Goodbye July

It was a nice fling.

“Are you sure you don’t want a receipt?” The dock loader at the food bank asked me.

“Nope, I’m good,” I responded. I gave him two dozen cans of Diet Coke, two dozen submarine sandwiches, and two boxes of potato chips.

If I had bothered to keep up with any kind of horoscope, I wondered if it predicted that I would have a month of gatherings with friends and family and then a flurry of departures, or if I would have important realigning of relationships with friends and family that were unavoidable and would require shifting a few pots on the emotional backburner.

Sometime in the middle of June my mother required a sit down with me. She wanted to go over some important insurance papers for herself and my younger sister. My sister, suffering from Lupus, was given two years to live. The life expectancy of my sister was one of those nebulous facts that the family never allowed to precipitate into reality. My sister’s visits to the hospital in the spring became weekend stays. Her body was breaking down. It was like taking a car to the shop to repair the muffler one week then bringing it back again to fix the starter, but you can’t get a new car. You have to bargain with the mechanic to keep it running as long as possible.

On the other end of the spectrum, my filmmaking group became unavoidably important. I registered our group for a filmmaking competition next to last weekend in July, and so, that month had been hijacked with meetings, location scouting, and scrounging of film equipment. In the end, my home had been filled with film crew for 48 hours, functioning as a home base. I learned that I like the filmmaking process. I don’t like the schmoozing, bluffing, and pistol whipping required to get people to do what I want them to do, but the word “unavoidable” pops up again, reminding me I got the answer wrong again.
“Don’t say goodbye to her,” my mother said, “just tell her you’ll see her next month.”

My niece and nephew were going back to Atlanta with my sister, but my niece didn’t want to go back. She missed Michigan, her friends, her father. My sister was desperate in Atlanta, making only half the money she did teaching in Detroit and not getting any child support from her ex-husband. In the two years since she moved to Atlanta, she moved four times. The children would settle in a new house or apartment, settle in the illusion of permanence then move again four months later under the threat of eviction. But my sister was too proud to come back home. Too proud and too stubborn. That and the fact that her distance from Michigan was retaliation against her ex-husband. Self-destructive could be a word, too, I guess.

So I don’t say goodbye. I kiss her and give a tight cobra hug, and I tell her I can’t wait until an August weekend when we’ll go swimming again.
The following weekend on Sunday I’m grilling hotdogs and hamburgers for the 10 people camped out in my apartment. We are finishing up editing for the film. Some people are eating: some are sitting around Oscar, the editor, as he digitally manipulates the footage on a huge monitor in the living room. Some are on my patio having a smoke. One crew member is in charge of the food on the grill making sure everyone gets their burgers to order. One by one, as each hour passes, the people get ready to leave. I load them off with extra food, make sure they have their equipment, and any clothes they brought along. By the time Oscar finishes the film, it’s just me, Oscar, Ryan, the director, and a couple other people. Oscar puts two copies of the short film in my hand, and I’m off to deliver them to the film festival. Everyone leaves with goodbyes and we plan our debriefing for the following week. Hours later in my apartment, I’m collecting empty beer cans and picking up scraps of tape from the floor. I’m processing how empty it seems now.

I’m in the hospital the following weekend after my film project. My sister has her own suite in the Intensive Care Unit. Visitors are allowed to visit 24 hours day, so my mother, other younger sister and I have been visiting around the clock. She had a new catheter put through her chest to help her lungs continue breathing. It’s supposed to be much better than the oxygen pump that was put in her side which put her in continuous pain for weeks.

They are keeping her in ICU for a week to make sure her body responds to the catheter without any risk. The downside is that she itches and has hot flashes in response to the drugs used to make the catheter work. We rub her arms, chest, and back with lotion to ease the itching. We fan her with old magazines and newspaper because she’s still hot even with the air conditioning around 65 degrees. The nurse comes at midnight to give her dilaudid, and I watch my sister drift off to sleep. My sister and I ask the nurse if we can sleep in her room; the nurse tells us that we would have to go to the waiting room. So we prop ourselves up in our chairs and watch the last 10 minutes of Gone with the Wind as Melanie says goodbye to Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler decides not to give a damn. After that we watch another old movie The Rains Came until 2:00 in the morning. We decide to go home and come back in the morning since my sister will be asleep for several hours. I lean over my sister and kiss her on the forehead.

Don’t say goodbye.

Don’t say it.