Author Archives: Robin Botie

Duetting: Memoir 26

Duetting: Memoir 26 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a collage of a tiny book made years ago by her daughter Marika Warden, who died with cancer.

For my holiday gift I’d asked my son for a shooting lesson. So on the unseasonably warm afternoon of Christmas Eve 2011, Greg comes downstairs with two long guns. Trembling, I wrap up in scarves, earplugs, earmuffs and hooded jacket, and follow him out the door and across the lawn. He stops just short of the pond, props his shotgun against a tree, and hands me the rifle. Remington.22, he tells me. And then he shows me how to hold, load, and ready it for shooting.

“You don’t pull the trigger,” he says, “you squeeze it. You hug it with your whole hand.” Willing my eyes to stay open, I squeeze and shoot. It’s not nearly as loud or as jarring as I’d expected. Marika would have said, “LikeBAM!” Hardly drawing a breath, I shoot again. Bam! The sky echoes with each ferocious bark. Handling this loaded rifle, cradling it so close, and then blasting the air—LikeBAM! —I am spellbound, conscious only of being just on the cusp of control or calamity.

We had placed two targets against a large willow tree across the pond. The targets were a gift I’d painted for Greg. The one I’m to use is a cartoon image of a rotund woodchuck with a bulls-eye bellybutton. We train the scope, first focusing far, and then zooming in so every breath and movement I make is exaggerated in the scope, and the woodchuck bounces in a dizzying scene. When it settles, I hug the trigger. LikeBAM! With no movement of my target, no trace of a hit, I aim and shoot again. BAM! I continue to load the magazine and shoot. My woodchuck hasn’t budged. Greg fires his gun and with each shot creates small clouds of smoke before his target.

When our bullets are spent, we walk together around the pond to inspect the targets. Surprisingly, the bullets sped through mine without moving it and I’ve hit the woodchuck’s belly twenty-six out of twenty-eight times. Pleased with myself, I’m hooting and cheering. Until we remove the targets from the base of the willow.
“Oh. No,” I wail, “I’ve been shooting clear through to the tree. We’re killing the tree.”
“Oh, well. ‘Goes with the territory,” he shrugs.

Some things, like the differences in our respect for life and living things, will never jive. I say a silent apology to the tree and then follow Greg into the kitchen. He takes the two rib-eye steaks I got for our supper, pierces them several times, plants them in plastic zip-lock bags, and marinates them in Johnny Walker whisky. He pours two glasses of the whisky over ice.

“Did Marika ever shoot? What’s the best prank you ever pulled on Marika?” I ask, thinking I’ve got him relaxed and ready to chat. “What would you fight for or even die for?”
“Mom. Just enjoy the Johnnie Walker. Okay?” And then, “Do you still have my extra passport photo somewhere? I need it back. I’ve got a job in Afghanistan as soon as I get my papers cleared.” He’s leaving again. Whatever holiday I’ve been avoiding is now totally shot.

Later that night, on the first Christmas Eve without my daughter, the single drawer of the small night table next to my bed is stuck open. I rarely use this drawer but I had rummaged through it for Greg’s passport photo. Now the drawer is jammed and I can’t get it to close shut. I slam it and it breaks. When I wrench it back out, a tiny green cloth packet falls to the floor, and I remember a Christmas long ago when Marika had no gift to give me. She had scurried upstairs, bounced back down, and handed me this small pouch of jeweled sequins. Now I empty the contents into my hand. Sparkling butterfly-light jewels catch the lamplight that blurs through tears. The remaining sparse contents of the broken drawer lay on the floor. And in the middle of the small mess, bound with shiny red holiday ribbon, sits a tiny book written and illustrated by Marika in 2001, when she was eleven years old.

Book of Wonderful Memories. From: Marika. J.W. To: Robin Botie
1.The costume parade. You were there for me every step of the way! I’ll never forget your face when I got 4th place. You were so happy! 2.That one teddy bear that you would look at when we were fighting and tell me a story of you. Mom … 5.Even with the most boring books, it seems so exciting with your voice. … 6.When I’m scared you are always there for me … 8.Always loveing even when I’m a brat.

