I don’t even know what tone to adopt for this post.
I’ll probably err on the side of black humor because that’s how I roll. That’s how I think most of us roll. I apologize in advance if I inadvertently cross any lines (I usually do).
The story that began with that photo from June 30, 1963 came to an end in August 2021.
The worst month in the history of our family. The last month of the family I grew up in.
What a loss. What a double-barreled blast to the heart.
And what a blow to the comment section of this blog. (Hm. A tone begins to suggest itself.)
I’m only half-joking: if you scroll through this blog all the way back to the day Molli was born, you’ll find that there’s almost always a comment from Pop Pop, and that he always made sure we all knew he was also Dad to some of us, and Doug to others. Really. More or less every single post going all the way back to 2004. Nana’s not as evident in the comments because she preferred to provide her feedback via email, which she almost always did.
Pop Pop and Nana were never Pop Pop and Nana to me. They were Mom and Dad.
Here’s Mom:
And here’s Dad:
Not that anyone that visits this blog needs pictures to know who I was talking about. But I wanted to include them here, up top, because this isn’t going to be a memorial or obituary. (Even though yes, those are the pictures from their obituaries.) It’s going to be a (mostly) normal post, taking the period chronologically, as I always have in the past and always will in the future.
But they needed to be on top.
Memorializing will happen along the way, as it did in real life.
The really sad and difficult part of all this for me is that the driving force for this blog has always been to let my parents feel connected to the family that lived an ocean away from them. I now find myself sometimes preparing to take a picture, as I always have, thinking what kind of an impression it’ll make on Mom or Dad in this blog. It’s going to take a long time to accept that they’re no longer out there to see it.
We begin with a stupid and trivial couple of pictures from late July or early August: they’re photos of Didi’s “son” Otto (né Blue), now aged two, enjoying life with his family.
Hard to beat those for pictures less relevant to what was about to happen, but that’s life: the trivial is always there, and in the end maybe it’s not even that trivial.
So here’s a picture of Didi from about the same time period.
Also in late July, a lunch down on Lyøvej.
One of my first days back at work after vacation, I had to race a big rainstorm home. I’d checked the radar very carefully and was pretty sure I could make it. Until I reached this spot in Emdrup and realized I was riding straight into something very bad. (The picture doesn’t do it justice: I was biking into the maws of hell.)
It got so bad so quickly that I had to pull over: it was raining so hard I could no longer see very clearly and was worried about an upcoming hill so steep that on a clear dry day I can hit speeds over 45 kph coming down it: I didn’t think that hill would be my friend in such a heavy cloudburst.
Unfortunately, as I pulled off the bike bath onto some grass beneath the protection of some trees, my bike slid out from under me. I managed to land on my feet unhurt, and the bike wasn’t damaged, but the acceleration was enough to inflate my Hövding “helmet.”
Here’s what it looked like when I got home:
Insurance initially rejected my claim because they said those helmets can only be reimbursed or replaced for bike accidents, while I had merely been pulling over.
I appealed their decision, explaining that my having landed on my feet was only a matter of luck and agility, and that as my insurance company they should be pleased that the helmet was the only thing damaged in what could have been a much more catastrophic (and expensive) accident.
They reimbursed me.
For the permanent record: Denmark finally seems to be grasping the utility of screens. Joachim Hagemeister had a party for his daughter and I was careful to get this picture of his very clever magnetic screen door—I want one—but weirdly enough, it’s apparently the only picture I took at the party. So there are Lars and Lise talking in the kitchen: that’s the only picture I can offer from the only Hagemeister gathering we’ve attended in at least a year.
I no longer recall what sports event had Maddie all amped up and Danified: The Olympics were over by now, weren’t they? And the EM had come and gone while we were in Portugal.
Well, the event isn’t the important thing. The exuberance is.
Nana turned 80 on August 5th. We managed to have a video session with her to wish her a happy day; she wasn’t doing great, but she made the most of the day and seemed to enjoy our singing.
The Lees gift to her was an email-enabled digital frame that we could all send pictures to whenever we wanted. As soon as we got the email address we all fired off some photos. I sent these:
I have no idea what the girls sent on their own initiative, only that Pop Pop said they did sent pictures and Nana was very happy with them.
The next morning Pop Pop had to call an ambulance to rush her to the hospital.
We were all very worried about her, but since there was nothing we could do we went through the motions of daily life. Pop Pop and Aunt Deb (who had flown down to Florida) didn’t sound very positive when I talked to or emailed them, but Nana was sending me texts telling me she was feeling better.
I believed Nana because she was telling me what I wanted to hear.
Monday the 9th was the girls’ first school day of the ’21-’22 school year: Maddie in 7th grade, Molli in her second year at Birkerød Gymnasium (call it 11th grade). I’d been out of the house too early to get pictures, but the girls stepped up and got them for me.
