I found this essay I wrote sophomore year of high school for my Honors English class. enjoy!
“If I Had You”
By Madeline Fleer
The summer before my eighth grade year was when the cancer finally reached his blood system. Being twelve at the time, I had no idea what that meant. I just knew that my step dad, my beloved Danny, was very sick. You must understand that my biological father was rather absent, I only saw him once every few months, if I was lucky. Danny was my best friend, my playmate, and a strong father figure all at once.
He was on a lot of steroids, because the radiation and chemo had caused a pulmonary embolism, and they thinned his blood out. He was moodier than he had ever been, which was still happier than normal people. Even in his last week he was so full of life, it seemed like he didn’t know he was sick at all.
The summer after my 7th grade year was in full swing. Danny has started radiation treatment on a brain tumor every day. It made him nauseas and tired, and even though he never let me see it, I’m positive he was miserable. One day while he was at Duck Creek with our two labs, I saw Mom taking out the shot guns from our front coat closet. I was only twelve, but I correctly assumed that it was in case he thought of suicide, and it scared me more than anything else.
One sweltering afternoon, we were where you could normally find us as a family-on a golf course. Part of why this sticks out in my mind was because it was the first time I got to drive a golf cart by myself, and my cart had faulty brakes. Danny was already angry, because he hit a golf ball into a pond or off the runway or something like that. The course was the only place I ever say him display anger in any form at all, the only time I ever heard him mutter a cuss word or throw anything (namely one of his golf clubs). The steroids weren’t helping his bad mood, either. We were on hole nine, the last one of the day, which was located on a steep hill. Mom had ridden with Danny ahead of me, so I was solo in my cart. I started down the hill carefully, sun in my eyes and foot on the brake. At that moment, the brakes completely went out, and I gently bumped into Danny’s cart parked in front of mine.
I don’t think the golf ball hitting my foot is what made me cry, because even though it bruised, it didn’t hurt much. It was more the shock that my gentle, compassionate, loving Danny had thrown it at me in the first place. He had never so much as spanked me, or even yelled. Mom told him that if he ever touched ‘her daughter’ again, she’d be gone. It was the first time she had ever insinuated that I was only hers, and I could see the hurt in his eyes as she said it. It was then that I knew it wasn’t Danny that had thrown it, but the medication and his sickness, destroying him.
The end of June and beginning of July brought a lot of changes. They put a tube in his shoulder where they could directly inject chemo into his blood system. Less golf, more TV. Mom and I started looking after the dogs, because Danny couldn’t get around as well anymore. The man who had been big and strong my entire childhood could hardly lift himself up anymore. I could tell he was restless, but his own body was holding him back. He fished a lot, because it was easier for him. My birthday was totally passed up when his conditioned worsened. I went away for Fourth of July week, down to my best friend’s vacation home on the Current River. I came back to find that Danny had had another pulmonary embolism while I was gone and had been in the hospital, and my mom hadn’t even called to tell me.
One week mom as gone, doing a seminar for school, and she asked to me ride with Danny when he went to radiation everyday. She said it was important that he wasn’t alone, and she knew that I was feeling neglected by him. He drove, and I sat, and we talked about the future. Not how you would think, not about his future. About mine. He encouraged me to keep taking voice and piano lessons, telling me I could be a rock star if I wanted to. Then again, this was the same man who told me I could be a ballerina, or a journalist, or a Chemistry teacher, like he had been. We arrived in Cape Girardeau with time to spare, so he stopped by a Hastings, and picked up a Frank Sinatra Best Hits CD, telling me that he wished like he could sing like one of two people in the world-me, or ‘Ole Blue Eyes.
That was the first time I went into the Radiation Treatment center. The waiting area was lit with a flickering fluorescent light, casting an eerie and foreboding shadow on a thin woman with a pink bandana around her bald head, and a very old man with no hair, but a very thin beard. We sat down, and I flipped through a People Magazine from 1995 while I waited for him. Afterward, a very nice nurse showed me the room where they gave him the treatment. She didn’t turn on a light, only held the door open for a moment so I could look in and see a white, plastic platform where she said Danny laid, a white cone-shaped instrument was held over his head, aiming for the brain tumor. She also showed me the mask that they screwed over his head and onto the table, holding him still. I was appalled, trying to block the image of my strong father, helpless, screwed to a table while people that were supposed to be helping him purposely inflicted brain damage.