Mareek! Are you here? I cry out. Are you helping me get through Christmas? What the heck am I doing in this drawer anyway? It’s almost midnight and I’m holding the most precious gift, now received twice over. Why does it feel like you’re watching me? Sometimes it’s hard not to believe in ghosts, in after-life. Here I am, holding this tiny book you made ten years ago, before all the road trips, before cancer. Before our mother/daughter divide. Ten years ago when you adored me—Maybe you never stopped adoring me—Maybe you just stopped showing it.

She’d made me a book. And now I am making a book for her. She wrote. So I’m writing. Words are my new medium and I’m using them to paint our portrait, mixing words like I used to mix colors. All the sweet or savory, whispering or roaring, bland or bewitching words that dance in my mind. Like : meandering, infinitesimal, crimson, petechiae…. Reading my book aloud at the Feed and Reads, occasionally I glance up from the pages to peek at my audience, their jaws dropped and eyes begging me to continue. My gift to Marika, I tell myself. Really, though, she has gifted me, and is gifting me still.

My first manuscript is a plot-less lament to my dead daughter. But that doesn’t matter. Because, daily, I lose myself and find myself in what I write. Some new determination to live, lives on. And I feel hope. It’s back. And hope implies future. So I continue to write, and look forward to the sharing. And I love my book like it’s my daughter.

REPLY TO ROBIN

Duetting: Memoir 25

Duetting: Memoir 25 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, phoshops a tangle of computer wires and cables to illustrate a aprt of her memoir about closure after the death of a loved one.It is the day before my first Christmas Eve without Marika. No Christmas this year. No Chanukah. Holidays seem pointless without Marika. So I’m erasing the whole season. Instead I’ll clean and write and do un-holiday-type things. Like clearing out the last of Marika’s belongings.

I had surprised myself, and others, by how quickly I got rid of her things. It had been eerily easy. Somewhere, someone said cleaning up after a dead loved one is an important aspect of achieving closure. Closure—hah! Not for me. It is more like a desperate urge to re-home the many pieces of Marika. I am seeding the world with her stuff. It requires a great trust in the universe to find the right new person or place for the pretty prom dresses, the high-heeled shoes, stuffed animals … and now, the old desktop computer in her room. Marika hadn’t used it since shortly after she got cancer, after my father gave her a new laptop for college. Staples will recycle the old computer for ten dollars.

Rachel comes over to help me get it into the car. It feels less intrusive to rummage through Marika’s underwear drawer or her journals than to go anywhere near her old computer. But we briefly check it for anything I might want to keep. Nothing. I crave the writings of the almost-adult Marika, but this computer predates that. So Rachel tears it from the tangled mass of cables and wires, the arteries and veins that bind it to home.

“I ended up drunk in the ER every weekend. It was like I was suicidal,” Rachel tells me as she pulls cords out from under the desk. I keep my mouth shut. “When I went into Rehab, I was out of contact with the world for twenty-eight days. No phone, no computer,” she says.
“Are you back at work now? What was that last job? Working as a caseworker?”  
“Yeah. I had to resign when I went to Rehab. I loved that job.”
“That was a neat job,” I say. She carries the computer down the stairs and I follow.
“Can you read some of the book to me?” she asks, after she shoves the computer into the car. She reminds me of Marika as a young child begging me to read. But before I can begin, Rachel’s cell phone rings. She listens briefly.

“What are you doing in a bar, you goofball? Get out of there. Fast,” she says. Then, “You’re gonna throw sixty days of sobriety down the trash for a girl?” As she speaks to this person in crisis, I am awed at how together Rachel sounds. She seems to have found herself after this difficult year of loss, substance abuse, and Rehab. Her head is in a good place, whereas I feel lost. After the last three sad but blessed years of knowing exactly why I was where I was, I now find myself directionless.

Later, alone in the Staples parking lot, I can barely lift the computer tower out of the car and into a shopping cart. I know I’m in trouble when, wheeling the loaded cart through the automatic doors, I have a flashback to last year at this time when I pushed Marika in a wheelchair through similar doors at the hospital. But soon, two Staples technicians are operating with screwdrivers and pliers to pull the ancient computer apart. The younger tech, about Marika’s age, extracts and then hands me the hard drive, a small but surprisingly heavy black metal box. It says “Fragile” on it and contains all her old high school homework, snippets of printed conversations with friends, playlists, … young girl-stuff locked up inside. It is like holding Marika’s heart. The technician draws stars in blue ink on the white label.