We were all sick with worry about Nana, but we were keeping hope alive. Nana’s texts gave us no reason not to. The afternoon of the 10th, in fact, she sent me a text saying “A little better but a long way to go.”
Pop Pop and Aunt Deb called me that evening while Trine and Maddie and I were watching Star Trek, and it was suddenly clear that Nana was not doing better, and that I was the one with a long way to go.
And on the morning of the 11th, off I went.
The first flight I could find to Miami had a connection in Frankfurt.
Never go through Frankfurt when you’re in a hurry.
No, wait: never go through Frankfurt.
I considered myself lucky just to make my plane.
I fired off a selfie to Nana just before we took off.
It was a rough trip: wearing a facemask for 12 hours was hard enough, but we were also jostled by some pretty heavy weather as we approached Florida.
Once we got through the bad weather, though, there were rainbows everywhere. (Beneath us, obviously, which was kind of weird.) Rainbows have had a longstanding association with birth for me, and of course they don’t have many negative connotations anyway, so I felt a little cheered: I told myself there was hope, that there’s always hope, and the rainbows were the empirical evidence supporting my hypothesis.
(No rainbow in the next pic, just a nice shot of Miami.)
(Back to rainbows.)
The overhead view of Miami had persuaded me we were about to land, but we continued south (as best as I could tell) before circling around over southern Florida in such a wide arc that I was pretty sure we were flying over Alligator Alley.
My primitive seatback video monitor disagreed: we had indeed circled around pretty expansively, but too far south for the desolate road you see above to have been Alligator Alley.
It was about 15:30 before I got off the plane, and a little before 16:00 before I got to the car rental terminal.
The car place I’d rented from had been the cheapest I could find, and from what I could see on the net it looked like they met the only other criterion I’d had when booking the reservation: easy airport pickup.
But they’d lied. I had to wait for their van to be driven to their off-premises lot. It was a forty-minute wait for what turned out to be a five-minute drive (and probably would have been about a ten minute walk).
I wasn’t in the car and on my way west until well past 17:00, which meant I probably couldn’t make it to Nana before visiting hours ended at 18:00. I gave the gas a little extra encouragement to try and get there before then, but the prospects were pretty hopeless.
I had promised Trine, as we’d numbed ourselves calm with a little scotch the night before, that I would stop at the old Indian rest-stop on Alligator Alley and finally try some of those nasty-looking boiled peanuts. But the old Indian rest-stop on Alligator was just a relic:
It had been replaced by a fresh new facility including a Dunkin’ Donuts.
Suffice to say, the clean and expansive new facility offered a lot more than the old one had, and in a much nicer setting, but boiled peanuts were no longer accessible.
Someone back in Estero (all the Lees were by now assembled there) had however already texted me the following photo:
So I was told not to worry about food.
I had to make another quick stop to touch base with Aunt Deb or Pop Pop and figure out whether I had any chance of seeing Nana or should just come straight to the condo in Estero. Aunt Deb told me that visiting hours were waived for patients “in her condition,” but that Nana had seemed pretty stable when she’d been with her earlier that day so I could probably just come to the condo, but that I should weigh the decision carefully: there were no guarantees and we wouldn’t want me to carry around the regret of not having seen her if things were to take a bad turn overnight. And so, thank God, I decided to play it safe and go straight to the hospital.
I was escorted straight to her and was able to have 30-45 minutes alone with her before she got tired (they had just dosed her with some relaxing medicines moments before I arrived).
My gratitude for having had that conversation is immeasurable.
I went straight to Estero from the hospital. We all talked. I had a strong drink to counter-act the coffee I’d been guzzling for the past 20 hours, and it was enough to let me fall asleep very swiftly on the air mattress in the den.
I woke up to the sound of Dad’s phone ringing loudly with its obnoxious ring tone. I heard some muffled conversation, then detected more activity than there ought to have been so early in the morning.
Dad slid the door to the den open and told me the hospital had just called: Nana had apparently tried to pull off her mask and all her tubes in the middle of the night. They’d calmed her down and she was stable again, but they’d urged us to come in immediately.
So we went in immediately.
Nana (Mom) was indeed stable, and looked very much her normal self sitting up in her bed, if one was willing to overlook the mask and stuff. She was very happy to have us all around her, but she was also adamant about her decision: it was time for her to say goodbye.
In our talk the night before I’d asked whether Trine and the girls should come out. Mom had said she thought she could make it to Saturday, but that she wasn’t sure what to tell me about the girls.
“I struggled with the same thing when my parents died,” she had said. “I didn’t know whether you and Deb should have come all the way out to Seattle. I don’t know what to tell you.”
But that issue was now moot: had Trine and the girls boarded a plane the moment they woke up that morning, they still wouldn’t have made it in time. So we arranged instead for them to say goodbye to Nana over video.
