Letters from Grenada

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Part VI

Back at home and work again, life went on and I tried to follow.  Mom had stayed in Indiana.  For the first time in three years she was easily accessible by phone, so we spoke nearly every day, something we’d never done before.  She was itching to get back to John, who was with in Grenada minding North Star, but she had committed to spending at least a month with Grandma Vera.  Grandma needed more care than ever.  She was slipping deeper and deeper into Parkinson’s, and we could do nothing to stop it, we could only ease her descent.

Mom was still in South Bend on September 7, 2004, the day Hurricane Ivan ravaged Grenada.  It made landfall as a Category 5, which is as bad as hurricanes get.  Nine out of ten houses lost at least their roof.  Power and phone service were completely out for over a week.  Downed trees blocked roads and driveways everywhere.  There was little to eat and few dry places to sleep.  Cocoa, Grenada’s only real export, was decimated.  People were collectively stunned.  It was the worst storm in over 50 years, which meant it was the worst storm in memory for most.  Within days, ships from Trinidad appeared on the horizon, bearing donated supplies.  The healing began.

Mom had watched with horror from afar.  She and John had both tracked the progress of Ivan as he menaced the Eastern Caribbean.  They knew it was likely that Grenada would be hit, and hard, but John would never leave North Star behind.  So Kay, his wife, sat on proverbial pins and needles and hoped.  John was the most sensible, useful and safety conscious man we had ever known.  Surely he would know how to make it through a hurricane.  In his working life, he had been the operational safety officer at a nuclear power plant.

He didn’t disappoint us.  He was one of the heroes of the hurricane.  He braved the worst of it sheltered in a concrete shower block.  During the eye of the storm he ran out to tighten the stabilizing straps on North Star, then all the boats around her.  He could have died in that wind, but he was focused and strong.  Later, when the wind finally died and the sun came out, he went to work alongside the locals, doing whatever needed to be done.

Because he had charged the batteries on North Star, and because he had a yachtie email device called SailMail, which accessed the internet via radio, he was able to let Kay know right away that he was safe.  She was relieved and proud.  I bought him a t-shirt I knew would make him laugh.  It said Obey gravity.  It’s the law. I mailed it to my mom so she could bring it to him when she went back to Grenada.

John emailed me a picture of himself.  He was standing calf-deep in the surf, glee in his eyes, smiling and waving as if to say, “Look, Ma!  No hands!”  The picture had been taken during the tail end of the storm, on the beach at St. David’s Harbour.  He was wearing dirty khaki shorts, a yellow t-shirt and a red raincoat.  His hair and beard were wavy and white.  His face was tan, his cheeks were pink and his smile was laughing.  He looked like Santa Claus would look if he lost some weight and retired to the islands.

In October, Penny married Dan.  The wedding was on Cape Cod, so the boyfriend and I drove to Long Island and boarded the ferry to Connecticut.  My cell phone rang.  Miraculously, I had reception on the Long Island Sound.  It was Mom.  She was still with Grandma, but scheduled to fly back to Grenada in a week.  She had bad news, she said.  John had fallen off the boat.  He had hurt his back.  He was in the hospital.  He had been carrying the windlass.

“Omigod, Mom.  He’s going to be OK, right?”

“I think so.  We’ll know more tomorrow.  But no matter what, it’s going to take him a long time to heal.”

“Hmph.  Well, tell him I said we expect more from him than that.”  I actually said that.

We agreed to talk to him the following day.  I went to the wedding and tried not to worry.  I wore the perfect cocktail dress.  I drank champagne and danced with a man who sounded just like Ted Kennedy.  I tried not to worry.

It was immediately clear that John needed to be moved to the U.S. for medical attention.  My mother agonized over whether to meet John in Florida, or meet him in Grenada and travel with him on the medical airlift.  (John, who always seemed to think of everything, had medical airlift insurance.)  I encouraged her to meet him in Grenada, and she did.  Three days after his fall, they arrived in Florida and checked into the Cleveland Clinic.

After running pre-op tests, the doctors reported that John had recently suffered an undetected heart attack.  The doctors also said it would have been better if he’d been operated on immediately.  Some vertebrae had been fractured, others had been crushed.

My mother kissed him before he went into surgery.  She told him she loved him.  She noticed that he smelled salty, like a little boy who’d been playing, sweaty but sweet.

The surgery to repair John’s broken back began in the evening and was supposed to last until early the next morning.  Some hours in, the surgeon emerged, face sad like a turtle, to report the worst possible news.  John had suffered a massive heart attack.  John had suffered a massive stroke.  John had stopped breathing for far too long and John was brain dead.

Mom sat with him for an hour, rubbing his feet, massaging his calves, pressing his hands between hers.  Then she turned off the machines.

The date was October 5, 2004.

When she called I had been half-awake all night praying.  I no longer tried to broker deals with God, I simply pleaded.  Please, dear God, just please let him be whole again. She said the words.  “John died,” she said, and her voice was a short howl.  No words had ever sounded so unnatural.

“Oh, Mommy.  Mommy, I’m so sorry.  I want you to come home, come here.  Do it today, do it right now.”

I was knocked flat.  In a few short months, my world had spiraled completely out of control.  My grief existed on two planes – my own, and the vicarious sorrow of my mother.  I ignored my own and focused on her, which almost felt like strength.  Because she asked me to, I wrote and delivered the eulogy at John’s funeral.  I did it and I was shamefully proud of it.  It was an act of sheer will the likes of which I hope never to repeat.

My mother emerged small and lost.  She entered a state of new age-y pseudo-Zen that scared the hell out of me.  In January 2005 she went back to Grenada.  I approved because I thought she might be soothed there.

She was gone again, and I slid slowly back into myself.  Everything had soured.  Oswaldo, who was both my boss and my friend, watched me come undone.  He watched me lose 20 pounds in two months.  He was in the next cubicle while I lost the will to focus on work.  The boyfriend had thrown me out three days before Christmas, so fed up with me and my mood swings that he had coldly left me homeless.  I was overstaying my welcome on Liz’s couch.  I had no plans whatsoever.  I’d found a shrink who was happy to give me all the Ativan I wanted, which I sometimes washed down with vodka martinis, extra-dry.  There were blank spots in my memory.  On a weekend away with my girlfriends, I blacked out and slid down the basement steps.  By some miracle I didn’t break any teeth.  Everyone was very worried.

More than once, Oswaldo pleaded with me to go to Grenada.  “Be with your mom,” he said.  “Get some color on that pale face of yours.  Get a job tending bar at the beach, and don’t worry about a damn thing except what color flip-flops to wear.”

I suspected he was right, but couldn’t bring myself to make a move.  On March 15th, Oswaldo stopped hinting and fired me.  I didn’t blame him.

The next day I got myself a ticket to Grenada.  I arrived on April 15, 2005.  I was scheduled to stay for four weeks.  Three years later, I am still here.  I fell in love, got a job, got pregnant, almost got deported, had my baby in a local clinic, and struggled to adjust to being a foreigner.  I’ve worked as a tutor, a project manager in a boatyard, and even had a brief stint as a translator on a Venezuelan fishing boat.  We brought Grandma Vera to live with us.  I’ve remembered how to smile.

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Posted on September 15th, 2008 under Grenada • Tags: backstory, memoir. •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback