Seven years ago today, this awesome guy (who now strikes me as a Chuck Norris look alike), died from lung cancer:

Gordy & Me. I was about Ruthie’s age.

A few weeks ago Bryan and I watched the episode of Breaking Bad where Walter hears his official cancer diagnosis. I don’t remember all the details, but there was mention of Small Cell or Non-Small Cell lung cancer.

Gordy had one of these, but I don’t remember which one. My lack of memory is maddening sometimes, but I remember he had the kind that is rare for non-smokers to get.

At any rate, I never thought anything about anything as we watched a show about a guy with lung cancer until I heard the words, Small Cell Lung Cancer.

I heard those words like the crack of a whip or the shattering of glass – high and sharp in my ears, while the rest of the show and general ambiance in the room faded into a muffle, like I was wearing headphones.

And then it passed.

The moment was so unnatural that I half expected to hear a sad song with Ellen Pompeo’s voice narrating my thoughts.

Anyway. This picture reminds me that my kids have never been to the cabin.

Blargh.

Fuck Cancer.

I woke up Sunday morning to a 59 degree house – the coldest it’s been since the seasons changed – so I finally decided to turn on the furnace. What used to be a simple flip of the switch is now a ceremony of sorts – I pause to remember, acknowledge, sometimes shed a tear. Turning on the heat is never the same anymore, because I remember so clearly the day it died. In honor of the man who was the source of so much warmth in my life – my stepfather – I now repost this essay from four years ago.

—

At precisely 5:30pm on Thursday afternoon, on the eve of a three-day holiday weekend in which all things were closed the next day, our furnace began making a screeching grinding sound that echoed in the vents throughout the house.

As Bryan and I stood in the kitchen assessing the nature of the sound, we both had That Look on our face. It is That Look that recognized the time of day on that particular holiday weekend, during that particular week where temperatures were at a record low for the Puget Sound Area. It was That Look that recognized how OBVIOUS it would be that a furnace would begin making such grinding noises at this particular moment in time.

A few minutes later the grinding stopped, and we went about our business of the evening.

Off and on all weekend we stopped and held our breath as the grinding came and went. We waited. We hoped. We crossed our fingers. We prayed the furnace would last through the weekend.

On Saturday afternoon – New Year’s Day – I got a call from my sister, Jody, who reported that Gordy seemed to be slipping away, letting go. She said I should think about coming home soon, and that his daughter, Pam, was already on an airplane.

Even though Gordy had been diagnosed eight months ago, this plunge still took me by surprise. Just a week earlier at Christmastime he was up and about, visiting family and eating lutefisk. It seemed we might get another month with him at least.

Upon hearing this news I did what I always to do cope… I started doing things. I cleaned, I packed, I researched airline ticket prices, I rearranged plans, I organized the kitchen cabinets. I kept moving.

Meanwhile, the grinding furnace got so bad that on Sunday afternoon we shut it down from the circuit breaker.

It was cold that weekend. Seattle was experiencing record-breaking low temperatures. We borrowed space heaters from friends and shuffled them around the house with us. We slept in ski hats and wools socks.

Monday morning, January 3rd, was a regular morning. I woke up, I took a shower, I fed Ruthie breakfast, I called someone to fix the furnace. Around 11am the phone rang.

I recently read an excerpt of Carole Radziwill’s memoir, “What Remains,” in which she describes what happens between the moment an event happens and when you find out about it, how she was sipping a glass of wine and reading Pride and Prejudice as her friend’s airplane spiraled downward into the ocean.

I was sleeping when Gordy died. While he drifted off into the peacefulness of the early dawn in his own bedroom, I was completely unaware that something significant was transpiring in my life, that I was losing the man who had anchored me throughout the confusing years of my childhood.

In the morning when I awoke, when I fed Ruthie breakfast and called the furnace repair guy, I had no idea that I had just experienced a loss.

At 11:00 a.m. when I picked up the phone, my mom was crying on the other end. Through her sobs I heard her say, “Gordy is walking the streets of gold.”

I was standing in the laundry room where I had been loading the washing machine. I was crying, and the doorbell rang.

Almost every significant event throughout Gordy’s illness is somehow tied to a major home maintenance project. When I first received the news that Gordy had cancer, Bryan and I were meeting with contractors who were bidding out the remodel of our basement. And now, as the news of his passing was still sinking in I walked a sales representative through my house pointing out air vents and faulty duct work.

