There were six. And now there is one. They weren’t perfect, but they were mine. And one is the loneliest number.
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The first to die was Sam, a Beagle, of old age, at roughly 84 human years. He lived in the fifties and sixties, a different time, with no leash or poop bags. Mrs. Weinswag, the neighborhood crone three doors up East Street, would complain. Sam was a survivor, with wounds from a car chassis and, likely, a bobcat. In the end, he was blind and deaf and would follow my mom up the stairs one lame step at a time. One Saturday morning, my dad took him to the vet and came back alone.
Paul Gardner, Sr. was next, at 71, in 1993, with sinus cancer that took too long to diagnose. A lifelong Republican, he cast his last vote for Bill Clinton, saying the Christian Right would eventually destroy his party. He was an engineer who worked on cryogenic propellant for the Saturn moon rocket. In retirement, he made multigrain bread products and sold them at farmers’ markets. In his last few months, he built a second railing down into the basement, saying to our mother, “You’ll be in this house a long time, and I don’t want you falling when you do the Monday morning laundry.”
Dad was 35 years right about the Republican Party and about his wife of 43 years. Dody Gardner would live in our childhood home until 2016, when she started wandering outside at night, necessitating that my brother Pat, who lived five miles from Mom and who had been checking in on her every day, move her into a memory care unit where she would live in misery for a year and a half, dying of COPD at 95. Dody was a master bridge player who graduated from college in 1942 and raised my two brothers and me. When I was 13, I came home crying after fighting with a neighborhood kid. “Who started the fight?” she asked. “I did,” I sobbed. “Then it’s your problem, buster.” Her unsympathetic but perfect answer planted a seed that’s still blossoming.
My brother Pat was the youngest and stayed in his hometown, as did his wife, Sue. They were married for 49 years. He was an excellent athlete, an All-State baseball pitcher, which made his death from liver cancer at 70 last year even harder to take. It’s likely this killer cancer was connected to the removal of all of his colon except for a small piece for colitis thirty years ago. According to his oncologist, they should have tested that bit of colon every year. By the time they discovered the disease, it was too late. Pat became a regional sales manager for Sherwin-Williams and retired about a decade ago, partly to have more time to help manage our mother’s decline, with the patience of a youngest son and his mother’s no-nonsense attitude.
My other brother, Peter, born two years after me and four years before Pat, also died last year of lung cancer. Peter, a city manager, left for the south in 1974 and never returned, dying in Florida. When he was two, a car accident resulted in him being catapulted from his mother’s arms out of an open window onto a curb. I was in the front passenger seat and ended up on a grassy boulevard, not seriously injured. As a result of his injuries, Peter’s left arm and leg were malformed. Sadly, Pat and I lost touch with Peter in the last five years. After Pat’s death, I discovered Peter had been in an Assisted Living facility for two years and that his wife, Pamela, had just died. Fortunately, I was able to FaceTime with my brother many times before his death last January.
So, Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles, when you ask about a family tradition, and since we are heading into Christmas season, I’m going to start playing a Christmas album my family put on the brand new 1955 stereo every season while we gathered in the rarely used living room with the decorated tree on Christmas Eve, tearing into gifts, lighting the fire, drinking eggnog, lingering for midnight Mass, salivating for my mother’s chocolate pie, arguing about whatnot, and listening for Sam’s ” Let Me In ” bark.
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