Chapter 7: Day 2: 9:05 AM continued

The world dimmed out for a second. Con was still talking but I could not process anything he was saying. When the world blinked back into the present, my mind was as fractured as Con’s. I wanted to ask him dozens of questions all at once: what kind of cancer it was, was it treatable, what is the prognosis.” But I could not get them out. All I could muster was “Oh shit, Con. I am sorry.”

For the next hour, Conor, in disjointed thoughts, non sequiturs and mangled sentences, managed to explain what had transpired since our last conversation. When he had ended our call, he decided that he could not make it to Lil’s house and headed back to his apartment. His next unaided memory is waking up in the hospital. From what Lil told him he must of passed out when he got home because he never called to let her know that he was not coming over. Alarmed when he had not called in a day she went to his apartment and found him unconscious on his bed. She called the paramedics. The Doctors ordered a head X-ray to eliminate the possibility that he had fallen and fractured his skull and a tox screen to rule out drugs. Tox screen was negative, but the X-Ray had some abnormalities. An MRI was ordered and it showed a lemon sized tumor on his left frontal lobe. Within days and after a  series of exams to determine the true dimensions of the tumor, his neurosurgeon removed as much of the tumor as he could without damaging his healthy brain tissue.  A biopsy was done and he was diagnosed with glioblastoma.

When he told me this my heart skipped a beat. The first real kiss I ever had was with Lynn Cavan. I had been at a dance at the Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child, a Catholic Girls school in Summit and had been introduced to her by a mutual friend. We danced and eventually a slow song came along and the next thing I knew we were kissing. It was revelatory, mind blowing and is permanently etched in my memory so that I can recall every moment of it. Nothing ever came of that kiss but we remained acquaintances if not friends through high school, college and beyond. When Facebook became popular we connected. Five years ago, she posted she had been diagnosed with glioblastoma. Three months later she was dead. My guts turned liquid. I wanted to throw up. I took a beat and said “Con, you know I would have been on an airplane in a moment had I known this was going on. Why didn’t someone call?”

“I asked Lil to call you, but she said that you would get me all stirred up and she didn’t think that was a good idea.”

“Did she call anyone?”

“She called my brother George because he is next of kin but other than that no one.”

“She didn’t call Liam or Duke? Did George call them? “

“Not that I know of.”

“Dude, not calling me is one thing. I mean it pisses me off and was wrong. But not calling your boys is a whole new level of wrong. If Lil harbors a grudge against them that is one thing. But George should have called them. Them not knowing…fuck. Do you want me to talk to the boys?” 

“No. No. Don’t do that. You know that Lil thinks that they are horrible. And she has been so good to me. She has been here every day. She has managed the Dr’s and just everything. She has even slept here. She is the only one taking care of me. If you get them involved, she will be out.”

I am still reeling from the news but the idea that Liam and Duke are being kept in the dark about their father’s cancer does not sit well with me. But it is more than that. The idea of Lilith being the gate keeper to Con, the one who is deciding who sees him and who does not, horrifies me. This is the woman who created the wedding crisis, which over time I have come to believe is part of a deeper psychological problem. The only star Lilith wants in Con’s universe is hers. She wants to control him. I am sure, sitting here, in my dark bedroom, at an hour where even the owls are asleep, that the only reason that George was called was not altruism. George was called as next of kin. Nothing medical could be done for Con without his permission.

As much as I want to point this out to Con right now, it is not the right time. You do not fight a rip current; you swim with it until you can figure out a way to break free. Right now, I have too many questions for my friend. How are they going to treat the disease? Even though I think that I know, what is the prognosis? When are they planning to release him from the hospital? Where is he going to live? Who is going to take care of him? But I do not get a chance to ask any of them as my friend is on a different subject. He is rambling on about a fight he had with a robot that was in his room taking care of him. It is a long, detailed story that makes absolutely no sense. It is clear the friend that I knew is gone forever. Forever altered by the diseases that is slowly, inalterably, subsuming his being. It is all too much for me to take in and I need some time to make sense of it all. When he finishes his story, I remind him of how late it is and how I need to work the next day.

I say “Listen my friend, I have to get some rest. And you should too. I need to sort my life out, but I will come and visit you in the next few weeks. I will call you later today and let you know when. Okay?”