We surrounded her with love all day.
We watched Mamma Mia! with her.
We kept everything happy and upbeat in the room with Nana, while outside in a little family room the awful practicalities were already being tended to.
The hospital dug up some Christmas decorations that allowed us to give the room a bit of a Christmasy feel, because Nana had been so looking forward to this coming Christmas—it was going to be the first ever with all four grandchildren together.
We sang Christmas carols together. We shared stories of our lives with her.
It was a long morning, a long day. At one point we all needed a break just to recharge: I needed fresh air and a chance to move my body around, because the emotions and jetlag and sleep deprivation were all catching up with me. One of the nurses suggested I take a walk on the beach, which was just a few blocks away.
That’s what I did, and that’s why my only pictures from that sad day were from the beach.
The one below was so calming and peaceful I texted it to the whole family group we’d been using all day.
Nana liked it very much.
I had to sit on a bench to get the sand out of my shoes, and when I got up I noticed it had an inscription.
Never heard of Kalidasa, but I’m tempted to put the text over the photo and have it printed and framed as a way to remember Nana, who really always did “look well to this day.”
Nana passed away surrounded by her husband, her sister, both her children, her son-in-law, and two of her grandchildren. Her daughter-in-law was present via Facetime (and, in one of life’s awful ironies of timing, was simultaneously dealing with a flood in our kitchen).
Nana—Mom—Anne—went the way she wanted to go, on her own timeline and on her own terms, absolutely blanketed with love. There was no struggle or pain at the end. I would have liked Nana to live a much longer life, but I don’t think I could have wished her a better departure.
She was very concerned what we’d all do for dinner that night. She recommended Italian.
And that really ought to have been that. This post should be about the horrible August when we lost Nana.
But we were just getting started.
We kept to ourselves in the days after losing Nana. This was a time of grief and sorrow, obviously, but we were able to give each other strength. Gifts of food poured in, and we enjoyed our meals together. We were all there for Pop Pop now, doing everything we could to keep him strong and help him begin a strange new life without the woman who’d been his constant companion since the Kennedy administration.
We ate a lot. We played games. We tried to watch movies or television with Pop Pop, but that was more difficult than it sounds. His aversion to ads meant that he was always hopping around between channels. From Jeopardy to an old episode of NCIS to Fox News to some European soccer game, clicking back to the Jeopardy channel every few moments just in case it was back. I’m laughing a little about it now, as I write this, at how insanely exasperating it was to all of us, and how he simply couldn’t be bothered to give a damn.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing: little conflicts flared up as they often will whenever family is gathered, and although they could be intense they were also short-lived.
We all sought refuge in various little normalcies. I went to Publix one evening and remembered I’d made some promises to Maddie and Molli. I sent them photographic evidence that at least one of them had been kept:
The condo and Beth’s house were quite crowded, so I’d found it was nice for long calls to get out to Miromar. I’d walk around that giant mall as I talked, enjoying the open air and the sight of people going about their perfectly ordinary days.
Although the mercurial weather more than once hit with such severity that I found myself trapped at Miromar, unable to sprint the 50 or 100 yards to my car for fear of the lightning that always seemed to be striking all over the parking lots.
And from time to time I wandered into stores to look at stuff. I went into the Reebok store to buy some flip-flops. They were about ten bucks. The cashier told me that that green-and-yellow set of sneakers you see in this photo were a collector’s item:
They’d just been returned, he explained, so he could offer me an incredibly reduced price: just $210 for the pair. He assured me they were already selling on e-Bay for like $1400.
I shared that picture with the family group, and next thing I knew Molli was urging me to go buy them because they were so cool, she just loved them. So I told her I’d buy them for her if she’d pay half out of her own money.
That was the end of conversation about the Limited Edition Jurassic Park Instapump Fury sneakers.
One day one of the many bunnies romping around the Oakwood neighborhood had a run-in with a car and lost, right on the street outside the condo. I’d noticed the bunny’s two-dimensional remains on my way out somewhere and had thought, “I should tell the guys at the gate to send someone to scoop it off the street.”
But I forgot, both on the way out through the gate and on the way back in.
But when I came back, there was a crew at work on the leftover bunny: a flock of black vultures.
It was astonishing to watch them work on Mr. Bunny. I brought most of the family out of the condo to watch: there were at least six or seven of them picking at the bunny, with two looking on very menacingly from a nearby roof. Within a matter of minutes, nothing remained but a clean white spine in the middle of the street.
It was ghastly, but we couldn’t stop watching.
Beth treated us all to a a dinner at the pub in the Clubhouse one evening.
The walls were covered with a lot of paintings by a local artist that I thought were kind of fun. Not as great art, but just… fun. I took pictures of them intending to show them to Maddie for inspiration. Not “try to paint like this” inspiration (dear Maddie, please never paint like this), but “look at the fun kinds of things some people paint; you can paint anything” kind of inspiration.
