Wednesday - The Phone Call
Apr. 5th, 2006 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermoreToday on my drive into work, I was thinking about my cousin Leslie, who called me last night while she stood outside of a hospital somewhere in Tennessee. Usually, her phone calls last at least an hour, but this one was only about 20 minutes - about the time it takes to smoke 2 cigarettes. Leslie smokes, and when she's stressed she chain smokes and talks a mile a minute. Her son had just been admitted to the hospital, so she was plenty stressed.
Leslie is 12 years older than I am, and her son is about 5 years my junior. Leslie was close to my mother and used to turn to her when her relationship with her own mother, my aunt Jo, was strained and she needed a mother figure. I think sometimes that she calls me because I am the closest that she can get to my mother, though I am a poor substitute. It drove Leslie up the wall when I once confessed to her once that there are days when I can barely remember my mother's face or the sound of her voice. She can still close her eyes and see my mother clearly, she tells me. She still can hear the sound of my mother's voice in her mind.
"Hey, Nina, this is Leslie," she said when I answered the phone. "I'm outside the hospital right now. We just admitted Cam to the Emergency Room for the 5th time in the last 3 weeks."
"Oh, no," I said, feeling sympathetic but not surprised, "What's wrong with him? Is it still pneumonia?"
She swore under her breath. "No, it's not that. The mass in his lungs is gone. They don't know what it is. He just keeps spiking a fever of 103 degrees. He doesn't seem to have anything wrong with him, just this fever that keeps coming back."
Leslie's son, Cameron, lives in a nursing home. In the Spring of 1993 when he was 18, his father and stepmother tried to wake him up one morning and found that they couldn't. At the hospital they determined that an aneurysm had burst in his brain while he slept. The surgeons opened his skull to relieve the pressure that had been on his brain for an unknown number of hours and stop the bleeding. They succeeded in saving his life, such as it is. The honor student a month away from graduating high school, the musician, the budding ladies man who had not one but two teenaged girl friends waiting anxiously in the hospital waiting room for him to wake up, was gone. He is not the same, but he is Leslie's only child and keeping him alive and cared for has become her obsession. She took care of him herself for several years before she gave in and sent him to a nursing home because the task was too much. He is 6'2" and must be fed, bathed, diapered and cared for like a baby. The effort was killing her slowly. They are both better off with him in an institution, where she visits him almost daily and watches the staff like a hawk to make sure he is treated well.
After talking briefly about what was going on in our lives, Leslie said she had to let me go. I could picture her crushing out the butt of that second cigarette, the perfect device for timing a 10 minute phone call. I was glad to have qualified for two of them.
When the call was over, I thought about a story my youngest brother told me about a visit he had with Leslie and Cameron when they were living at her mother's house in the first year after the aneurysm. Of all the stories that I can tell you about Cameron since that day in 1993, this is the only one that makes me choke up every time.
Ron was in the living room with Cameron, sitting at my aunt's upright piano. He began to pluck out a tune on the keys, "Hymn to Joy" from the 9th Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven. I always remember it as the tune to a hymn we sang in church when I was growing up:
Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee,
God of glory, Lord of love;
Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee,
opening to the sun above.
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness;
drive the dark of doubt away;
Giver of immortal gladness,
fill us with the light of day...
"You recognize this, don't you Cameron?" Ron asked him, "Come on, you know what it is. Tell me."
Cameron could no longer tell you what the days of the week are called or recite his alphabet, but his face lit up in a smile when he answered my brother's question.
Slowly and deliberately, with great effort, he opened his mouth and said, "Beethoven."
Leslie is 12 years older than I am, and her son is about 5 years my junior. Leslie was close to my mother and used to turn to her when her relationship with her own mother, my aunt Jo, was strained and she needed a mother figure. I think sometimes that she calls me because I am the closest that she can get to my mother, though I am a poor substitute. It drove Leslie up the wall when I once confessed to her once that there are days when I can barely remember my mother's face or the sound of her voice. She can still close her eyes and see my mother clearly, she tells me. She still can hear the sound of my mother's voice in her mind.
"Hey, Nina, this is Leslie," she said when I answered the phone. "I'm outside the hospital right now. We just admitted Cam to the Emergency Room for the 5th time in the last 3 weeks."
"Oh, no," I said, feeling sympathetic but not surprised, "What's wrong with him? Is it still pneumonia?"
She swore under her breath. "No, it's not that. The mass in his lungs is gone. They don't know what it is. He just keeps spiking a fever of 103 degrees. He doesn't seem to have anything wrong with him, just this fever that keeps coming back."
Leslie's son, Cameron, lives in a nursing home. In the Spring of 1993 when he was 18, his father and stepmother tried to wake him up one morning and found that they couldn't. At the hospital they determined that an aneurysm had burst in his brain while he slept. The surgeons opened his skull to relieve the pressure that had been on his brain for an unknown number of hours and stop the bleeding. They succeeded in saving his life, such as it is. The honor student a month away from graduating high school, the musician, the budding ladies man who had not one but two teenaged girl friends waiting anxiously in the hospital waiting room for him to wake up, was gone. He is not the same, but he is Leslie's only child and keeping him alive and cared for has become her obsession. She took care of him herself for several years before she gave in and sent him to a nursing home because the task was too much. He is 6'2" and must be fed, bathed, diapered and cared for like a baby. The effort was killing her slowly. They are both better off with him in an institution, where she visits him almost daily and watches the staff like a hawk to make sure he is treated well.
After talking briefly about what was going on in our lives, Leslie said she had to let me go. I could picture her crushing out the butt of that second cigarette, the perfect device for timing a 10 minute phone call. I was glad to have qualified for two of them.
When the call was over, I thought about a story my youngest brother told me about a visit he had with Leslie and Cameron when they were living at her mother's house in the first year after the aneurysm. Of all the stories that I can tell you about Cameron since that day in 1993, this is the only one that makes me choke up every time.
Ron was in the living room with Cameron, sitting at my aunt's upright piano. He began to pluck out a tune on the keys, "Hymn to Joy" from the 9th Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven. I always remember it as the tune to a hymn we sang in church when I was growing up:
God of glory, Lord of love;
Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee,
opening to the sun above.
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness;
drive the dark of doubt away;
Giver of immortal gladness,
fill us with the light of day...
"You recognize this, don't you Cameron?" Ron asked him, "Come on, you know what it is. Tell me."
Cameron could no longer tell you what the days of the week are called or recite his alphabet, but his face lit up in a smile when he answered my brother's question.
Slowly and deliberately, with great effort, he opened his mouth and said, "Beethoven."
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Date: 2006-04-05 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-05 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-05 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-05 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-06 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-06 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-06 05:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-05 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-05 11:49 pm (UTC)LC hasn't called me in a while. I miss talking to her, but I'm sure she knows that it would tear me up right now. Why does this shit keep happening to our family?!?!?
no subject
Date: 2006-04-06 02:08 pm (UTC)If this theory is correct, we should also stand a better chance than most people of winning the lottery. I mean, it's got to work both ways. So far, though, this hasn't worked out for me. ;P
no subject
Date: 2006-04-06 04:34 am (UTC)They say music can calm the savage beast.. but it can do so much more than just that.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-06 02:25 pm (UTC)I think what hits me about the story is the illustration of his humanity and about the ability of art, of music in this case, to transcend the damage done to him. It indicates that somewhere in there, part of him may still alive and even aware. It makes me worry that this must all seem like some sort of nightmare that he can't wake up from, that he is caught in a bad dream that has lasted for 13 years. If I think about it too much, the horror of the idea makes me feel physically ill.