“Hey, yeah. I forgot how late it is there. I am so sorry.”

“No worries. I am glad you called…”

“Yeah, yeah. Call me later.”

“I love you man.” 

The phone goes silent. Unfortunately, my mind does not. I am juggling emotions like a side show performer. I am angry. Not just at Lil and George from keeping Duke, Liam and me in the dark about Con’s illness but at myself. I spent weeks being angry at Con for the perceived slight of not calling me back or returning my calls instead of having faith in our friendship. He would have called had he been able. I should have questioned more. Dug harder. Been a better friend. That does assuage my anger at Lil and George. Lil wanted control of Con and George gave it to her because it was the easy thing to do. They did that knowingly and that is an indelible stain on them. That is undeniable. It is also incontrovertible that while my doubts may have been fostered by them, no one but me.

What is to become of Con? I know, even without him telling me, how sick he really is. From the bitter experience of taking care of my Dad I knew that they do not allow neurological patients to just walk out of the hospital. You cannot care for yourself. You have to let your injuries heal. Someone has to help you shower, to go to the bathroom. Where are they going to send him to rehab? These places are depressing and often resemble thinly camouflaged dormitories of death. Will Lil be able to handle keeping his spirits up and moving towards the best possible outcome?

Glioblastoma does not have good outcomes. Survival rates are minimal. Survival times measured in weeks and months not years. Will it be chemo or radiation? Both? Are there new treatments that will help? Is he in the right place to get the best treatment?

And what about the boys? Don’t they deserve to know? Should I tell them? Do I have the right to tell them? What happens if I tell them, and Lil locks me out? By accepting the condition of not telling them am I doing just the thing that I despise Lil and George doing to me?

It is a whirlpool of emotions, questions, and problems that I am only beginning to know. I cannot break free from it. I just keep going around and around again in circles until I begin to see the first whisperings of dawn out my window. It is a new day in every sense of the word. I decided that despite my lack of sleep I need to face it. Really, what choice do I have?

PiWhole Donuts is a very California bakery on Manhattan Blvd, in Manhattan Beach California. Started by a CalTech mathematician and her husband, it makes donuts that you will not find anywhere else. Which makes it exceedingly difficult for people such as me who have never been there before to decide about what to order. Their maple bacon bar looks amazing as does their “Thank You Very Much,” its tribute to Elvis, which combines bananas, bacon and peanut butter.  Others such as their Black Hole (licorice filled) and Sacre Blue a blue cheese filled confection far less so. I play it safe eventually and order a Tres leches, a Walt Whitman (Captain Crunch infused), and a Yogi Bear (Jelly filled) with a couple of coffees and bring them out to the adjacent plaza where Conor sits in his wheelchair waiting for me.

This is my third trip to California to visit since the night I found out about his illness. After forty years of friendship, I did not feel I could “dial” it in. Phone calls and Skype would have been far easier. Saved me a ton of time and money. And, it would have been far more consistent with Nadine and my mother’s advice. They did not like me going not because they did not care for Con. They did. But they lived with the aftermath of our visits. All of which left a mark on me emotionally and physically. Seeing your brother in all but blood slowly diminish is not for the faint of heart. It leaves wounds seen and unseen that do not heal easily and are only tolerated when you realize that your suffering is nothing compared to your friend.  Also, there is no doubt  Lilith would have been happier if I had stayed away. It fit her narrative of me far better. She only tolerated my visits because Con insisted.  But in words and deeds she did not make me feel welcome. She viewed me as a direct threat to her control of Con. All I could do was smile and play nicely. She was Con’s gatekeeper and even though she made me feel as welcome as a liquor salesman at an AA meeting I lived with it because friends show up.

This morning, I picked up Con at his new rehab center. It was his third since he had begun his journey with cancer. The first facility he was sent after his discharge from the hospital was little more than a converted no tell motel, bought by an ambitious entrepreneur and converted into a facility for the extremely sick and nearly dead. A dormitory of death. He had been greeted in the lobby by a morbidly obese administrator whose white shirt was wrinkled and stained along with a cadre of patients in wheelchairs who looked at him as if he was lunch. He said his room contained a single hospital bed that was probably new in the ‘80s, a chipped nightstand and a closet so small that to enter it you would have to turn sideways. Lil, who had escorted him to this place, had done her best to convince him that it was okay. He had listened to her but the moment she left he ordered an Uber and went back to the hospital who were forced to readmit him.

