THE VALUE OF HOME PART 3
Chuck and Mary initially pitched their tent in the historic Movie Colony of Palm Springs, renting a house across the street from the former home of actors Janet Leigh (Psycho) and Tony Curtis (Some Like It Hot). But the allure of homeownership, which had been a unifying principle of their marriage from the beginning, was too strong to resist. Two years later, Chuck and Mary bought a house around the corner from the rental and proceeded to give it a full makeover, reenacting in the Movie Colony their Covina project of a decade earlier.
Dad had seen enough of the iconic post-and-beam, mid-century modern architecture of Palm Springs to know that the new house needed fewer walls and a lot more glass if he wanted to take in the spectacular view of Mount San Jacinto and capture the Movie Colony's laid-back vibe. Within no time, he rolled out an ambitious home improvement plan, hiring a crew to blow out the back of the house, incorporate a portion of the pool deck into the living area and enclose the whole addition in window walls. This was Dad's way of claiming his territory, putting his personal signature on his desert home. A curious neighbor, drawn by all the racket and wondering what the new owner was up to, dropped by one day and after listening to Dad explain all his big plans, asked, "Why didn't you just buy a bigger house?" He obviously didn't know my father.
Chuck and Mary encountered the same problem that had bedeviled their earlier efforts in Covina to create a home that would reflect the hard work, sacrifices and satisfactions they had experienced in their scramble up the ladder of wealth and status. The problem was coherence, or rather the lack thereof.
The Palm Springs remodeling project was launched without an overall plan or "aesthetic vision," and the effect was more mishmash than modern. Holdovers from their French period which had migrated from Covina to Palm Springs stuck out like a sore thumb. A pair of 19th-century Louis XV settees, a gilt bronze Louis XVI cartel wall clock, a marble-top black commode with chinoiserie finish, a landscape painting in the style of Corot—these frills and fripperies represented everything mid-century modern disdained, and were the last thing one would expect to find in a minimalist Movie Colony home. If Mom and Dad had been open to the postmodern aesthetic of pastiche, the French antiques might have made the cut. But eclectic irony left them cold precisely because it mocked coherence, that elusive quality they were looking for, not only in their home but in their life, both of which were works in progress.
It didn't take long before Dad became dissatisfied with his second foray into home remodeling and interior design. This wasn't the kind of DIY job he was used to, which required a Skill saw, power drill, sledge hammer and strong back. He needed to enlist professionals to help transform the empty space he was creating into the meaningful place he had been dreaming of since the West Covina starter home, maybe since his childhood home back in LA.
Dad told Mike of an epiphany he had experienced when touring the home of screen star William Holden of Sunset Boulevard fame. Holden bought his 4,559-square-feet, 5-bedroom, 5.5-bath trophy home in the Movie Colony in 1966, and lived there for eleven years, so it seems likely that Dad got his first peak at its interior in 1977, when Holden put the property on the market. Mike recalls Dad saying that he was floored by the "complete vision" of the modernist interior, from the furnishings and finishes to the LeCorbusier backlighting. Determined to bring such a vision into his own home, Dad tracked down and hired the visionary himself, Palm Springs-based James Callahan, "designer to the stars and the Sultan of Brunei," in the words of one realtor who was pitching a home that had received the full Callahan treatment.
Thus began Chuck and Mary's deep dive into modernism. Bourbon bric-a-brac was out; glass, chrome and sleek lines were in. Most of the antiques headed back to Abell Auction from whence they came, except for the landscape that now hangs above our fireplace, which Mom somehow managed to intercept before it reached the auction block and send our way. When the dust, din and drama of the Callahan makeover had settled, the Steffens finally had their modernist trophy home. In a partnership of two postwar strivers who were engaged in a project of self-presentation through interior design, they had worked their way through the art history textbook, beginning with their French chateau on the top of the hill and culminating with Callahan's modernist confection in the desert. It was as if Chuck and Mary were trying on different architectural styles to find the best fit, the one best able to materialize in space the pride they took in being successful. If their new home was not quite in Holden's league, it was a worthy addition to the Movie Colony. Chuck and Mary had spent ungodly sums of money on the project but were pleased with how it turned out. It fit like a glove.