“Drill here. When you get rid of a computer you have to destroy the hard drive,” he says. Too mesmerized by the mysterious box in my hands, I don’t question why Staples doesn’t just take it and complete the job themselves. Through sobs, I ask the tech whom to pay the ten dollars to, and he tells me there’s no charge. On the verge of a major meltdown, I take Marika’s Heart Drive and flee.

My son, on his way out just as I arrive home with the somber little black box, offers to blast it apart at his next shooting session. Remembering how proud Marika had been of her brother shooting a shotgun off the deck during one of her parties, I give it to Greg. After all, maybe he needs some closure.

 

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN

Duetting: Memoir 24

Duetting: Memoir 24 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops Andrea Riddle and Marika Warden wearing headwraps and hoop earrings, as cancer patients.

There is always some anxiety as I wait for guests to arrive. My friends are so different from one another. They range from Marika’s age to my mother’s age. For the Feed and Reads I’ve gathered them from my hiking group, from foodie endeavors, former workplaces, and past mother-daughter relationships. One friend’s daughter will join us, and also a woman I’ve never met who felt linked by loss. And Rachel. If I can reach her.

“Hey Rachel, where are you? You haven’t called or emailed me in over a month. I’m getting worried,” I leave multiple messages on her cell, “You’re coming to the Feed and Read aren’t you?” Rachel usually communicates with confidence, like she’s the Mayor of Cool. But when I last spoke to her she’d sounded almost suicidal. Too wrapped up in my own pain, I’d never really considered how Marika’s death affected her best friend. 

Soon I’m more warmed than worried, looking around the first assembly of my readers. They introduce themselves and talk like they are old friends. And in the months to come, they will be. In their courageous effort to help me, they will discover familiar connections and create new ones. But there are two who are missing. One is Andrea. She had often “borrowed” my children over the years, spoiling them and stretching their minds. She’d visited Marika several times in the hospital. Andrea had given me my first teaching job, knowing what I could do long before I did. Two months ago we walked in the woods as yellow leaves fell. What kind of horrible joke was it that she was recently diagnosed with cancer herself? I wanted to be there for her. But wearing her head wrap and hoop earrings, she so resembled Marika, I could hardly look at her. Now Andrea is too sick from chemo to join the Feed and Reads.

The doorbell rings and I run to answer it. Rachel.
“Sorry I’m late,” she says, all bubbly at the door.
“Look at you!” I gush. “Your hair. You look adorable. You look – happy.” She looks like she owns the world and has just walked into her own birthday party. Her makeup and manicure are gone. And her hair is shaved off except for a bit at the top.
“It’s a Faux-Hawk,” she says, brushing at her almost bare head. “Do you like it?” It’s freezing outside, but she’s wearing a wife-beater undershirt, neon Michael Jordan sneakers, and low rise baggy khaki shorts that might be her dad’s. She looks like the beloved janitor from some old TV show. But she still has on the fragile silver necklace that was Marika’s.

“I’ve been sober for fifty-six days,” Rachel announces at the table as we feast on butternut squash soup, cheeses, salad, sushi, and shrimp cocktail. She proudly shows off her tattoos. One particularly huge one spreads across her ribs on her right side, “Be strong when you feel weak,” a quote of Marika’s. I’m very aware of how different Rachel is, from before, from the others. And I’m proud of her, like she’s mine.

When the meal is over, we move into the small living room for the reading. A photo of Marika sits on a tiny table next to me. Next to it is a box of tissues. And pencils and notebooks, for comments.

The Feed and Reads will go on for over a year. Whenever I have a couple of new chapters to share we will feast. My work is the focus at these gatherings, but everyone here knows grief. Before and after I read, we share our stories.

“It was just like that for me when my husband was in the hospital, before he died,” says Jane, the friend-of-a-friend I hadn’t known before. Next to her, Barb, who will host most of the Feed and Reads, sits stunned, holding a tissue in mid-air between her lap and her face.
“After my husband died I wrote him letters too,” says Annette, whom I’ve known over twenty-five years, “It was a powerful healing tool.” Celia, who remembers everything, brings the group back to my story saying, “You forgot to mention the prom. You have to write about the prom.”

