Host: Dan Kennedy
Dan: [00:00:01] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. And this week, we have two stories for you on the podcast.
First up, John DeVore tells us about the last lesson that his father taught him. And this is a kind of story from a show that we did here in New York City in 2014 at a venue called Crash Mansion, which has sadly closed since we did the show. The theme of the night was Who's Your Daddy: Stories of Fatherhood. Here's John DeVore.
[cheers and applause]
John: [00:00:36] I have no saliva in my mouth. [audience laughter]
First off, my father died of cancer two years ago. But don't worry, that's not this story. This is not terms of endearment. I swear there will be no emotional pornography. But I want you to know up front that my dad fought. For three years, he fought. And even though he lost the fight, the fight was what was important.
My dad was 50ft tall. He wore really cheap tweed jackets to the US Capitol. He loved deep fried chicken gizzards. Really bad, inappropriate jokes like, “Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic and so am I.” He loved to sing, and he loved to embarrass me by singing in public. He had a voice that was a cross between Roy Orbison and a blender full of gravel. [audience laughter] And he was a devout Texan.
Now, I was raised outside of D.C. My dad worked for politicians, Texas politicians. He regarded Texas the way I imagine Jews regard Israel. It was the Promised Land. It was the place I was to return to. So, in my sixth year here in New York, being the one orphan, the one who got away, the one who escaped the gravity of Texas, and he told me that he had lung cancer. I thought, fuck, I got to go back to Texas. And I did. I went back to Texas. But after months of ignoring it and putting it aside, and I finally relented and put in a tour of duty.
My brother, my sister and my mother, they really absorbed the brunt of it. But I went for five days. The first day that I was there, I immediately went with him to a chemo warehouse, because in Texas, they keep these-- They have these huge chemo warehouses where bald, dying people are stacked up. I walked in there with him and sat him down in his little recliner. They put the IV in him, that dripped into him, and it dripped into him and he dripped into it. They sat us down to this guy by the name of Rusty.
Rusty was Marine Force Recon. He had a quarter lung. It was his eighth treatment. He was a bit of a chemoethusiast. And without asking us if we wanted to talk to him, he looked at us in the eye with his little oxygen thing in his nose and went, “You got to think of the cancer. How's the enemy? You got to kill it. It's in your head. You got to fight.” And I was like, “Welcome to Texas.” I put my father there and I ran outside. And for the next two days, all I did was cry and smoke. I was like, [whimper] Because irony of irony is nothing makes you want to smoke more than a chemotherapy ward. [audience laughter]
I would run out while I put my dad to sleep to find a 7-Eleven where the dying couldn't see me. And that was what happened for two days until I realized something that I'd never really thought of before, which is the process of dying is really boring. And so, on the third day, my dad was sleeping because that's what he did now. He asked me if I wanted to go shooting. And I went, “Sure, yeah. Guns?”
And so, about an hour later, I found myself at Red's. Red’s is in Austin, Texas. You can go there right now and find that-- It's a long, rambling shack filled with guys in different forms of camouflage dress, yellow tinted glasses, jingoistic ball caps, beards and sidearms. Everyone who works their dreams, wants, desires, cannot wait for someone to try to rob them. [audience laughter] And from the moment I walked in there, they knew I was a poser. They knew I was a big city wuss, which [chuckles] I am. But the thing about rednecks is you can never show weakness. They're like coyotes. They can smell weakness.
So, my brother, who apparently had been going there often, he went off to go look at the assault rifles. I sauntered up to the glass case, where today's specials were. Walked up to some guy who looked at me dead in the eye with that sort of, “You ain't from around here look.” I perused the buffet. They had .22s. They had 9mms. Again, assault rifles and revolvers. I wouldn't show any weakness. I just looked and, “No. No.” The only gun I knew was from John Woo movies. So, I picked the 9mm. I said, “I'll take that 9mm.” And he goes, “Smith & Wesson or HK?” And I went, [chuckles] “Duh, HK.”
He gave me the 9mm. He showed me how to use the gun I'd never used it before. He showed me how to pull the chamber back, he showed me where the safety was, he showed me how to load a clip. It was $20 for a gun and $20 for a box of 20 rounds. He told me to keep my eye on the round in the chamber, because that's how most people hurt themselves in firearm accidents. They don't count the round in the chamber. And he sent me into the range, which was filled in the afternoon. There was a couple next to me, rather a father and son, practicing with hunting rifles. There was a mousy little woman who had a .357 snub nose, which is Dirty Harry's gun, only it's super small. It can only hold five rounds and will flatten anything that gets in your way.