While the modernist movement was going full bore in the Movie Colony, Chuck and Mary doubled down on their investments in commercial real estate, perhaps no coincidence considering the eye-popping fees and markups charged by the designer to the stars. In 1977 they sold the apartments in El Monte and Monterey Park, and bought a 435-unit complex in Las Vegas, a 4-hour drive from Palm Springs if you take the highways, which they rarely did, opting instead for backroads that cut through the desert from Twenty-Nine Palms to Amboy. A stretch of this route was unpaved. I mention this detail because on one occasion my speed-demon father lost control of the station wagon in which they were traveling, and rolled it across the burning desert sands. When the car finally came to a stop right-side up, Mom, who was sitting in the passenger seat, panicked at the sight of pinkish goo all over her blouse and pants, which turned out to be strawberry yogurt that she had packed in an ice chest for her health-conscious husband. This was one reason, among many others, that Mom came to dread these regular runs to Vegas and back.
The home remodeling project and the new business venture seem to have lifted Dad out of his malaise. Or maybe it was the other way around: the lifting of the malaise may have given Dad the energy to undertake these ambitious enterprises.
Either way, Dad seems to have recovered a sense of purpose and direction at just the moment when his sons were leaving home. This was surely no coincidence. For the first time in his married life he could savor the sweet taste of free time unburdened by the daily grind of parenting. Raising four boys, each of whom had different needs, interests and personalities, had taken its toll on him, another source of stress to go with his adequate-man syndrome. When Mark, the last bro standing, left home for college in 1975, Dad was more than ready to explore the possibilities of being an empty nester. Nowadays, when the four brothers get together and the conversation turns to Dad, as it inevitably does, it's as if we are talking about two completely different people. Mark probably has the best perspective on this double vision, as he was the only one of us who was able to observe Dad's behavior as the countdown of resident sons approached the magic number of zero. He believes that "young Dad," the one Mike and I had to contend with growing up as surly teenagers in West Covina and Covina, had morphed into "tired Dad" by the time the family reached Palm Springs. This distracted, convalescing Dad was the one he and Dan knew during the years 1970-1975.
As the house emptied out, an opening was created for yet another metamorphosis. From the chrysalis of tired Dad would emerge reborn Dad. This abrupt about-face was perfectly in character for a man who could never stand still, rest on his laurels or stop striving. As part of his middle-age renaissance, Dad went back to school, first at a local community college, where he enrolled in Spanish language and history courses, and later at the University of California at Riverside, a fifty-minute drive from Palm Springs, where he earned a BA with a double major in History and Philosophy. He even took a few graduate seminars in preparation for a MA in Philosophy.
In lock step with his immersion in the humanities, reborn Dad also rekindled the old flame with dermatology, both as a clinician and researcher. He joined a medical clinic in Palm Springs, which allowed him to see patients without the headaches of running a business, which had been a major factor in his decision to walk away from his Covina practice. He eventually decided to give private practice one more try, renting an office and hiring a staff of receptionists and nurses. As best as I could tell, Dad was never happier than when seeing his desert patients with their skin cancers, among whom was the aforementioned Bill Holden. Dad once told me that his patients "think I'm God," which I never said about my students in all the years I was teaching. On top of all this, Dad mastered an entirely new sub-specialty, becoming a board-certified dermatopathologist, which entailed making regular trips to New York to study under one of the preeminent figures in the field, A. Bernard Ackerman, with whom he co-authored the book Neoplasms with Sebaceous Differentiation, a 751-page tome published in 1994. Dad dedicated the book to Mom.
At the time, I took Dad's intellectual journey for granted or, even worse, dismissed it as yet another case of his all-too-familiar pattern of turning the page and never looking back, never taking stock, never making amends. How differently I see things now that he is gone! I am simply blown away by the creative energy he was able to summon and channel toward productive ends during this come-back period of his life.
Yet, as he acknowledged in the book dedication, behind it all was Mom. There was no Chuck without Mary.
You might be asking yourself why I have written so much about my father, and so little about my mother. I've asked myself the same question, many, many times. The reason, I have come to see, is that in our family, Dad was the one in the driver's seat and in our faces, when we kids were living at home. Mom, on the other hand, rode shotgun and showered her children with unflagging affection and good humor. If I have less to say about my mother, it is partly because I was too busy battling my father to give her the attention she deserved. Let me put it this way: when I was living in my parents' house, life was a highly competitive contact sport in which Mom was not a player but the referee. It might be worth noting that in the polaroid photo of Gramps and the Steffen boys I am armed and aiming a pistol at my brothers. It wasn't until my brothers and I started marrying and bringing our wives and daughters around that Mom could count on a female presence to counterbalance what must have been the suffocating maleness of the Steffen household.