It’s as if they all know I need them here. They somehow sense the best way to support a grieving parent is to show up and listen. So I keep writing and rewriting. To read aloud my daughter’s story. All a bereaved mother really wants is for her child to be remembered. For the rest of my life I will listen patiently while friends ramble on about their kids graduating, getting their first real jobs, getting married … and there will be no more news of Marika that I can contribute to the chatter. But here is my time to tell about my beautiful brave girl, her accomplishments, and her extraordinary passage through the bloom of her short life.

 

 

 

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN

Duetting: Memoir 23

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a collage of her daughter's ashes in an effort to heal her broken heart.

In late July 2011, I bring home the sealed black box containing my daughter’s ashes, and assemble a small altar in the living room, above the TV. Around the box I place photographs, daisies, chocolates, Marika’s stuffed Puppy, and two Lonely Planet Guides to Australia. The first summer without Marika is half over when I finally end my travels. I hadn’t found her anywhere else in the world. The box is where she lives now. Each day I stand before it wishing Marika good morning and goodnight. Her ashes are not just dust. The ashes are her, humming and dancing inside the box, watching me come and go.

With Rachel’s help, I clear out most of Marika’s bedroom in the house. Then, in a reckless determination to purge, I attack the attic, my son’s sprawl of accumulated stuff, and my own closets. I sell off my father’s stamp collection and deposit carloads of clothing and toys at the Salvation Army. It all has to go. The only things I want are Marika’s words. And once they are photo-copied, I send the original journals off with Rachel to give to Marika’s father. Then Rachel and I empty Marika’s bedroom at the apartment she shared with friends.

“What’s up with you?” I ask her. Rachel looks like a wounded animal. “Are you okay?” My eyes are drawn to the silver Tiffany’s necklace she wears, the one Laurie gave Marika for graduation.
“I’m not with my boyfriend anymore,” she says.
“Should I say sorry or congratulations? Well, either way, congratulations. ‘Cause you’re with you.” It’s what I say to anyone who tells me she’s survived a separation and is suddenly single or alone. It’s what I tell myself: You still have you. But I don’t recognize this as a gift yet. I feel I’m only a ghost of the person I was before. And it’s still hard to face people. I’m sure there is whispering and pointing just beyond my earshot and sight. Like last year, at a party, when my friend Andrea nodded discreetly in the direction of an acquaintance, “Do you see that woman? She’s been through hell and back, and she looks it.” I’d regarded the blinking, quivering woman who did indeed look like she’d fallen to Earth from outer space, breaking the sound barrier, her heart, and every moving part of her in the fall. Is that what I look like now? Floundering and crazed?

After Rachel and I bag the last of Marika’s shoes, I wash my hands singing “Happy Birthday” twice to Marika, and consider the strange haunted face in the mirror. Red rheumy eyes stare back. Graying roots jeer at me. Ugh. This has to go too.

Then, in early August, on a Sunday morning hike with Suki and friends, I fall in a slippery stream bed, and break my wrist. Right away I know it’s fractured although it is the first bone I’ve ever broken.
“Go. Get back to enjoying your Sunday,” I tell my friends who take Suki and drop me off at the hospital. “I’ll be fine.” But I am not fine. It’s my first time back at a hospital since Marika died. Waiting alone in the ER, I break down in howls. All the tears I had stuffed away for months each time I bravely faced the world beyond home, come gushing out of me. Marika’s supposed to be here, not me.

And then, as I bumble around the next several weeks in a cast, I suffer all sorts of snags. Mishaps. Glitches. Calamities. I get the flu. I mislay bills and incur late fees. By a hair, I miss hitting a deer on the road. Everything I cook burns. My keys disappear. My house is plagued by deferred maintenance. Skunks move in under my deck, and the pond is overrun with muskrats. I can’t sleep nights. And at the end of September, I get a traffic violation for failing to pull into the far lane when passing a blinking, parked cop car.

“Mom, you’re such a wimp,” I hear. And I know I’ve got to do better. So, I begin to drag myself out of the house and down the hill to the community that loved Marika. I start co-leading Chronic Disease Self-Management Workshops for the Tompkins County Health Department. I join a six-week hospice-sponsored group, Singing Through Your Grief, where mourners are supported as they share stories and sing. CompassionNet, a program serving New York State families of children with life-threatening illnesses, offers to pay for life coaching sessions.