I got about a dozen of the paintings, but here are just three.
The paintings are sort of irrelevant: what I remember about that dinner is Aunt Deb leaving the table and going back to the condo because she didn’t feel well. And hadn’t been for a while. Pop Pop had been under the weather too, and coughing enough that I’d been urging him to see a doctor.
What we didn’t know at that point was that the whole family was riddled with covid. Within a matter of days, six of the eight of us would test positive for covid.
But we still didn’t know that. We were feeling our way back toward normal. Flights back home were beginning to show up on the radar. I was working remotely for PensionDanmark at least a few hours every day.
And from time to time, I allowed myself a moment to do nothing at all.
One evening I’d asked Pop Pop if he had any Tums. Sure, he said, up in the medicine cabinet in our bathroom.
I got them out of the cabinet and checked the expiration date: September 2005. This little tub of Tums was probably purchased around the time of Molli’s birth:
(I think the reason I’d checked the expiration date was because Pop Pop had earlier insisted his cough was just some post-nasal drip, and we’d been through a similar routine: there was some Dristan in the medicine cabinet, could I get it for him? I could. But it had expired about midway through Obama’s second term.)
I haven’t yet mentioned the heat. It was hot in Florida, as Augusts often are in the tropics. Hot and humid. The heat was searing when the sun was shining: and when there was rain (and there was rain most every afternoon around 15:00, usually with thunderstorms), the searing heat became a hot and heavy dampness.
Not very pleasant for human beings, but nice for the geckos… who were everywhere.
Pop Pop finally called his doctor about a week after Nana died. I wasn’t around when he made the call, but Aunt Deb told me she overheard him, and what he told the doctor over the phone was: “Yes, my wife died last week and now my son’s convinced I’m going to die.”
So he arranged for a video consultation the following afternoon.
But because his cough was so bad and she herself was feeling so lousy, Aunt Deb sprang for a bunch of home covid tests early on the day of Pop Pop’s scheduled consultation.
Hannah supervised us to be sure we took the tests correctly. Mine looked like this:
So did everyone else’s—except Pop Pop’s.
His had a second line.
He was pregnant!
The doctor wasn’t especially concerned. We pushed him to refer Pop Pop for a monoclonal antibody infusion, which he agreed to do, but it would require an in-person visit. So we scheduled one for Friday.
It was at about this point I began ending every evening with a glass of scotch in Beth’s hot tub.
I should stress, I must stress, that we weren’t especially worried about Pop Pop’s health, even with the covid. He was fully vaccinated. We all knew that among the fully vaccinated, hospitalizations were rare and the death rate was, and here I quote from memory the findings of a study that had been released just a week before, “effectively zero.”
We were all worried about his state of mind, of course, but all things considered he seemed to be holding up better than we might have expected.
I was still doing my best to work for PensionDanmark as close to a full day as possible: my colleagues expressed endless concern for me, so I sent them the picture below to show them where I was working: at Beth’s kitchen table, in a big open space with a view out to the pool in the lanai and the palm-tree lined golf course beyond it. It was a tough time for our family, yes, but we were working through it, and the setting certainly helped.
The setting and, as I’ve already noted, the hot tub, and the scotch.
Below is just one of many selfies I would send back to Trine each evening to try and show I was doing all right. The smiles were sometimes almost unbearably forced, but the very act of forcing them was in fact somehow cheering. (Thank you, Stanislavski.)
But then a new problem arose: Aunt Deb was feeling worse and worse, so she tested herself again, and this time the results were positive. She and Uncle Gene had been scheduled to fly back to Boston Friday morning (the 20th), but although she needed to get home, flying-while-covid-positive was not an option. So they arranged to cancel their flight and take their rental car up to Boston. Google says that’s a 1474 mile trip requiring 22 hours and 19 minutes of driving.
Google doesn’t say anything about making that same trip when at least one passenger is covid-positive and there’s a hurricane bearing down on the northeastern United States, with expected landfall roughly about the same time the vehicle will be entering the area of landfall.
“Whee! We’re on a race to beat a hurricane to place that’s 1500 miles away! And one of us has covid! (So far!)”
Clearly I was not the only one forcing smiles.
Deb sent pictures as they made their way north; it obviously kills chronology to include them here, but let’s do it anyway because I think it’s kind of heroic how much ground they covered so quickly under such circumstances.
Now, as long as we’re stepping outside chronology for a moment, I should mention that eventually Dad, Beth, Deb, Gene, Salli, and Hannah would all contract (or at least test positive) for Covid. Only Sophie and I dodged it. The math is shocking: of the eight people gathered together for Mom’s last days, all of whom were fully vaccinated, six caught covid.