Let me tell you a story about my mother and her invisible presence. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, when Dad was hard at work transforming himself into a top-tier dermatopathologist, a decision was made to host a series of annual symposia in Palm Springs, starring the renowned Doctor Ackerman, Dad's mentor. Dermatologists, pathologists, and dermatopathologists from across the globe would converge on the desert resort to enjoy the nice winter weather and sit at the feet of the master. The symposia would last for days, sometimes a full week. Dad agreed to handle the local arrangements, which involved booking meeting places, overseeing hotel reservations, settling bills, mediating disputes and misunderstandings, babying big egos and making sure that Ackerman received his honorarium in a timely fashion. But as Dad would be the first to admit, it was my mother who did the lioness's share of this thankless leg work. The moment one symposium ended, she would start working on the next one. This went on year after year. I recently did a quick Google search, looking for announcements of the symposia in old medical journals. I found plenty of them, which included local contact information in Palm Springs for those planning to attend. Does Mom's name appear there or anywhere else? Nope. Mom did not leave a paper trail or fingerprints. She would have made a great cat burglar.
By the 1990s the cat burglar was tired. Tired of hair-raising drives to Vegas, tired of being a landlady, tired of real estate, tired of organizing symposia, tired of sweating through the blistering heat of Sonoran Desert summers, tired of watching her beloved irises shrivel up and die no matter how often she watered them, tired of nursing a needy husband and four no less needy sons. What she wanted was (1) to sell the Vegas apartments; (2) to get out of commercial real estate for good; (3) to wash her hands of whatever professional activities my father and his colleagues might cook up in the future; (4) to pull up stakes and leave the Movie Colony; (5) to pitch a new tent at the beach, specifically Oceanside, a two-plus-hour drive from Palm Springs; (6), to grow her irises and watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean rather than behind the 10,800-feet Mount San Jacinto; (7) to take walks along Carlsbad Beach, where she liked to collect the polished stones that are now prized possessions left behind for family and friends; (8) to take a good, long rest.
The balance of marital power was definitely shifting for Chuck and Mary. In his reborn iteration, Dad was anything but tired. On the contrary, he was raring to go. At first, reborn Dad agreed to consider selling the Vegas property but only on the condition that they roll over the money and buy an even bigger apartment complex, such as one he had his eye on in far-off Kansas City. He agreed to relocate to Oceanside, but provisionally and only on weekends. During the workweek they would continue to live in the Callahan trophy home and he would continue to see his patients and run the practice he had grown to love.
It would take several years of negotiation to find a marital modus vivendi, but in the end Mom got most of what she wanted. In 1999 Chuck and Mary sold their home in Palm Springs and bought one in Oceanside. In a repeat performance of the Covina home-sale debacle, they took a big hit. The Callahan imprimatur didn't seem to matter much to anyone except Dad, and the money he spent on the remodeling turned out to be, in purely financial terms, money down the drain. Two years later, they sold the Vegas apartments for $2.8 million, paying the capital gains tax rather than deferring it through a 1031 exchange, as they had done with their LA properties. Dad tried to hang onto a stripped-down version of his practice in the desert, but eventually settled on commuting once a week to assist with surgical procedures that required the presence of a dermatopathologist. At the same time, he found his footing in Oceanside, joining the medical staff of the Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base located a few miles away from their new home.
THE VALUE OF HOME PART 4
Dad had made major concessions to Mom, whether voluntarily or under duress, I don't know. For the most part, they had sense enough to manage their marital differences behind closed doors. But Dad's want, need and desire for a trophy home remained as strong as ever. Despite all the changes he had undergone over the years, and despite being beached in Oceanside at the age of 73, on this question of home, Dad was the still the 34-year-old who carved out a French manor house in the foothills of Covina, the 46-year-old who teamed up with a celebrity designer to create a contemporary dream space in Palm Springs, maybe even the 17-year-old who left home to join the Navy. In Oceanside, he would give the dream one last try.
What did Chuck and Mary want their home to be? She wanted a place close to the beach, where the four sons, their wives and children, or however many of the tribe happened to be in town, could gather for special occasions—a grand total of fifteen people in 1999, all of whom lived in California except for Allyson, Brendan and me. This would be a place for meals, conversations, celebrations and parties, for throwing flank steaks on the grill and watching Notre Dame football on TV, which was ritual in a family that had long since fallen away from the Catholic church but retained a stubborn sense of Irish Catholic identity. And lest I forget, a place for drinking.