“Why don’t you write a book?” asks my life coach, Marci Solomon.
“I would never,” I say, scrunching up my nose like Marika did when I suggested she wear shoes and socks in winter instead of sandals. But I enjoy writing responses to the questions Marci asks each week. And I eagerly do the homework from the Hospicare singing group.
“Your assignment is to pick a prompt from the list and write what you would tell your deceased loved one,” say Jayne Demakos and Kira Lallas, who lead Singing Through Your Grief. At the session that follows I read aloud what I wrote. A reverential silence followed by exuberant praise energizes me like richest chocolate.
“I will write for five hours this week,” I pledge at a Chronic Disease Self-Management workshop. Even the co-leaders are required to make and complete Action Plans, weekly contracts to do something for themselves, and then share their successes or failed attempts at the next meeting. The following week, “I will write for ten hours.”

It was just letters to Marika at first. Like on the TV game show Jeopardy, I teased out questions from her poems and songs, questions I wish I’d asked during our time together. What’s it like to be twenty and have cancer? What do you fear? How does cancer affect your relationships? … Memories swell up inside me. Words churn in my head. And when all the commotion is captured onto paper, I experience a thawing, a lightening. When I read aloud what I wrote, it becomes part of me. It makes me feel stronger. And it makes me sure this is not something I want to do on my own.

“Hey, Rachel, I’m writing a book,” I say over the phone. Then I call a dozen other friends. “I have an idea,” I say. “I’ve been writing a book and want to test it out. I want to do a series of simple dinners where I read aloud. Chapter by chapter, as I write. I’m calling these dinners ‘Feed and Reads.’ Would you come?”

It is so exciting to enlist listeners. With thirteen positive responses I begin two small groups that will fuel my energies over the next year with their kind and brave commitment. December starts out dreary. But I write for hours every day. Often by candlelight. For Marika, and now for the women who will gather together to hear me. Addicted to light, I line the driveway with solar-powered garden torches. I frame the mudroom door with rows of red mini-lights, and plant battery-operated plastic candlesticks in the windows up and down the house. I buy hundred-watt bulbs and full-spectrum therapy lamps to write by. Sweet light blossoms all around me, breaking the darkness as I write. Warm welcoming lights brighten the winter nights, the empty house, the long lonely driveway, and my dark heart. They beckon, they plead: come to me, come home.

 

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN

Duetting: Memoir 22

Duetting: Memoir 22 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops her daughter Marika Warden as a fierce warrior.

Sometimes I think of our time in the deeps of cancer as one big tumble. Cancer had barged into our home felling one thing after another, like the toppling of dominoes. Everything faltered and failed. Respiratory failure. The falling hair, the fallen-too-low white blood cell counts, the failing immune system. Prone to falling, Marika fell from a hospital bed, she fell down a staircase. She fell in love, she fell out of love. She fell in and out of remission. We both fell into depression. We fell down together in a parking lot near the hospital when I failed to support the weight of her larger frame. Falling behind in my work as I commuted back and forth to keep my job and keep at her bedside, I fell asleep at the wheel one day and ended up in a ditch. Terrified, I kept driving. Scared, worn out. Dangerous. My life was crumbling. And then the sky fell completely.

The chemo failed. We were all fooled. Life and the future are deceptions. Normal, if there is such a thing, doesn’t last long. Everything changes, and you can’t get back to how things were before cancer clobbered the world you once so obliviously flitted about. By the end of June 2009, Greg had been at war in Afghanistan for six months, my father began his own battles with failing health, and I got cut from my teaching job, just in time for Marika’s relapse of leukemia.

And maybe things wouldn’t have ended up the way they did if she hadn’t failed to stay in compliance. That’s what they called it, “failure to stay in compliance.” At some point she’d stopped taking her meds. Who knows why? Marika stopped the chemo maintenance pills that kept her cancer at bay and could possibly have cured her. The pills that might have been the happy end of the story. And she fell to her leukemia again. Her leukemia. As if she owned it, controlled it, and could just get rid of it. But now it owned her, and it would own every last aspect of her life.