As long we’ve stepped outside the chronological flow: Trine and the girls were sending me pictures here and there to cheer me up and keep me updated on life back home. I can’t date any of them beyond “some time in August.”
Getting back to chronological order, once the Hurricane Henri Covid Crew sped off, it was just Dad, Beth, and myself remaining.
And, of course, Mr. Bunny:
I don’t know which granddaughter he got it from, or whether it was something he made up himself, but Dad referred to all the bunnies as “Mr. Bunny.” As though the many bunnies hopping around were really just a single bunny. In fairness, I never saw more than one at a time—but given the number of predators, it’s a wonder I saw any at all. At one point earlier in the visit the whole family watched in awe as a panther went bounding across the lawn outside the lanai; a day or two later the upstairs neighbor told me his wife had been startled out of her wits that morning when she’d been on her way out to get the mail only to see a bobcat sitting on the path right in front of the steps to their door. (She did not fetch the mail.) And you’ve already seen what quick work the local birds could make of a bunny.
So I guess bunnies are just the tribbles of earth: they have no hope of survival except to reproduce like crazy.
With everyone else gone, and Dad not having much of an appetite, it fell upon me to put the condolence foods to good use.
You see that pickle? That’s no ordinary pickle. It’s one of these:
Those are the best pickles I have ever tasted in my life. And I mean that. I thought they were some local startup I’d stumbled across, and indeed they were. In Boston. In 2008.
In any case, to hell with Vlasic and Clausen: it’s Grillo’s or bust for me from now on.
And now back to our slow-motion tragedy, already in progress.
I made a trip out to the Gulf Coast shopping center. The one with the Costco. Just for a break from Miromar.
I took this picture and sent it immediately to Trine, saying we’d have to get Maddie to this place in December:
Trine agreed, and reminded me to pick up some extra Vitamin C while I was out and about. Pandemic shopping is not like regular shopping:
No Vitamin C at all. Sold out completely.
A day or two earlier when I got back to the condo from some trip or other, I’d noticed a white streak on the passenger door that hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t a scratch, just a streak, but it looked bad and I didn’t want the rental company to charge me for it. I tried to rub it out with a little spit and finger pressure, but it didn’t really work. A lovely old woman pulled up into the driveway while I was engaged with that. Her name was Sandy, she said, and she had been a dear friend of Mom’s. She’d just come by to drop off a lasagne, she said. We had a brief chat about Mom, and about how the whole family was holding up. She went to get the lasagne from her trunk, but it was empty. She said something about her husband having probably taken it out. She got back in her car and drove off.
On this date when I got to the condo, Dad said, “Someone came by and left you a gift. It’s on the counter.”
And there it was.
Yep: Turtle Wax for the car.
(But no lasagne.)
Another day, another wind-down in the hot tub with a scotch:
I’ll assume that picture was from Saturday, August 21. I wrote Trine that night: “Dad did good tonight, we ordered chinese and he ate a LOT, given how little he’s eaten the past few days. His BP went up, but I remembered something like that when the girls ate in neonatal so since all his other signs were normal we shrugged it off as digestion. 😄 He felt fine, anyway. I think he’s beat this thing.”
I don’t want to get bogged down into the details, but suffice to say we’d been monitoring his vitals very carefully all weekend, and had been eagerly awaiting the infusion doctor to confirm he’d received all the necessary documentation and was ready to schedule an infusion.
After Dad’s dinner Sunday evening (I cooked him his but was waiting to have my own), we took the vitals and the oxygen saturation was at 89. That was alarming. He said he didn’t feel very bad, though, so we thought we’d clean the device, wait 20-30 minutes for digestion to subside, then try again.
Which is what we did. And it was still low. So we got into the car and drove to the NCH hospital over by Coconut Point. There was nobody in the ER waiting room except for two uniformed EMTs behind the desk. I explained that my father was Covid-positive and we’d been told by his doctor to bring him to ER if his oxygen saturation ever dropped below 90, and it just had. They kicked right into gear, and within moments they were wheeling Dad into the hospital and telling me I should go get some food because it would be at least a few hours before there was any news, and their covid rules meant I wouldn’t be allowed to stay with Dad anyway.
“Should I just go eat and come back?” I asked.
They suggested I go home to await any news. Dad agreed with their suggestion. So I went back to Beth’s, poured a drink, and sat in the hot tub. I sipped that scotch very slowly, against the possibility of having to drive, until Dad called many hours later: I should just go to bed, he said: they were transferring him down to NCH Baker, down in Naples. He’d text me in the morning.
I wouldn’t be allowed to see him again for over a week.
Meanwhile, Beth had been feeling so lousy I took her to her primary physician (Michelle) for a checkup. She’d tested negative back when we all did, but we wanted to know what was behind her cough and sluggishness. (The fact that Deb had tested negative before testing positive was not lost on us.)