The second place he was sent, and the first place I visited him, was a lock down unit at a facility called Eagles Rest. It was located in Hermosa Beach, newly built, and resembled a boutique luxury hotel. That all disappeared the minute you entered their neurological unit. All visitors needed to be approved by next of skin and present an ID to the staff before entering. When you were buzzed in the door audibly locked behind you. New visitors were told that when we wanted to leave, we had to ring a buzzer and we would be buzzed out. Patients were allowed off the floor with advance notice and approval of their physician and next of kin. It was a prison for the infirm and intimidating as hell but considering my friend’s penchant for escape and cognitive challenges, required. That he was impaired was without question. Conversations with him were, at the time, an exercise in patience. Often, they would ricochet from subject to subject. He had blank spots in his short-term memory and often could not remember what he had done twenty minutes ago but could remember a conversation we had in high school.

Visiting people, you love in places like Eagle Nest is an assault on your emotions. There is no way to avoid the people here who are desperately ill, in most cases dying. The conclusion of life, the frailty of our existence is something that we store in the cubbyhole of our brain that is furthest from our awareness. Here it slaps you in the face. It turns into a gut punch when the person you are visiting has been a part of your life, your closest friend since you were children and is still relatively young. This was compounded in Conor’s case by the fact he did not look like himself. His face seemed to fit on his skull like a latex mask on trick or treaters during Halloween. He had explained, in horrific detail, that in order not to leave a gaping scar across his forehead and scalp they had peeled back the skin on his face. “Just like in Face Off” he had proudly declared adding that the Doctor had told him that it would return to normal in a few months.

I remember calling Nadine and my mother that evening and trying to explain what it was that I was feeling. It is one thing knowing something intellectually “Oh, my friend has brain cancer.” It is quite another thing to see him amongst the living dead with his face draped on his skull like a towel. I broke down sobbing in both cases. What had happened to Con over the last few years since Delilah had left him, had seemed so unfair, cruel and sad. My friend, the golden boy, the one who had everything that I would have wished for in a life, good looks, charisma and charm, a lucrative and successful career, a beautiful wife and two exceptional sons who adored, if not idolized, had been stripped of everything. He was alone, broke and dying.  

It is human nature to look for someone to blame in this situation. I know I did. I blamed Delilah. Not because she had decided to divorce Conor. In retrospect, their marriage had been held together with bubble gum and duct tape for decades. There was no doubt in my mind, despite his denials that Con had stepped out of his marriage on more than one occasion, but so had she. That combined with her desire to live the life of a fifties stay at home Mom when Con was expecting a partner, had doomed the marriage. But she did not have to wage a war against him. Instead of Pearl Harboring him with her departure she could have sought counseling to end the marriage peacefully. Instead of aggressively attacking him in court, garnishing his wages, and filing multiple subpoenas against his company that eventually cost him his job, they could have hired an arbitrator to split the marital assets. She could have explained to her boys that empty nesters divorce at an alarming rate instead of poisoning them with stories of their father’s infidelity while conveniently not mentioning her own.

Del caused Con’s cancer. I know that sounds crazy. Perhaps it is. But I have my reasons. Shortly after we graduated college, Con’s Dad, Conor Sr. was fired from the privately held brokerage firm he had been running for thirty years. One of the major stockholders, the chairman of the board, wanted his newly minted Wharton MBA son to replace Conor Sr. As I heard the story from Con this had devastated his father as he had built the company from a private investment firm that no one had ever heard of before to a well-regarded medium-sized company that continued to show impressive year-over-year growth. Mr. Kennedy sued the company. The company counter sued and began spreading unflattering half-truths and lies about him. As a frequent guest in their home, the jovial, full of bonhomie man, who always had a joke or story to tell, slowly vanished, until what was left was a façade of his former self. Still the same man on the outside but those of us who knew him, loved him, could tell the strain was eating at him. And then it really was. About a year after this ordeal had started, he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Six months later he was dead.