“Robin, how many pills are left in Marika’s container of ATRA?” Laurie phoned, flummoxed, one day near the end of June. Laurie’s method of coping with the unknown is to tear it apart, examine every inch, and understand it.
“Fifty-five ATRA left,” I reported back to her ten minutes later. “Why?”
“Well, I called the two pharmacies she uses to fill the ‘scrips, and the math doesn’t add up. She must have quit taking the pills around January,” she said.
“Did she say anything to you?” I asked, knowing that Laurie would come right out and ask Marika why.
“She wouldn’t talk about it,” she said, sounding brokenhearted. Laurie was beating herself up about the pills, like she could ever have known or been able to do anything about it. What was Marika thinking? She’d dropped her weapons. Was she surrendering to cancer? Or was she pretending it just wasn’t there?

Marika, the intrepid warrior. That’s what someone on her blog site called her. My mother called her “a tough cookie.” Laurie dubbed her The Complication Queen since every bit of her, body and spirit, challenged any administration of new drug or routine procedure, resulting in countless complications. Laurie also said Marika was her own worst enemy. She fought blindly, sometimes recklessly, to live life on her own terms. People say you don’t fight cancer; that you learn to live with it. No, this was a battle. We were at war with cancer. I’d look at my daughter and marvel at how brave she was. In the hospital, I tried to be tough and strong so she could feel safe. When she was down I pretended to be a soldier standing guard over her, keeping long vigils. Then on Fridays, I’d say goodbye and go off again and again and again. And on Sundays, I’d march back up to my beautiful trouble at Strong. I pushed myself to be brave. For her. And maybe our war with cancer brought out the best in me. Maybe cancer was my General’s Table. Because that’s when I discovered I wasn’t alone. There were people, beautiful warm-hearted, courageous people, everywhere along the way. I was fighting in good company.

“I’m in Strong,” Marika said over the phone on the last day of June 2009, while I was stuck at Fort Lauderdale Airport, returning from a visit with my father. She said “in Strong,” not “at Strong.” When one is “at” the hospital, it means she’ll be home by dinnertime. But Marika was IN Strong. Again.
“I’m on the way,” I told her. And waiting for the plane back to New York, nothing in that airport was moving fast enough, now that we were soldiers at war once more.

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN

Duetting: Memoir 21

Duetting: Memoir 21 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops an image of a soldier, remembering that each warrior has someone somewhere to whom she is a hero.The son who returned home from Iraq was, in many ways, a stranger. Always a man of few words, Greg had seen and done things he wouldn’t talk about. But he also discovered people. He came home connected to friends all over the country. It seemed to start early on in his army career, maybe after eating at the General’s Table.

“Mom, they made us march 16 miles today. 3 more days until we do simulated attack. I won 10 rounds of hand-to-hand combat. I passed bayonet training,” he wrote home, all during boot camp. Except for the drill sergeant doling out disciplinary actions, Greg never mentioned other people. Then, several weeks into basic training, the drill sergeant directed some of the privates in the platoon to do an extra detail. Tired, hungry and sore, the soldiers were taken to the general’s house to collect the furniture and clean up from a party held that day. When they got there, they found leftover prime ribs, shrimp, eggrolls, sandwiches, and cakes. They were given an hour to clear the place and get rid of it all.
“Any way you can,” the drill sergeant barked before he disappeared.
“Yeah. So I ate at the General’s Table today,” Greg told us with glee over the base phone he’d waited on a long line to use. After that, in addition to filling us in on his own achievements, his letters and calls were rich with stories about his fellow soldiers. His communications came alive with the adventures of Stapp and Williams, and the trips they took to steak houses and shopping malls, and to New Orleans to see Mardi Gras. They wrote to each other’s sisters, and Greg’s social side began to blossom. The shy, lone warrior played golf, fished, cooked meals, and went out with friends. And good shared times continued with Marika when he came home on leave.

My returning warrior picked up some questionable new behaviors in the army. He now slept only on the couch, with the television blasting, the computer and lights on, and everything he held dear within arms’ reach. His bedroom became a storage closet for his collection of knives and guns. He chewed tobacco. He drank. He took extreme pride in his precision barbecuing.
“Mom, you gotta try some of this,” he offered when I came home shortly after him one Friday evening, while Marika was away at college.
“No thanks. It looks like the squirrel you shot in the driveway last week.”
“No, it’s barbecued rabbit steak. Fresh today. Marinated in good Irish whiskey,” he said. “With Rufus Teague Pork Rub.”