A nurse gave her a quick test as soon as we got to the office. A little bit later, Beth’s doctor came in and said, “Well, Beth, how on earth did you get Covid?”
With Dad at the hospital and Beth now positive for Covid, I did the smart thing and moved my stuff back to the condo.
I had to leave Beth a note so she’d know what to tell Donna and Marissa when they arrived.
In case it’s too small to read:
- Michelle (her doctor) tested you for Covid—you have it.
- Downtown NCH Hosp. is going to call you with a time for a monoclonal infusion.
- If they don’t call soon, call them at the # on the brochure Michelle gave you.
- Arrange to have Marissa take you to that appointment.
- Drink fluids, eat salty stuff, get LOTS of rest.
I checked on Beth later that evening, once I’d wrapped things up with Dad on the phone. She was making a big chicken salad for us. Tearing the meat off the carcass with her bare hands.
I had to remind her I couldn’t eat with her because she had Covid. She’d forgotten. I asked if the hospital had called about the appointment; she said no, no calls. I asked if she’d called them. She asked if she was supposed to.
The note had been a clever idea—Beth uses notes for herself all the time— but it would have been even more clever with a lot of notes around the house reminding her to read it.
From this point forward I was alone in the condo most days, checking in with Dad very often via text and with Beth in person at least once a day (masked and at a distance).
I tried to make the most of things. There were, after all, still pretty sunrises.
I didn’t have the option of hot-tubbing with a scotch at Beth’s any more, so I tried taking my evening scotch at the Oakwood pool (the waters of which weren’t much cooler than Beth’s hot-tub anyway).
It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t the same, so I never tried again.
But I did keep sending forced smiles back home.
The afternoon weather seemed to be worsening: by now the afternoon “rumblers” seemed to last two or three hours.
On the advice of everyone I was communicating with, I took a few hours one afternoon to indulge myself over at Doc’s Beach House, in Bonita Beach.
It was a nice half hour—then the clouds rolled up.
And then thunder started rumbling in the distance.
The dragonflies went amok: every speck you see in the photo below was a giant Florida dragonfly, brilliant crimson in color.
I went back to the condo.
Mr. Bunny was there as always.
Since the beach hadn’t worked out, I thought I’d indulge myself with a dinner up at the Clubhouse and maybe an exotic drink in the hot tub up there. So I got myself all prepped and….
It wasn’t just the pool clubhouse, everything up there was closed except the main dining room.
(“Objection, your honor, relevance?” “Goes to state of mind, your honor.” “Very well, proceed.”)
From everything I can tell, that was Saturday, August 28. It’s very strange the clubhouse would be closed on a Saturday evening, but by this point nothing struck me as particularly unusual.
Sunday was the day Dad decided to sign himself over to hospice.
He’d been pretty pessimistic about the outcome of his stay down at Baker from very early on, and Deb and I were exhausting ourselves trying to keep him positive—especially when a lot of his early concerns turned out to have been based on misunderstandings (which we could only learn by speaking to medical staff, which was complicated in that they refused to call me on my Danish number, so they would call Deb and she would call me).
I had a lengthy talk with his doctor that Sunday afternoon. This was no misunderstanding. Worse, the doc’s objective assessment was that Dad’s decision was “reasonable.”
We arranged that I would come down to NCH Baker the next day, Monday, to meet with the hospice people to sign papers and stuff. And it would give us a chance to get a will signed, because the hospital—which had done such a good job getting Dad all the little things I’d been bringing him over the course of the week, and getting me all the things he was sending back—had somehow lost the will I had brought for his signature.
I went down Monday around lunch time and gave the receptionist a new printed will. I said I would sit in the lobby until someone came down from Dad’s floor, picked it up, and brought it straight to him for signing. And witnessing.
That worked.
The hospice woman arrived and I signed the necessary papers.
Within about half an hour of that Dad was moved to a hospice room.
His male nurse was a guy from Brooklyn. Dad was very happy about that. We talked a little: the three of us at first, then just Dad and I. We were able to get Facetime calls connected to all immediate family members: all the Lees, my own family, and Bob.
Finally it was just Dad and Deb and me. We talked a little more while nurses came in and set things up just as they had for mom. Dad then asked us to leave him. We resisted a little, but… he was still Dad. Resistance was futile.
At his insistence I took the gym bag full of his personal property with me: in grabbing it off the table, I knocked over a pitcher of ice-water, the contents of which went sloshing all over the floor.
The nurses told me not to worry about it and whooshed me out of the room.
The Brooklyn guy came out with me and explained that a lot of people didn’t want anyone around for their final moments. He didn’t want me to feel bad about being kicked out. Or about spilling the water.
I drove back to the condo feeling bad anyway. Also very numb and lost.
