Italian Grotto Eggs
My father had a bad back. He'd had trouble for as long as I could remember, ever since a cross-country skiing accident when I was a baby. He'd been skiing with me on his back in a frame pack, and he'd lost his balance. To keep from falling backward and crushing me, he sat down instead. After that, his back would go out sometimes, every now and then, and for a day or two he would stand crooked, his spine listing to one side. But he was a doctor, and he kept a tackle box full of pills in his bathroom drawer. He took them when he needed them. We all did. We didn't think much of it.
One night—I think it was the fifteenth of September, the day after my twenty-fourth birthday—he was in Toronto for a family bat mitzvah, and he stumbled on the stairs to his cousin's house. He'd been having back pain for a while, but he hadn't told anyone. He was never the type to talk about those sorts of things. But now the pain was so bad that he thought he might have broken something. I had moved to Seattle only a week earlier, and he and my mother called one night to tell me. It might be a broken vertebra, he said, or maybe a spinal infection. Instead, a couple of days later, a bone scan showed that it was cancer. It had started in one of his kidneys but had been growing for a while, creeping into the bones of his spine. He was a radiation oncologist, so he knew what it meant.
"What a kick in the ass," he said.
My mother told me the plan. He would have his kidney removed, and then he would be at home for a while, recovering, before the chemotherapy began. My brother David would fly in to keep him company while my mother went to work. I imagined the two of them tottering around the house, my father in a flannel nightshirt and David in a T-shirt and sweats. They would watch TV in the den, and at night, David would help him up the stairs.
But the surgery came and went, and he didn't go home. He didn't leave the hospital for five and a half weeks, and when he did, it was on a stretcher. When they opened him up to pull out his kidney, it was the size of a jumbo Kleenex box, the deep, rectangular kind they keep in hospital waiting rooms and therapists' offices. The cancer had spread to the bones of his pelvis, and to his skull, and to the skinny bone that runs along the shin. There were spots on his liver, and in his lungs.
My mother tried to be calm, counseling me to stay in Seattle. But in mid-October, I flew home for a weekend, and four days after, she called, asking me to come back.
. . .
For a long time, all I could think about was the duffel bag.
When my father checked into the hospital, he took a brown leather duffel bag with him. It was stained the color of melted milk chocolate, a shiny brown that bordered on red. Inside, he had packed everything that he thought he might want: a book of crossword puzzles, a bottle of cologne, his blue cotton bathrobe with the big white polka dots. He was wearing a white dress shirt and a pair of wool pants that he held under his belly with a brown leather belt. When he exchanged his clothes for a hospital gown, he folded them and put them into the bag to wait for the trip back home.
But after the surgery, he never walked, or wore those clothes, again. Bone cancer, his doctor told me, is one of the most painful kinds. It would require patches, pills, and eventually an epidural port, a coiled wire that slipped eerily into a hole in his back. Then there were the bones themselves, which were slowly ceding ground to the soft tissue of the cancer. About a month after his diagnosis, a CAT scan showed his pelvis almost completely blacked out by tumors. I remember standing by the sink in his hospital room with my mother and the doctor, looking at the scan against a fluorescent light. It was as though a storm cloud had floated across the film and settled under my father's ribs. I gasped when I saw it. My mother covered my mouth, so Burg wouldn't hear.
He couldn't stand because of the pain, but if he had, his bones would have crumbled under the weight. I didn't even know that bones could do that. I was terrified of what it might look like. But he didn't try to stand. He just lay there in the bed, propped at varying degrees of supine. Sometimes he slept, and sometimes he cried. Sometimes he just stared at us. He must have been trying to understand how we got there, to that room at the end of the oncology hall, where we read old issues of People to pass the time and warmed soup from the neighbors in a microwave at the nurse 's station. The duffel bag sat where he had left it, on the window ledge next to the bed.