It was a half-hour drive from Cape to Advance, and during those thirty minutes, my view of Danny was totally changed. To me, he was just my daddy, my play mate and my idol. He was old, almost fifty-eight, and as far as I was concerned, he had been born that age, he had always been my Danny. The one that I had always known. I would have always thought that, if it wasn’t for the song ‘It Was a Very Good Year’ which he told me made me think of his teens and twenties. He told me that he thought of it as my song, because he hoped my life turned into a story, a good one, like in the song. He said he imagined my life being like that. He hummed along and drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “Reminds me of the good ‘ole days.” He said happily.
It raised a thousand questions in my mind. What kind of child had he been? Had he ever gotten in trouble for the same things I did? What were his friends like? What sort of things had he done in his free time? What about when he went to ‘Nam? What did he do there, did he still think about it a lot? In college, had he partied or gone to class? I felt as though I didn’t even know the man who had been the most significant influence of my formative years. And now, who knew how much time I had left to learn about him? I felt foolish, wasting away whatever time I had left with him, but afraid to ask questions, afraid I might drudge up some memory that would tinge his last days with sadness or regret.
So I just listened to that Greatest Hits CD everyday, memorized it, knew it inside and out. That was something I still regret, not asking him questions, and having to find out about his life from other people.
I wasn’t really into normal 13-year-old music. My radio sat silent in a corner of my room, untouched. I was learning Italian arias for voice lesions and bluegrass folk songs, which I played over and over again on my half-size guitar. I was in to people like Johnny Hartford, Mark O’Connor, and Clair Lynch. I listened to classical music at night and sang tough foreign-language pieces in the shower. I played my Phantom of the Opera DVD until I could recite the whole movie. So I don’t know if I love Frank so much because of his music. I think my love for Frank music stems from some small hope that, by knowing all the words to the songs, by understanding the way I feel when I listen, that I understand Danny a little more, that I somehow know him better from it.
The night before he went into the hospital, he called me into his room and had me sing ‘Star Viccino’ for him, and Italian aria had I been learning in voice lessons. “I could never do that in a million years. Never stop trying, kid. Never stop trying,” were his last coherent words to me.
On August 16, 2005, at 7:26 in the morning, my second day of the eighth grade, Danny died in a hospital bed in our living room. There are really only three ways people react to a death of someone close to them, in my eyes, anyway. Most people become very sad, fraught with grief, cry a lot, and don’t recover for a very long time. A few people get angry at God, the world, the person who left them.
This was my first reaction. I threw my book bag down (because I was almost out the door) and ran up to my room, where I screamed ‘I Hate You!’ at my ceiling, not sure whether I meant God or Danny as he floated away to oblivion above me.
Then you have the third reaction, the rarest, and maybe the worst, that of apathy. You don’t feel anything, don’t care about anything, nothing moves you in any direction. This was my main reaction, after I got over my brief bought of anger. I closed up completely. I lost all sense of feeling, all emotion. Even before I had never been an emotional child, but it turned to an extreme after Danny’s death. I didn’t even care that I didn’t care. It was almost like, when he died, a part of me died along with him. Some vital part to my psychological make-up that controlled feeling. I thought I was sad, but I couldn’t tell anymore. I might have been angry, but it was impossible to be certain. So I just stopped trying and ignored what was going on inside me completely.
At his memorial service, they played ‘I did it my way’ at the end. I sung along under my breath, thinking it was the perfect song for people to remember such a man like Danny by. Very fitting, to say the least.
Everyone has an outlet for emotion, something that makes them feel better. My mother threw herself into diets and working out at the gym. I followed along without complaint, not really noticing anything around me. As I far as I could tell, I didn’t need an outlet because I wasn’t upset, so I just did nothing. Over the last two years, I have gotten better about it. Compassion for people has slowly crept its way back into my life, along with joy and most other things normal people feel.
I don’t really know why that’s started happening, and even though it’s sometimes painful, I’m glad, because I missed myself just like I miss Danny. And I know some day I’ll get to see him again, but until then I’ll live every day like a Frank Sinatra song.
*”If I Had You” is a song recorded by Frank Sinatra on his album “Voice of Frank Sinatra” in 1947.
I was so reflective! I can't believe I was only 15 when I wrote that. I should soooo go to journalism school.