Talking to Deb about ninety minutes after I’d left Dad, she asked whether the hospital had called to say he’d passed, as they’d said they would. (A few days earlier I’d bought a burner phone to have an American number so the hospital could reach me.)
I said they had not.
“They haven’t called me either,” she said, “I’ll call them.”
A few minutes later she got back to me: he was still hanging in there, the nurse had told her, sleeping peacefully—and snoring.
About fifteen minutes later I got the final call from the hospital.
Sitting out on the lanai to try and let it all sink in, I noticed a rainbow in the distance. I sent the picture to Deb.
She wrote back immediately: had I not noticed that the clouds looked like two people kissing?
I hadn’t noticed at first, but couldn’t help seeing it after she wrote that.
The sunset that night was particularly striking.
(It must have been even more striking looking west.)
I won’t say there was any relief afterwards, but there was a lessening of anxiety and urgency that felt like relief.
I thought sun and water would help.
They didn’t.
Or maybe they did. Who knows?
From this point on, it was mere practicalities. There was only so much I could do down there alone, but it was somehow enough to keep me busy all day, every day.
Sandy was apparently also good friends with Beth, so she knew everything that had happened.
(Still no sign of that lasagne, though.)
After mom died, my awful rental car company (NÜ, which should stand for “Never Üse”) had allowed me to extend my one-week rental an additional week. When Dad got sick they had at first refused my request for an additional extension, but I petitioned them pretty hard and managed to get an addition extra week. They were quite firm, however, in insisting I could not renew the extension again. So two days after Dad died I had to burn a big chunk of a day driving down to Miami to return the car, pick up a new one, and drive back.
I had planned to top off the tank at the Indian rest area in the middle of Alligator Alley. I had done the math and was confident I could make it, but by the time I was a few miles into that empty wilderness the car began warning me in terms that made me doubt my own math.
So when I came to an exit whose signage informed me the next exit was another 43 miles away, I took the exit impulsively.
I pulled over and checked Google maps: the nearest gas station was 12 miles north. That wasn’t optimal, but it was better than 43 miles—so I went for it.
I drove about 5 miles along a road that looked like this:
And I have to admit I was getting flashbacks to the ill-fated drive to Estero from Cape Canaveral, when I’d led the hungry, tired family through the barrens of central Florida on nothing but fumes as darkness fell.
The feeling was exacerbated when a sign informed me I was entering Florida’s largest panther reserve.
(Panthers… why did it have to be panthers?)
Fortune smiled on me, however, and I made it to the station without running out of gas and having to hike through a panther reserve in the middle of alligator country.
Much further along, I made the usual pit stop where the black vultures are always lurking around.
I made it to Miami just before the 15:00 deadline to turn in the old car. A couple of hours later, I was on my way back in the new one:
(It was much more car than I’d ordered, or needed, but the guy at the agency felt bad for me because although he’d been able to change my rental from 7 to 3 days, and although agency policy allowed refunds, he said Priceline would not refund it, so he’d upgrade the car to “use” all the money that would otherwise be wasted.)
Halfway through Alligator Alley on the way back to Estero it began pouring rain, and the rain only increased with every mile. Another insane tropical rain storm that continued even after I got back to the condo.
The next day I went to visit Norwood and Toni to thank them in person for all the help they’d given Mom and Dad the past few years.
Later they emailed Deb and me a picture from the not too distant past:
I got caught in yet another hellstorm on the way back to Estero from their house in Naples, but at least I was rewarded with another rainbow by the time I got back.
Friday afternoon I gave the sun and water another chance.
Beth had me over for dinner that night, my last in Florida. (She’d been officially cleared of Covid by her doctor a few days earlier, with two negative tests.) She had a different nurse at her house that night, and this one was an amateur chef: Beth sent her off to Publix to get some great steaks and potatoes and wine and she prepared them to perfection. It was a a genuinely delicious meal and it was nice to have people to talk to in person.
On Saturday I left.
I took that particular picture as a reminder of where we were putting the key to the condo, then a goodbye picture with Beth.
And that was it.
I also got to say goodbye to the pit-stop vultures on my way to the airport.
Checking in at the airport was complicated: first there was a line where I had to prove I had the necessary Covid documentation for my destination. I needed none for my trip to Denmark via Germany, but had to wait in line behind a lot of people who didn’t have the right documentation or couldn’t find it.
Then there was a very long check-in line, since Covid had made online check-in impossible for international flights leaving America.
Then there was a third long line to get through TSA security.
I needn’t have worried: yet another tropical hellstorm had blown through while I was making my way through all those lines, disrupting all the arriving flights, so my flight had been delayed about 45 minutes.
But finally I was able to board and take my place in what the check-in attendant had assured me was “the best seat I can get for you” because she felt bad for me.