Sometimes I would open it up and look inside, overwhelmed by the rush of odors, his smell. He had expected to get up and walk the hospital halls in that robe, and to go home in the clothes he had arrived in. When he left home, he thought he was coming back. When he got out of bed that morning, when he stood in the bathroom, when he combed his hair in the mirror and stooped gingerly to pack his bag, he thought he would be back. He didn't know that he would never see the second floor of his house again, or, for that matter, anything more than a single room downstairs, the room in which we would install his hospital bed, a humidifier, and, for sixteen hours a day, a nurse.
When no one was around to hear me, I would say it aloud to myself. He thought he was coming home. This could have been a trip, a vacation, Paris, anywhere. The bathrobe he packed was the one he wore to make stewed prunes and, in the mornings, mugs of cappuccino for himself and my mother. I would hear him go down the creaky stairs, and then the sound of his feet on the wood floor. He would clear his throat, snort a little, and sit down with the newspaper, his knees poking through the folds of the robe. It smelled like him: a low, musky odor, masculine and pungent. When he packed that duffel bag, he didn't know that he would never wear the robe again. He didn't know that he would never put on his cologne. He didn't know that he would never do another crossword puzzle over Saturday lunch and wash it down with a beer in his favorite glass, the one with the grapevines in relief around the side. He didn't know.
. . .
For the last four weeks that he was alive, my father lay in a rented hospital bed in a room next to the kitchen. There isn't much a person wants to eat when he is hooked up to an IV drip, or when his legs feel as though they are on fire. The painkillers were strong enough to make him hallucinate—he once went on a duck hunt in his bed, pointing an imaginary gun at the fireplace and shouting pow! pow!—but they could barely keep up with the pain. Still, I got out of bed every morning to make his breakfast. There were plenty of people around to do it—my mother, my half-siblings, aunts and uncles, even the nurses—but I wanted to. Some mornings he took a bowl of oatmeal with half-and-half, or Cream of Wheat with fat lumps of butter. But most days, it was eggs. I would scoop the food into his mouth in quiet disbelief, watching his belly, the target of so much nagging, slowly melt away. Sometimes I would think about the last time I hugged him, standing in the driveway in early September, when I left for Seattle, and the way his gut, so distended, had pressed familiarly against mine. I didn't know then that there was a tumor behind it.
One day, he told me about the grotto. I'd come to bring his breakfast, some scrambled eggs with goat cheese and a slice of buttered toast. When he saw me in the doorway, he sighed and pointed dazedly, with one hand, toward the couch.
"Isn't it beautiful?"he breathed. We were sitting next to a grotto, he explained, gazing dreamily at the armchair, his voice an excited whisper. "Look at that water. It's so blue!"
Eyeing the plate in my hands, he asked if the picnic was ready. I nodded. Between bites, he murmured dazedly. We were in Italy, he said, and we were sitting on a blanket, and the grass around us was green and cool.
"When we finish eating, let's go for a swim in the water," he said.
I looked down to scoop up the last bite of egg. When I looked up again, he was quiet, staring at his thumbs. I slipped the fork between his lips. As quickly as it had started, it was over. He had left the grotto and come back to bed. He looked away. I didn't say anything. I didn't want to ruin it. I wiped his mouth, and then I carried the empty plate into the kitchen. But a few days later, when I asked what he wanted for lunch, he looked at me squarely.
"Italian grotto eggs," he said. Just like that.
Maybe he knew he'd dreamed it, and he wanted me to know. Or maybe he believed that we'd really been to Italy, eating eggs and swimming. Maybe it didn't matter. Somehow his mind was working to bridge the gap between the hospital bed and a hazy, faraway place. It was a grotto in Italy, a sea cave to swim in, somewhere far from that bed in Oklahoma. I guess it was his way of escaping the body that had carried him for seventy-three years and dropped him without warning.
It could have frightened me to see him like that. Sometimes, it did. His body was giving way, literal bone by bone, and so was his mind. But I was grateful for whatever relief he found, and when I wasn't afraid, I just wanted to help him find it.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.