People die. Life goes on.

Never before in my life – and probably never again – will that fact be made more clear to me.

Yesterday we finally turned on our new furnace for the winter season. It purred ever so quietly, and the air blew through the vents with a force of confidence.

I felt warm, and I remembered.

Friends gave me this bush three years ago in honor of Gordy after he died. It came in a five gallon bucket, and just look at it now. It grows like a weed, but I couldn’t be happier about it, because when pruned I bring the clippings inside and display them in a vase. The leaves smell like pine and sweet oregano when you rub them, and it freshens up any room.

The bush sits to the left as you walk up my front steps, and I really do think of Gordy every time I pass by it. I’m certain that if I ever moved out of this house, I would take the bush with me. I just don’t part that easily with Things That Mean Something.

What do you hold in your hand, or in your pocket, what treasure to you look at to remember someone or something by?

My Grandma – my mom’s mom – died on or around Valentine’s Day a few years ago. She was a sturdy, healthy woman, who simply grew too old for her body to carry her. She died peacefully in her own bed, with Gordy by her side.

My mom was getting her hair done at the time, which is so mom. When she’s old and not so independent, I’ll be taking her to the beauty shop every week to get her hair done. In heaven her hair will be thick and full of body – no beauty shops necessary there.

Gordy adored my Grandma, and she adored him, in her reserved, German kind of way. When my Grandpa died, her husband of more than 50 years, my Grandma collapsed from the exhaustion of caring for him, her body somehow understanding she was no longer on duty. She was in the hospital during his funeral, but Gordy sat with her, quietly holding her hand.

Then years later as she passed away, he was holding her hand again.

I didn’t consider at the time how prophetic this was, Gordy holding the hand of a dying woman, watching her take her last breath. It would be years later that he lay in a hospice bed in his own living room, in and out of awareness, his body giving way to cancer.

I wonder if he remembered that moment, the moment he was holding the hand of a woman when the life went out of her. I wonder if he remembered her last breath, the peaceful silence, the whisper of a soul floating away. I wonder if this memory brought him comfort. I wonder if this prepared him for his own passing.

Jesus knew what he was doing when he called my Grandma home just then, as Gordy held her hand.

When life feels out of control I try to remember that God sees the bigger picture. He doesn’t just see the moment, but he sees the moment in connection with an infinity of moments. In my panic I often run into the street, naked and screaming maniacally about the end of the world as we know it, when all I really need to do is sit and quietly allow the Holy Spirit to connect the dots from one moment to the next.

When life feels out of control I need to ask myself, Do I trust him to carry me from moment to moment, even into infinite?

Today is the second anniversary of Gordy’s death from cancer. I have to be honest – and I feel a certain sense of betrayal to say this – but the grieving does get easier over time. I think I worried that if it ever quit being REALLY hard to think about Gordy, that I was forgetting him, or dishonoring his memory, or that maybe I didn’t love him as much as I thought I did.

But none of this is true. Over time the grief changes, and warm memories come out of nowhere – like when you walk into someone’s home and smell the burning wood and hear the crackle of the fire in their fire place, and you think of every fire you’ve ever sat next to in Gordy’s presence. Only, experiencing these memories no longer overwhelms you with grief, but brings a slight upward bend to the corners of your mouth as you think fondly of the Good Ole Days.

“What you did in Jesus’ resurrection proves that you can do absolutely anything.”
– Pastor Leith Anderson in prayer, Wooddale Church, Easter morning 2006.

I hadn’t spent much time preparing for Easter this year in a spiritual sense. I was traveling, visiting family, the weather was warm and sunny, and there were many fun activities distracting us.

It seems we weren’t really prepared for the other aspects of Easter, either. On Saturday night while the kids were sleeping, the three of us – my mom, my sister, and I – we lounged in the living room reading and watching the Twins beat the Yankees. The kitchen was still a mess from the day, the dining table was piled high with purses and books, and the contents of the kids’ Easter baskets were still in a Target bag under mom’s bed.

There we were, three ladies and no men. The house seemed large and empty without the presence of Gordy. On Friday night mom decided to grill hamburgers, and I said, “Really?” Gordy had done all the grilling. Mom and Jody fumbled with the controls on the gas grill until they finally got it working (I don’t do gas grills or car batteries), and we had some juicy burgers.