Dad had no objections to any of this, as he genuinely enjoyed being with and entertaining his kids their families. The four daughters-in-law closed ranks to form a tightly knit sorority around Mom.
But in addition to being a place to live and to stage family events, the home Dad had in mind would possess value as a symbolic mile marker, measuring how far he had come and how much he had achieved on his life journey. Dad no sooner set eyes on the house and its spacious but unfinished "activity room" over the garage than his thoughts turned to gutting the whole place and redoing it from the inside out. If he had shown even the least bit of financial acumen that earned him a lot of money in commercial real estate, Dad would have passed on another major home remodeling project after taking a bath on the sale of his two previous homes in Covina and Palm Springs. But when it came to residential real estate, his financial acumen flew out the window. Like a bloodied prize fighter who has been on the mat in the first two rounds but answers the bell for the third, Dad proposed to undertake another home makeover with you know who in charge of the project. That's right, James Callahan, designer to the stars and the Sultan of Brunei, was back on the payroll. Dad had lived in a Callahan trophy home, and by God he intended to die in one.
Years later, Mike went through Chuck and Mary's financial records, trying to figure out what to save and what to toss. He came across a file folder to which Mom had attached a post-it note itemizing the expenses of Callahan's Oceanside job. The costs totaled somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.3 million. She jotted down the note before her Alzheimer's took hold, probably sometime between 2003 and 2007. Why leave this paper trail behind? Was she simply keeping the household accounts in good order, as she had done throughout her married life? Was she making a personal note to herself, sensing that her memory was becoming less and less reliable? Was she documenting how her husband's project had spun completely out of control?
To put the $1.3 million in context, let's consider for a moment a few other numbers. In 1999 Chuck and Mary sold their Palm Springs house for $355,000 and bought the Oceanside house for $370,000. Fourteen years later, in 2013, when they were preparing to move into an assisted-living facility, the Oceanside home went on the market and brought $675,000. Do the math: one-million dollars went up in smoke as Chuck and Mary reenacted the familiar pattern of buying a home, remodeling it and then letting it go for a huge loss. Dad was heartbroken by the sale price. When the property was first listed, he told me that a professional photographer would be hired to do a full layout of the house, which he seemed certain would find its way into Architectural Digest or some such glossy magazine. Magical thinking. "Doesn't anyone know that this is a James Callahan house?" Mark remembers him saying as he waited for the seven-figure bids that never materialized.
For Dad the stress was starting to show. Fed up by the delays and cost overruns, as well as by the bad blood that seemed to be spilling all over his new trophy home, Dad hauled Callahan into small claims court and sued him over some faulty accessory in the guest bedroom. This was chump change considering the total costs, but it registered Dad's frantic state of mind as frustration turned into something more akin to sorrow. The judge ruled against him, probably figuring that the case called for therapeutic rather than legal intervention.
Oceanside did indeed turn out to be the last stop on the homeownership escalator for Chuck and Mary, bringing all the contradictions of home value to a head. I watched this family drama unfold from a safe distance in Atlanta, and tried to forget about it after my parents died. But recently, when I watched the movie The Brutalist, the memories stirred back to life. The protagonist is László Tóth, a Jewish-Hungarian architect played by Adrien Brody, who flees to the US after World War II and agrees to oversee the creation a modernist monument for a obsessive American millionaire. The project comes to grief when a freight train carrying precious building materials across the Pennsylvania countryside to the construction site derails. Shot from a high altitude, the scene creates for viewers (or at least for this viewer) a weird tension between the trainwreck which they can sense is just around the bend, and the safety of the Olympian vantage point from which they watch the train explode into flames. As I watched this scene unfold, my thoughts returned to another architectural trainwreck involving an obsessive client and celebrity designer, one that hit closer to home.
Before Alzheimer's and stroke cleaned the slate, Chuck and Mary had come face-to-face with the unanswered question underlying their dream of homeownership, the dream that brought them together and kept them together. What was the value of a home? For Mom it was a place to internalize a life in the here and now; for Dad it was a place to externalize a life that was mainly in the past.
This might sound like the end of the story, but it's not. The Chuck and Mary story has one final chapter left, in which Mom slips away from those who loved her, neuron by neuron, while Dad undergoes a final metamorphosis to emerge as what might be called redeemed Dad. While I am a little uncomfortable using a word like redeemed in light of its strong Come-to-Jesus connotations, I believe it fits the case at hand. You be the judge.
The first serious signs of Mom's descent into Alzheimer’s appeared around the time I took the picture above, in which she sits alongside Dad at the dining room table. Dad has his signature cup of black coffee, while Mom keeps her ever-watchful eye on the world that revolved around him. I wonder now if she could read what she is looking at so intently over Dad's shoulder or if she is just content to share a quiet moment with her husband on one side, and her son across the table with his camera.
Dad did the best he could to care for Mom at home, eventually hiring 24-7 help as she became less and less mobile. As the physical and emotional pressures of caregiving intensified, causing him on occasion to lose his patience and temper, Dad knew that it was time to stop drinking. Drawing inspiration from one of his four sons who had called it quits a few years earlier, in 2007 Dad attended his first AA meeting at the Oceanside Moose Lodge # 1325. When my recovering-alcoholic brother was in town, the two of them would get up bright and early and head over to the Moose Lodge for an early-bird meeting, after which they retired to Don's Country Kitchen across the street for breakfast and lots of coffee. Father and son became brothers in sobriety. Neither could have stuck it out without the other. I am proud to say that Dad never had another drink before his death, and that my brother remains clean and sober to this day.
When Dad made the decision to sell their home and put Mom in a nearby assisted-living facility, he had to empty out the house. He crated up the last two antiques remaining from the Louis XVI phase of their marriage—the black commode mentioned earlier and a terracotta statue, attributed to Clodion, of a bacchant and bacchante in a wine-fueled embrace—and sent them back to Abell Auction. He then cleared out his closet and tossed his entire wardrobe into a dumpster, right down to his last pair of socks and his eye-popping collection of bikini briefs.
When Chuck and Mary left the last house they would ever own, they took little more than the clothes on their backs. They would be traveling light from now on.
If it had been anyone else, I would have chalked up such behavior to shock, grief and trauma. After all, here was a man beginning the process of saying goodbye to his companion of sixty-six years. But there was a method to his madness. Dad had always subscribed to the doctrine that the best way of dealing with life's ups and downs is to make a clean break and never, ever look back.
As you have probably surmised, I had an edgy relationship with my father, one that was balanced precariously between respect and love on one side, and hair-trigger male ego on the other; the ego was mostly mine, to speak truthfully. On one memorable, alcohol-infused night in Palm Springs, when Mom was not present to keep the peace, having flown up to Petaluma, north of San Francisco, to help with my brother Mike's wedding, I mouthed off to Dad about his so-called Greatest Generation and its hypocritical sense of white entitlement. He hit me across the chin with a kitchen bar stool. There was a lot of blood. I remember him saying a few seconds later, "Charlie, this is something you'll never forget," and then he commended me for not raising my hand in anger or retaliation.
Dad was right about my not forgetting that moment almost forty years ago, though I very much doubt he imagined I would write about it or that a complete stranger like yourself would be reading about it now. But Dad was wrong if he thought I was tempted to exchange blows with him. It would never occur to me in a thousand years to strike my father. What I wanted at that moment was for him to strike me so that I could show him that at least one of his sons could take his best shot. Crazy, right? Adolescent, right? But that's how it was. When the air cleared and we had both sobered up, Dad drove me down to his office a few blocks away and stitched up my face so that I would look half-way presentable the very next day when Mike and Mary exchanged their vows. A few hours later, the two of us seated next to each other on a flight to San Francisco, bleary-eyed and silent, lost in our thoughts.
Looking back on it, I believe what really stung him was my insinuation that he had gotten a handout, a gift he hadn't really earned and maybe didn't deserve. In Dad's mind, he worked hard for everything he had, unlike a lot of other men who, he believed, depended on handouts—his handouts. Did these inadequate, incompetent freeloaders include his four sons? Did they include me? From the time I was a teenager this question hung in the air whenever we were together, like the musky, testosterone scent of some old-school boxing gym. Now you know what I mean by "the suffocating maleness" of the household over which my mother presided.
It was Mike who phoned to tell me about Dad and the dumpster. I don't remember being overly concerned. The old man's okay, I told myself. He just needs a little time and space to adjust to the new reality.