To this day, my son skillfully manages the searing and flipping on the grill. He scrapes the iron grates afterwards. He takes care of the grill, his guns, and his people. His friends and those he works with mean the world to him and he will drop everything, lose sleep, lose money, and defy death and danger to take care of them. Most amazing to me, my soldier keeps in touch. And it surprises me that he always comes home, though the length of his time here grows shorter and shorter as he hones in, ever closer, to the what and where of his future. I watch with bittersweet pride as he becomes a veritable citizen of the greater world, no longer an incidental by-product of small town Ithaca.

I know soldiers. They don’t fuss over their misfortunes. They keep busy with other things. When his gut ached, Greg would find the Tums and a friend to play golf with. When his Achilles tendon got torn in a boating accident, he threw away the crutches, changed his own dressings, and went out shopping at the mall. When stung by a girlfriend, he’d go out drinking with the guys.

Home from the base early one week, he strode into the kitchen with three huge racks of ribs, two jars of barbecue sauce and a twenty-four ounce can of beer. He mixed it all together in my largest broiler pan and set it in the fridge. For days he nursed it, turning the racks and redistributing the sauce.
“Who’s gonna eat all this?” I asked, thinking I would arrive home to a party any time. On the third day, grinning, he put the whole thing in the oven on medium-low for three hours. Then he put it on the grill while he mixed up a batch of barbecue-type beans. A new girlfriend showed up, dressed and made up like they were going out. The next thing I knew, the three of us were eating dinner around the kitchen counter. We polished off most of it.

But one night in December, he came home from the base long after I’d gone to bed. He noisily climbed up the staircase, and before I could fall back to sleep, I heard a loud thud overhead. I ran upstairs. He’d fallen from the couch. I could not wake or move him.
“Mom, I’m okay,” he murmured, not opening his eyes.
“Are you sure you’re okay? You’re gonna sleep on the floor?”
“I’m okay,” he said again, and started to drift away into sleep. “Oh yeah, I’m going to Afghanistan in three weeks.” And then my heart fell through the floorboards.

Every life is precious to someone. Each warrior has a mother, a sister, or someone somewhere to whom he is a hero. The warrior who lives under my roof is a seasoned soldier whose respect for life is vastly different from my own. Marika and I were proud of him; we were scared for him. Whenever he deployed, we wore duplicates of his dog tags he’d made for us. When he was sent to Afghanistan in the winter of 2009, Marika steeled herself for her brother’s demise. She soldiered on at Clark University while I kept the computer on late nights waiting for the familiar chirping sound of his Instant Messaging.

Over the phone, Marika sounded strong. On maintenance chemotherapy to stay in remission, she was taking ATRA in pill form. ATRA, the drug that gave her seizures and nearly killed her months before was now her main weapon against leukemia. It gave her nausea and headaches the weeks she was on it. But the last bone marrow biopsy showed her to be totally clear of leukemia cells. If she could just stay on ATRA for two years, cancer could become history. She called from her dorm room on a Saturday night.

“Mom, I’m taking a Red Cross class so I can be a lifeguard at camp this summer.” One of my soldiers was becoming a lifeguard? For a second I smiled inside myself, thinking maybe she would learn how it feels to watch over lives that could wash away in a blink, maybe she’d experience adrenaline pulsing through her, overriding all fear and allowing her to venture into dangerous waters to save a life. But I didn’t let this distract me.
“Great,” I said. “Are you taking your ATRA?”
“Mom. I’ve got it under control. Mom, Jake got sick again. He’s got my type of leukemia now. He had to leave school early,” she said. My children always said “Mom” before they said what they had to say. It’s like they had to awaken me, make sure they grabbed my attention. But my attention was already captured by this news of her friend getting sick again. Jake would occupy a good chunk of my thoughts over the next months as I regularly sent out silent prayers for him and his family. After all, you send your kid off to college after cancer and you think you’ve accomplished something. You think you’ve finally won the war. You don’t expect to be taken prisoner by cancer all over again.

“I’m transferring to Ithaca College for next fall,” Marika added quickly.
“Uh, are you sure you want to do that?” She had caught me off guard. Part of me was excited that she might be back in Ithaca; but I was torn because I wanted her to be a normal healthy kid loving being away. Isn’t that what she craved? To be free of me and home? I thought that was what all my soldiers needed.

 

 

 

 

REPLY TO ROBIN