And now, on the Saturday before Easter, there was no bustle of activity in preparation of a big ham dinner. Without the bellies of men to fill, mom decided to prepare a light brunch. So there we sat, watching baseball.

Then, like three peas in a pod, we all got our second wind about 11:30. Mom found the plastic grass, we broke open the bag of jelly beans, and we shuffled around all the clutter to make way for a nice meal the next day.

Easter morning we attended my mom’s church. It was the church I grew up in, though it wasn’t this large when I lived at home. I guess you might call it a mega-church, but a church of this size is not uncommon in the Midwest. Many churches in the Bible belt of the Midwest have over a thousand attenders each week.

Now, when I attend church with my mom, I miss Gordy. As an employee of the church and a member of the building committee, he is everywhere in that building. I look up at the ceiling to the light bulbs at nose-bleed height and I remember how he’d notice one burned out during the service. I watch the choir sing and I remember him walking me through the choir loft as it was being built, helping me imagine beyond the gravel and concrete. He was so very proud of that building. He took such great care of the house of God.

On Easter morning as the choir sang a medley of hymns, I felt emotion welling up in me. Longing for Gordy, remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice – it all came back into focus as the intensity of the orchestra and choir swelled. We were celebrating, and I was remembering why.

Christ has risen. Christ is alive. And because of this, Gordy is alive as well.

I called my mom today to see how she was doing on this, the first anniversary of Gordy’s death. Turns out she’s throwing a party! Yes, ‘the gang’ is coming over for a baked potato bar, and this will mark the first time my mother has truly entertained since the summer before Gordy died. I’m sure there will be lots of tears and for sure some laughter, as no one in that group is NOT funny. I miss him, and have these photos to share with you as I remember him, too.

At precisely 5:30pm on Thursday afternoon, on the eve of a three-day holiday weekend in which all things were closed the next day, our furnace began making a screeching grinding sound that echoed in the vents throughout the house.

As Bryan and I stood in the kitchen assessing the nature of the sound, we both had That Look on our face. It is That Look that recognized the time of day on that particular holiday weekend, during that particular week where temperatures were at a record low for the Puget Sound Area. It was That Look that recognized how OBVIOUS it would be that a furnace would begin making such grinding noises at this particular moment in time.

A few minutes later the grinding stopped, and we went about our business of the evening.

Off and on all weekend we stopped and held our breath as the grinding came and went. We waited. We hoped. We crossed our fingers. We prayed the furnace would last through the weekend.

On Saturday afternoon – New Year’s Day – I got a call from my sister, Jody, who reported that Gordy seemed to be slipping away, letting go. She said I should think about coming home soon, and that his daughter, Pam, was already on an airplane.

Even though Gordy had been diagnosed eight months ago, this plunge still took me by surprise. Just a week earlier at Christmastime he was up and about, visiting family and eating lutefisk. It seemed we might get another month with him at least.

Upon hearing this news I did what I always to do cope… I started doing things. I cleaned, I packed, I researched airline ticket prices, I rearranged plans, I organized the kitchen cabinets. I kept moving.

Meanwhile, the grinding furnace got so bad that on Sunday afternoon we shut it down from the circuit breaker.

It was cold that weekend. Seattle was experiencing record-breaking low temperatures.
We borrowed space heaters from friends and shuffled them around the house with us. We slept in ski hats and wools socks.

Monday morning, January 3rd, was a regular morning. I woke up, I took a shower, I fed Ruthie breakfast, I called someone to fix the furnace. Around 11am the phone rang.

I recently read an excerpt of Carole Radziwill’s memoir, “What Remains,” in which she describes what happens between the moment an event happens and when you find out about it, how she was sipping a glass of wine and reading Pride and Prejudice as her friend’s airplane spiraled downward into the ocean.

I was sleeping when Gordy died. While he drifted off into the peacefulness of the early dawn in his own bedroom, I was completely unaware that something significant was transpiring in my life, that I was losing the man who had anchored me throughout the confusing years of my childhood.

In the morning when I awoke, when I fed Ruthie breakfast and called the furnace repair guy, I had no idea that I had just experienced a loss.

At 11:00 a.m. when I picked up the phone, my mom was crying on the other end. Through her sobs I heard her say, “Gordy is walking the streets of gold.”

I was standing in the laundry room where I had been loading the washing machine. I was crying, and the doorbell rang.