As part of this adjustment, Dad did something remarkable, even redemptive. Not for the first or last time in my life I realized how much I underestimated the nobility of his character, if that's not too melodramatic a way of putting it. Say what you will about him, I told myself at the time, the SOB did look after his own. You see, my father wasn't yet ready to let go of his wife, and nor would he ever be. The place where he planned to put Mom had an available two-bedroom apartment. After making some inquiries, Dad learned that the management had no objection, none at all, to collecting double rent from an Alzheimer's patient and her high-functioning, low-maintenance eighty-six-year-old soul mate.
Dad moved into memory-care with Mom.
Mom rapidly lost the ability to walk and speak, feed and clean herself. A "vegetable" by the end, to put it bluntly. An angel brigade of underpaid women from Mexico, Guatemala and the Philippines cared for her, assisted by Dad who could come and go as he pleased, running errands to get whatever she needed. Surrounded on all sides by cognitive decay and disrepair, and separated a good part of the day and all night from the outside world by a heavy metal door that locked automatically to keep patients like Mom from wandering off, Dad soldiered on. He set up his computer and microscope on a desk in his bedroom, where he continued to read slides and operate his dermatopathology practice.
The car keys were his best friend. Every other Saturday, Dad fired up his Toyota and drove from Oceanside to his former clinic in Palm Desert to read slides for his colleagues performing Mohs surgery. Two hours there, two hours back. A brutal commute, even for an alert and cautious driver. But alert and cautious were the last words anyone would use to describe Dad when he got behind the wheel. This hearing-impaired octogenarian was never happier than when he was playing Puccini's La Bohème at full blast on the car stereo while belting out "Che gelida manina" in his best Italian. With Dad at the helm, the Toyota was a bel canto missile streaking across the hills, shrublands and desert wastes of his beloved Southern California.
We tried to convince him to surrender the car keys. Not a chance. Each time I came out to see my parents, the Toyota sported a new coat of dents, scratches and dangling side view mirrors. It started looking more and more like my face after our brawl. (Now who sounds like a private dick out of a Mickey Spillane novel?)
But that was Dad. Speed lover and opera lover. Hardhead and healer.
Four years later, in 2017, came the massive stroke that grounded Dad for good. He now joined Mom on the receiving end of the healing arts. No more reading slides or running errands to fetch adult diapers for Mom. No more daily workouts at his gym. No more morning walks on Carlsbad Beach. No more quiet time sitting on his favorite park bench that offered panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean. On that bench, he seemed truly at peace with himself, a copy of the LA Times in one hand and a cup of bad coffee in the other, both courtesy of the local 7-Eleven on Carlsbad Drive.
The two love birds now shared a perch in another skilled-nursing ward, this one nested in the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains. The facility was located in Eagle Rock, not far from downtown LA, where William Anthony Steffen and Marie Early married and began their life together a century earlier, where Steffen Flowers opened its doors in 1929, where Dad grew up dreaming his American dream about adequate manhood. Chuck and Mary now slept in identical hospital beds, separated by a few feet.
Mom had no idea where she was, as best I could tell. (I said she was a vegetable, but how can you know for sure?) As for Dad, he was often in panic mode after the stroke, thinking he had misplaced his wife somewhere, on a street corner he vaguely remembered or in the booth of one of their favorite restaurants.
“Where’s your mother? I can’t find her.”
“She’s right here, Dad, in the next bed. She’s fine. Don’t worry.”
That’s the way things were at the end. “Mush brain” is how Dad sometimes described his crippled mental state. In these lucid moments, which seemed to come from out of nowhere, his black Irish humor flashed its teeth. One day, when Dad complained about the facility being a "dump," Dan replied, "Believe it or not, Dad, this place got a top rating."
Dad locked Dan in his sights. "Not," he said.
My brothers and I divided up the job of monitoring our parents during their final days. Mark, who lives in Torrance, an hour-drive away if you don't hit traffic (which is highly unlikely), was on point. Dan was in Thousand Oaks, another hour drive, on call in case of an emergency. Mike continued to oversee our parents' financial and legal affairs from his Bay Area base. I pitched in by catching a flight from Atlanta to LA every other month. My home away from home was a Comfort Inn on Colorado Boulevard, close to the nursing home, where I'd spend a week powwowing with the brothers and visiting my parents. Visiting is a euphemism. Holding vigil is more like it. The angels fed Mom her lunch and dinner, I fed Dad.
