Pink skin, white hair. He seems fascinated by what's happening behind him and turns to look often. I don't turn and I hear nothing out of the ordinary. A couple talking. It's a mystery and a little troubling. He is looking beyond me. Good.

It's 4:30 in the afternoon, the first of November. Sunlight slanted through thinning trees strobes irregularly in the train car. Fast, then slow. Stop. Slow, then fast. The movement of the train.

It's been one week and eight hours now since my mother died. Tonight will be my first back in my noisy, cluttered apartment since before that. I have no idea what it will be like.

A restless albino rides on a train.

How the Loser Spent Halloween

Fifty nine years ago Monday, October 31, 2011, the Complete and Total Loser's parents got married. At 11 a.m. this same day the Loser, his brothers, over 200 people and the Loser's father gathered in a church for his mother's funeral rites. 

The Loser spoke to the gathered. It went well, considering that he has never, in his life, spoken in public. He didn't fall apart or blow more than one line. He's not sure his remarks were appropriate. People seem big on biography and the mentioning of many names in eulogies. The Loser mentioned just three names: His mother, his father, and Kurt Vonnegut. That's another story.

On Saturday the phenomenal storm knocked out the power in the suburban house the Loser has shared with his father for a week now. When the power goes off, the heat does, too, and the house temperature dropped to the low 50s. Cold for inside. The Loser knows he shouldn't whine; the storm killed a dozen and many others are still without power. At 10:35, as the Loser and his father did their final inspection for the service, checking ties, making sure buttons were buttoned, the power came back. Lights glowed, the refrigerator hummed, digital devices reset their clocks and beeped. The Loser was tempted to look heavenward and to thank his mother for this but A) he is not a magical thinker and B) if she had a hand it in, it would have been damn nice of her to get things on the night before, as had happened in many areas nearby. 

The Loser spent the last hours of the evening writing Thank You cards to friends who had expressed their condolences. Being a Loser, he has few friends so there were only eight. He actually wrote to everyone who attended the service on his behalf. A childhood friend, a coworker, a couple he's known for over a decade. Three cards.

Her favorite chair is a comfortable one, and the Loser sat in it using a book she liked as a hard surface to write on. Flowers from the service sat before him. He wrote in cursive, meaning that if the recipients keep the cards their grandchildren surely won't be able to read them. The Loser will put stamps on the envelopes tonight and mail the cards tomorrow. Done. Over.