Nothing says “fuck you” like learning that the best that can be done for you is seat 38C.
The flight to Frankfurt was uneventful. The sprint through Frankfurt Airport was harrowing (repeat: never fly through Frankfurt), but I made it.
On the flight from Frankfurt to Copenhagen, about an hour south of Copenhagen, I was watching the landscape roll by beneath us when one of its features made me do something I don’t think I’d done in a while: I laughed out loud.
I didn’t take a picture of what I saw, but in describing it to a colleague at work a week or so later I browsed Google maps until I could find it. (And yes, I’m a child.)
Behold the German lake Schweriner Innensee:
A few hours later I was home.
I thought about ending the post there.
The storyline of this period for our family was, after all, the horrible loss of Mom and Dad—Nana and Pop Pop—and my return to Denmark had closed the book on that chapter. Not only that, but it was by now September 5. A whole new month.
But that’s not how life actually works. Life goes on. Life had in fact never slowed down a beat, much less stopped.
And although this blog has always been largely for Nana and Pop Pop, it was always about Molli and Maddie.
And still is. For their American relatives, for their Danish relatives, and for them.
I’d say, “for you, future Molli and future Maddie,” the way I used to, except they now come to the blog now and then on their own to trip down memory lane, as I hope they always will. We even use it to settle family arguments.
Life goes on, so the blog goes on, and so this post goes on.
I got home on a Sunday, took Monday off as a day to get my bearings and shake off some of the jetlag, and was back into my routine on Tuesday.
The following weekend was a busy one: a handball tournament down in Køge on Saturday, and Trine’s birthday on Sunday.
First, though, I’d had to work from home on Friday to escort Maddie to and from a Fantasy Fair at Dyrehaven. It didn’t go very well for her (she ended up being the lone Elf in a tribe of aggressive Orcs and Paladins), but I love this picture of her that I took when we got there.
Maddie had some great scores at the placement tournament down in Køge, and I managed to get a few down for the record.
On Sunday, the 29th anniversary of Trine’s 20th birthday was celebrated with brunch at the Dalle Valle across the street from Tivoli.
(Sigh. Shirt by Magnum PI Design; hair by Static Electricity.)
Molli is still the animal-whisperer: animals all just naturally trust her.
Me, they just want to attack.
(Zoom in on his face: look how angry!)
The whole thing reminded me a little of a visit to San Marcos Square, or whatever that big plaza in Venice is called:
(Crazy to think that was 14 years ago!)
Trine sent me this picture from the woods: I thought mushrooms only looked like this in cartoons:
You can’t see the squirrel in the next picture… but Didi can.
Finally, an old picture Trine sent me to cheer me up down in Florida.
That’s it. That gets us from the end of July through August and more than halfway through September.
So here we are.
It’s been a rough time for all of us, and returning to normal is going to take some time. School and work and all our various activities have helped get the flow of our lives back into a normal and familiar frame, but getting used to the idea that Nana and Pop Pop aren’t out there any more isn’t going to be quick.
While consoling me at one point, the upstairs neighbor—I just remembered his name: Tom Park—shared a story. He’d never been very good with cars, he said. The internal combustion engine was a mystery to him. He neither knew nor cared much about cars, but his dad was an amateur grease monkey.
“How do I learn as much about cars as you know, when I just don’t care about them?” he asked his father one day when he was still a fairly young man.
“You don’t,” his dad said. “I know what I know because I’ve always loved cars.”
“But how do I know what kind of car to buy, what to look for, how to tell when something’s wrong, how to tell when some mechanic is ripping me off? How do I know even stupid stuff like what kind of oil to use, or what kind of tires to buy?”
“You don’t,” his father said again. “You call me and you ask.”
So that’s what he did.
“And even though he’s gone now, every time I walk into a garage or my car starts doing something weird, I still reach for my phone to call him. And then I have that awful moment of, Damn, dad’s gone, I can’t call him any more.“
I offered my condolences on the loss of his father and said the feeling sounded familiar.
“The whole time Dad was sick,” I said, “whenever I got new information I had this feeling like, I better let Mom know. And now I keep thinking of things like, I better ask Dad, or I better tell Mom and Dad.“
He nodded.
“You’ll have those feelings for a while,” he said.
“When did your father die?” I asked.
“Twenty years ago,” he said.
Molli got her driving permit, Maddie’s started a writing workshop, and I took a new job at another pension company. We’re getting our Christmas trip tickets refunded (Christmas in Estero has obviously lost its appeal) and have redirected the money into a winter vacation in Athens.
But those are subjects for another post.
What I’m doing now is having a hard time wrapping up this post. I’ve been working on it for weeks (and believe me, I know it doesn’t show!). It’s been therapeutic for me, a kind of grieving rite. But now it’s time to save it, publish it, and move on.
So that’s what I’m going to do right now.