Their bodies were cremated and their ashes entombed in a cemetery wall at San Luis Rey de Francia, one of the original Spanish missions in California. San Luis Rey is a lovely spot located a few miles from my parents' last home in Oceanside. It is also an active community of Franciscan friars. The church and grounds are seeded with San Damiano crosses in honor of the order's founder, Francis of Assisi, who is everyone's first-ballot Hall of Fame favorite saint. I'm looking at one such cross right now, which hangs in my home study. I purchased it at the mission gift shop on my most recent visit. Not sure when, or if, I'll return.
Allyson says, "You'll be back."
CODA
I didn't plan on writing a coda to this essay. But life had plans of its own.
On the morning of New Year’s Eve, 2024, I was seated at our breakfast table, reading the New York Times on my laptop, when Allyson, who likes to sleep in, walked into the room and said, "My hand and foot are numb." She sat down and tried to bring a cup of coffee to her lips. She had no problem using her right hand but couldn't hold the cup steady with her left. A half hour later we were at the Emergency Room of the Emory-Decatur Hospital, a 10-minute drive from our home. The staff asked a few quick questions and whisked Allyson away for a CT scan, MRI, electrocardiogram, blood work and God knows what else. Not long afterwards we were in a hospital room. Allyson was hooked up to IV tubes and ECG cables, looking concerned but not panicked. Then the bad news arrived. “Oh, no,” she said.
A stroke.
I am writing this months later. Allyson has completed her physical and occupational therapy. The numbness in her left hand and foot waxes and wanes, but we have our fingers crossed that it's trending in the right direction. We are participating in a long-term stroke study under the auspices of Emory University. Allyson's balance is close to normal, good enough for her to resume a near-daily regimen of hot yoga. The stroke damaged her left peripheral vision, which initially played havoc with her ability to read and watch movies on TV (she is a ferocious reader and an avid movie fan). But as time goes on, the written text and moving images seem less and less prone to trigger weird distortions and flashing lights, thanks to the plasticity of the human brain and her ability to work around the impairment.
Every morning, we now sit together at the breakfast table with our laptops. She toggles back and forth between the text on the screen and the audio version when her eyes get tired. There was a breakthrough yesterday, when she went to a play with her book-club girlfriends, her first outing without me since the stroke. We are following up on this success with a movie date for the day after tomorrow, a matinee showing of Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, which will put her vision to the test of the big screen. Driving remains a work in progress, but we are hopeful that she’ll be behind the wheel and back on the road at some point. Allyson equates driving with the independence she used to have and wants desperately to have again.
When people ask me how she is doing, I say, “She's doing well, under the circumstances.” I try to be polite, to keep it positive.
But that’s not the only reason I strike an upbeat note. Having watched both my father and one of my dearest friends laid low by major strokes, I know that things could be far worse. Allyson’s case falls in the "moderate" range on the National Institute of Health Stroke Scale. Her cognitive functions, speech and memory are as sharp as ever. Ditto for her basic motor functions. If you saw her move, heard her speak or observed her thinking through a problem, you would never guess that there was anything wrong. Allyson has been mercifully spared the “mush brain” of which Dad used to complain during his rare moments of lucidity, and the aphasia that made the last ten years of my friend’s life so hellishly difficult for both him and his wife.
Guarded optimism is one thing; cynical optimism of the sort peddled by the self-help industry is quite another. Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided, for a spot-on dissection of the differences between the two. Fear, anxiety, panic, impatience, frustration, anger, regret, remorse, disappointment, sadness, depression are all present and accounted for in our daily life now. These unwelcome house guests seem to enjoy being cooped-up with us at home, where they can count on our undivided attention.
Home is the reason I have decided to add this coda to my essay on place. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Allyson's stroke has given me any new insight into my earlier claim that home is the quintessential place, where the structures, processes and moments of place come together. But it has given me a new appreciation for the healing properties of home.
Allyson feels safe in our home, at least most of the time, where she is shielded from all the bewildering strobe lights and terrifying sonic booms of the world outside. We both feel comforted by the familiarity of this bounded and coherent space, by the meanings that suffuse its materiality, by the couch on which Allyson can take a quiet nap wrapped up in her favorite afghan. Nothing gives me greater peace of mind than being in this place and watching her sleep, safe and sound.
Chuck and Mary. Breakfast Table. Oceanside. 2007