My brother immediately took his AR-15 assault rifle, which is the rifle you'll see NYPD walking around with. He began to unload. I put on the ear muff plug things. He had told me how to slide it back, put it in, make sure the safety is off and bang. The bang noise, the crack noise of a bullet is the bullet breaking the sound barrier. If you talk to anybody who's ever been wounded in combat, you never hear the bullet that hits you. Let me tell you, no matter what your ideology is, whether you're pro-gun or not, whether you think the NRI are a bunch of fruitcakes or not, it's to be poetic, a cool sound. And the 9mm, it held eight rounds. And so, bang. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Oh, it was good.
Because shooting a gun is a weird cross between Valium and Viagra. [audience laughter] It brings you up and then it takes you down, but makes you up and down. [audience laughter] And it felt good. And so, I loaded quickly. I took out the clip and loaded round, clicked it in, crack, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And $80 later, [audience laughter] I was in control. I had power. It was like the fucking Matrix. It was [blowing sound] [audience laughter]
If you ever shoot, always remember to line up the bullseye, and to aim a little bit down to compensate for the recoil. And if you're thinking of shooting sideways, don't do it because you look like an asshole. I had found in that afternoon the power and the cheapest, most affordable way for me to tell God to fuck off. And it helped me that night. It helped me in a really weird way, in the way that the booze and the pot and the coke wasn't helping me and the cigarettes. It helped me deal with my hysterical mother and my morbidly depressed brain. It helped me deal with my dad's just the wheezing which bothered me even though I would say, “Everything's going to be okay, Dad,” and run outside and go, [whimper] It helped me, and it was the weirdest thing.
I didn't spend that much time there though. [chuckles] As strong as it made me feel, I was still gone in five days. I went home. I went back to New York. I came back here to hide, because I'm a bit of a coward. I left the cruel nuts and bolts of caregiving to my family. The dealing with someone who can't control their bowels, they're feeding somebody who can't feed themselves. The staying up with someone who can't sleep, because it hurts too much. The watching that 50-foot-tall guy dwindle.
Freud said that the death of a father is-- Well, it's the first evidence or of a parent rather, evidence to the child that you know you're next. [chuckles] I thought about that. But I learned later, in retrospect, the death of a parent, the last thing that they teach a child is how to die. That's the last thing that they did. They can teach you well or they can't teach you well. My dad taught me a lot of things. He taught me how to tie and shave. He taught me that humility isn't weakness, and that even though Texas lost the Alamo, it was still a victory.
He taught me a lot of things, but the last thing he taught me was how to fight and how to die with some dignity, but how to fight because he fought determined and outmatched. He fought and he was terrified, but he did it. He was a one-man Alamo. I only hope that one day, I can go down like that and possibly show a son or a daughter how to go down fighting. And that's my story.
[applause]
Dan: [00:10:50] John DeVore is a writer and editor. He recently won two James Beard awards for an essay he wrote about Taco Bell and his Mexican-American mother.
Our next story is from Clementine Ford. And theme of the night was Between Worlds. It was told live last year in Melbourne, Australia. Here's Clementine.
[cheers and applause]
Clementine: [00:11:17] I got a three-hour tattoo today. I can do this. At the end of the movie Blade Runner, there's a scene where Roy, who's the last Android, the last replicant on earth, is dying. And he says, “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Sea beams glittering in the dark at the Tannhäuser Gate. All of these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
I love that movie and I love that quote. I actually have Orion, the constellation, tattooed on my wrist, because my parents loved that quote so much. And in our family, we're a family of storytellers. We're a family that sees sits around the dinner table and we play cards and we drink bottles of wine. We really mythologize the love that we have between each other. And for my parents especially, it was like this idea of a long lasting, magical love that not many people find in their lifetime.
They always had this idea that at the end of their life, when they'd done everything that they wanted to do together, traveling, seeing the world, whatever it may be, watching Blade Runner for the 50th time, that they would climb to the top of a hill and they would take with them two things, a bottle of champagne and a bottle of pills. And then, they would sit there together and they'd watch the sun set and they'd quietly slip away. And then, they'd said that they would spend the rest of eternity together dancing off the shoulder of Orion, which is a really beautiful thing to think about, but not to use too much of a cliche, sometimes life doesn't work out that way.