Almost every significant event throughout Gordy’s illness is somehow tied to a major home maintenance project. When I first received the news that Gordy had cancer, Bryan and I were meeting with contractors who were bidding out the remodel of our basement. And now, as the news of his passing was still sinking in I walked a sales representative through my house pointing out air vents and faulty duct work.

People die. Life goes on.

Never before in my life – and probably never again – will that fact be made more clear to me.

Yesterday we finally turned on our new furnace for the winter season. It purred ever so quietly, and the air blew through the vents with a force of confidence.

I felt warm, and I remembered.

It’s been cool and dark in the mornings this week, making it more difficult to crawl out of my cozy bed as early as I usually do. This morning it is raining, and we have been without rain for so long I actually did a happy little rain dance in front of my tomato plants as they drank it in.

[I was wearing my bubble gum pink bathrobe with embroidered cocktails as I did this, and all I can say is, Praise Jesus for tall fences!]

The house is quiet, except for Thomas’ cooing, and I have the urge to play Christmas music.

I love the fall, wearing jeans again, lighting candles and creating atmosphere in my home, making dinners that slowly roast in the oven, meals with soups and sauces.

This fall I enter into a season of remembrance. It was this time last year we learned that Gordy would not be getting better, which set a chain reaction of denial, acceptance, and last goodbyes.

I was talking to my mom the other day about her upcoming trip to the Minnesota State Fair. It’s one of the largest and best fairs in the country, and I’ve actually planned trips home to coincide with the fair because I miss it so much.

Gordy loved the fair, so I asked my mom what his favorite attractions were. She mentioned machinery hill where the farm equipment was on display, the dairy barn where he always had a malt, the pronto pups, watching the live TV broadcasts from the network booths, and then there were the years Gordy entered his photography into the art competitions.

We both began to cry as we remembered.

But as my mom sobbed, she said that she worried about forgetting things – his smell, the sound of his voice, significant events, everyday things.

I know this feeling of wanting to hang onto everything, I think that’s why I take so many pictures and display them in photo albums and scrapbooks. Years ago I filled up an entire photo album with pictures from just one quarter of college because I wanted to document EVERYTHING.

Last week when I got together with some girlfriends, and don’t even remember what we were talking about, but Alecia quoted a line from the movie Clue about the “flames burning on the side of my face!”

As she said this, she glanced sideways at me with a knowing smirk on her face, and my eyes went wide as I shot straight up in my seat.

“OH MY LORD!” I exclaimed in my usual drama “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU REMEMBERED THAT!”

We both laughed at this inside joke as the other gals looked on without a clue.

One line quoted from one movie we saw fifteen years ago brought back to me more than just the movie. It flooded all my senses with smells of popcorn, the sight of the bunch of us cozied on the sectional in the dorm lounge like newborn puppies, the nausea of staying up until 5:30am watching the same funny movie over and over again, only it’s not so much that the movie is funny, but that the people you are watching it with are ridiculously silly.

I took a picture of that night, never wanting to forget it.

But still, I forgot.

Until Alecia reached down into the recesses of my mind and pulled out one phrase from that evening, and all was remembered.

I told my mom this story, hoping to comfort her. I reassured her that even if some things slipped from the front of her mind, her memories would always be stored deep inside. One day someone will say a word, or she’ll see something, or smell something, and it will remind her of something she hadn’t thought of for a long time.

And she will simultaneously laugh and cry as she remembers, aching in her loss, but joyous in the memories.

The other night as I sat eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream with fresh peaches on top from the local farmer’s market, I was reminiscing of Gordy. He loved summer fruit, and he loved peaches with ice cream. I think blueberries were his favorite cereal topping, but for some reason as I sat there eating peaches with my ice cream, it had GORDY written all over it.

God, I miss him.

He had a way of getting excited over simple pleasures, like summer fruit and corn on the cob. I have memories of him marching into the kitchen with frisky determination, rubbing his hands together as he planned his attack on the fruit of the day.

Some days it was strawberry-rhubarb. He would cook batches of it on the stove: fresh rhubarb from the garden, strawberries, a little sugar to mellow it out. I couldn’t WAIT for strawberry-rhubarb season. I would spread it on my Wheaties, we’d have it on pancakes, and it was just the right amount of tart to put on vanilla ice cream.

Gordy knew how to savor.