So, my mother woke up one day and she was completely yellow. It was like bruised yellow that looks very sickly. So, we knew that something was wrong. We took her to the doctor and he said, “Oh, it's jaundice.” So, we thought, oh, it's something to do with her liver. We'll just get that fixed up the way that you think about illness. So, they did a scan and unfortunately, they found a shadow around her liver. When they checked further into it, they realized that it wasn't quite what they thought.
My dad called me one day and he said matter of factly over the phone, “It's cancer.” At the time, I was upset and concerned, but I still felt, “Well, cancer's this thing that people beat. People survive cancer. We've got cures for cancer.” We're a very charmed, blessed family. So, I didn't think that anything truly bad lay in store for us. So, I thought, well, what's the next step? Very practical. What's the next point to from here? They thought very luckily, because it was just affecting her bile duct, but it wasn't attached to any major artery. They thought that they could go in and cut it out. So, they scheduled the appointment for the surgery.
It was on my parents 26th wedding anniversary. The surgery was scheduled to be for six hours. So, I was really surprised when my dad called me two hours in. And in this phone call, there was no matter of fact. It was just the pure unbridled anguish and sadness of someone who's been told that there's nothing more that the doctors can do. So, what happened was they opened her up and they found that it was just riddled. It was like a toxic wasteland of cancer in her stomach with a big sign in the middle saying, “Warning, do not enter.”
They had to wait for the anesthetic to wear off, so that she could wake up and give her this news, while my dad is sitting there with his wife of 26 years that day, waiting for the end. She wakes up and they say to her, “We're very sorry. We've done everything that we can. There's nothing more we can do. Go home and enjoy the time that you have left.” But you know what? Human beings are funny creatures. We don't actually accept when people say that it's the end. So, they send her home. I'm again very practical. I'm on the internet and I'm looking up juicing, detox, how to cure cancer with coffee enemas. Eat your way in 21 days to a cancer free you.
I'm thinking, this is actually going to work. We're actually going to be one of those families that in 20 years’ time will be sitting around that dinner table where we've shared so much laughter, so many arguments, so many bottles of wine. We're going to be saying, “Do you remember that time 20 years ago when we cured that supposedly incurable cancer with some weird Canadian tea?” This is what I thought would happen.
And for a time, actually, it did seem like it might be working, because she seemed so healthy. You don't get to see what's happening on the inside. She was getting pink cheeks from the radiation she was taking. She actually said that she was feeling a bit of a spring in her step. She could have a few glasses of wine now, and she was feeling a little bit more robust. I was spending a lot of time with her during this period. Actually, at that point where maybe the daughters in the room will be familiar with getting annoyed when their mothers speak too much.
And then, one day, she gets sick again. She goes into the hospital and she can't eat. She can't keep anything down. They do another scan and there's more shadows and more blockages. I walk in to visit her one day in the hospital, and I hear the doctor saying to her, “The only thing we can do now is a gastric bypass surgery. It's not going to fix you, it's not going to cure you, but it may buy you three or four more months.” I walk in, and it's just her with the doctor and me, and I realize what he's saying. She decides to have the surgery. Because of course, at the end, the only thing that we ever want is the simplest and the most impossible, and that's more time.
We walk into the hospital chapel together, and I cry on her lap and she soothes me, because she's my mother and that's her job. And then, we go home. We schedule the surgery for the following week, and that's that. It's one more reprieve. And for anyone who's ever dealt with cancer before, that's what you're always looking for. It doesn't matter what they tell you, you're looking for one more door that you can try.
So, the surgery is scheduled for the following week. My dad and my mom invite us home for dinner that weekend. I have a brother and a sister, and they invite us home. I come in late as usual, which is usually my way. As I walk in, there's just this air of expectancy. They've been waiting to tell us something. I sit down, and my mum's not saying anything, and my dad just is standing over by the kitchen bench, and he looks at us and he says, “We've brought you home here to tell you that your mother's decided against having surgery. She doesn't want to spend any more time in hospitals. She wants to stay at home. And so, this is what's going to happen. You've come home to say goodbye, and then you're going to leave and we're going to wait.”
We're still confused at this point, because we're not quite sure of what he's telling us. So, I ask him to explain it again. And he says, “What it means is, in a few days, she's going to die.” We're crying and distraught and looking at her, and she finally speaks and she says, “I love you, and my family is my reason for being. And I want you to look after each other and I want you to like each other and I want you to remember that I'll be there watching over all of you from Orion.”
At this point, I'm completely destroyed. I go outside and I'm lying on a lounge chair in the garden and I'm crying, and screaming and raging. My sister comes out to hold me as I'm looking up at the sky and thinking, why? I remember something that my mother told me at the start of her illness. She said to me, “Clementine, bad things will happen to you, and you don't always deserve them and you don't know why they're happening. You can stand there and you can rage and shake your fist at the sky, at the stars, at God, at whatever you think might behind it. And you can say, ‘Why me?’ But if you listen carefully, out of the darkness, a whisper will come in your ear and say, ‘Why not you?’”
So, I walked back inside. My parents are sitting at the table with my brother. We try and attempt to have this last dinner of sorts. Although, of course, we've had the last supper already, because my mother can't eat at this stage. I think to myself about the concept of lasts and what that means. The last time you wake up on a Monday morning, the last weekend you'll ever have, the last time you brush your teeth, the last time you have a wedding anniversary, the last time you see your children and say goodbye and the last time you kiss your spouse.
I think to myself, what an incredibly brave woman that she had this vision for how she wanted to die, even if it was a mythology with her husband. And even though in the end she couldn't choose it the way that she wanted to, she chose it the way that she could. She chose to face it, to walk willingly into this season of lasts and accept her fate on her own terms.
The only time I saw my mother crack that night was when my brother and sister left and I stayed the night. She said goodbye to them and she hugged them. As they walked out the door, she put her two fingers to her lips to kiss them and hold her fingers out and she started to cry. But she remembered that I was in the room and stopped herself and took a deep breath, because this was the choice that she had made. Maybe the reason that she asked us to leave and not come back was because she knew that if she kept seeing us, she couldn't make that decision.
So, I stayed that night and I went in to say goodbye to her the next morning. I held her hand while she slept, and I stroked her hair and I tried to remember everything I could about her. Her smell, the way that her skin felt, the way that her hair spread out across the pillow. When she woke up, I hugged her and kissed her and cried again on her shoulder the way that I had so many times in my life. And she kissed me and she just said, “Go now.”
On the morning of May 16th, 2007, my dad called me and he said, “I'm just calling to let you know that your mother has begun her long journey towards Orion. She died in the middle of the night.” He held her while she took her last breaths and he held her for a lot longer after that. And that was that.
At the funeral, I went into the viewing room and I saw the body laying out there in the coffin. I went over to look at it and touch it, but I recoiled my hand, because the emptiness of the whole thing frightened me. It looked like her, but there was nothing in there. After the funeral, after we'd cried and wept and said our goodbyes, I lay on her side of the bed in my parents’ room and I wept some more. I began to panic. I thought, how can I go on, how can I live in a world where the person who has been with me from the very beginning is no longer here, when I can't smell them, I can't touch them, I can't speak to them, when there's no physical evidence of them having existed at all?
And then, I think to myself now, it was eight months that it took for her to die. It's been eight years since then. But not even a lifetime could pass where I could hope to forget her. Because at the end of Blade Runner, when Roy's giving his monologue, the thing that he fears most is being lost. He fears being forgotten. He fears that once everything is over, that the evidence of you is gone.
But I can't think that she's gone, because I hear her voice in my head. I picture her in my mind's eye, tending to her roses in her garden. I can smell her still sometimes when women walk past me on the street. And I still see her in my dreams. And the thing about the dreams, is that when she comes, it's like she's come back to life. It's the final reprieve that I always wanted and never got. It's not enough, but it is something. Thank you.
[applause]
Dan: [00:25:07] Clementine Ford is a Melbourne based writer for Daily Life, Australia's number one women's website. She's currently writing her first book, Fight Like a Girl, which will be released later in 2016.
Thanks to all of you for listening. I know we usually say I hope you have a story-worthy week. I think this week, we want to say that we hope you have a life affirming week.
Mooj: [00:25:32] Dan Kennedy is the author of the books, Loser Goes First, Rock On and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and performer with The Moth.
Dan: [00:25:41] Podcast production by Mooj Zadie. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.