My theory is that stress in Kennedy men cause them to manifest cancer. And Del knew this. She had just started dating Con when his father got sick. At the time, and over the years, we had many conversations about Con Sr’s illness and how the stress of being fired from the company he created had caused cancer. Was it the same as slipping some anti-freeze into Con’s morning smoothie or putting a bullet into his head and calling it suicide? No. But did she cause his stress deliberately? Yes! Did she have a good idea what this stress would do to him? You bet! Did she do it anyway? Of course. Did she do it with malice of forethought? I think so. She had as much as told me so when at the beginning of the divorce I had written to her begging her to find a better way to terminate their marriage than through litigation and massive attorney fees. Her response was brief “Daniel, you don’t want to see the truth. Conor destroyed our marriage and my life. If this is destroying his life now, then so be it. Karma is a bitch!”

I understood. I did. When a marriage of thirty-three years goes off the rails there is more often than not hurt, anger and a desire to punish the other. But what I saw, and she did not, is that wars, like the one she was waging against my friend, had unintended consequences which could be far worse than anyone could imagine or predict.

Conor’s wheelchair is tucked into one of the many umbrella adorned tables on the plaza directly adjacent to the PiHole. He has always been a sun worshipper and he has arranged himself so that like a sunflower his face is in the sun. As I set our donuts and coffee out on the table, he turns to me and asks, “What do you think happens next?”

I know his question is not about which donut to eat first. He is thinking about his mortality. How can it not be considering where he finds himself now? If I were in a similar position, it would be hard for me to keep my mind away from any thought but that. But I decided to deflect partly because it is my nature to add a joke to a serious question and because I am not ready to have this conversation with him. I reply “That is a hell of way to start a breakfast conversation. Not what kind of donuts did you got or did you remember to put cream in my coffee. You lead with “What happens when we die?” If it is all right with you, let me get a gulp of coffee in me before I begin to tackle that one.” 

Laughing, he says “What kind of donuts did you bring us?” When I tell him the choices, he chooses the Yogi Bear and says, “Thanks BooBoo.” Taking a bite of a Tres Leches and a sip of coffee I say “Well, to answer your question, I have no idea.”

“You don’t think about it?”

“Of course, I think about it. But I am not sure why you are asking me. I am the Jewish friend. Wouldn’t it be better for you to speak to someone from that megachurch you belonged to in Atlanta? They could guide you far better than I can in this.”

“They could. But I lost faith in those guys a long time ago. And besides most of them know Del and it will open a can of worms I just don’t want to deal with right now. They will inevitably tell me to get right with her and I am not going to do that. It is her fault that I am in this situation. She is the one who needs to ask forgiveness from me. Not the other way around.”

The couple at the table next to us turned to look at us as Con’s last sentence had lacked volume control. I give him a hand motion to turn down the volume and say, “Happy to talk to you about this but I am not going to bullshit with you. I will tell you what I think. I know you too well to do anything else. If that is okay with you, I am happy to share my thoughts.”

He meets my eyes and says, “That is all that I want.”

I nod and after taking another sip of coffee say “I am not a good Jew. Or said another way I am a secular Jew who has not spent any time studying the Torah or the bible. What I think I know is Judaism does not have a definitive answer on heaven. There is allegorical stuff like when my old man and I were in Jerusalem we visited the “Golden Gate” which is right next to the Mt. of Olives, the ancient cemetery, where you can only be buried by special permission these days. It is where the faithful want to be buried because tradition says the Golden Gate is where the Messiah will enter Jerusalem when he returns to earth. The dead who are buried there are the first to enter the city that is the bridge to heaven. But I am not sure of what that means. So, I can’t give you a religious answer or at least one based on the knowledge of faith.”

I look over at my friend. He has not taken a bite of his donut nor a sip of his coffee. His worry, his fear, of what happens after this life ends, is written all over his face. I want to give him something to hold onto. Something that will ease his fear but is not based on faith or bullshit. I say “What I have come to believe is that this Universe did not get here on its own. How did it get here? There must be something bigger greater than me, beyond my understanding that created it all. I cannot tell you if that is God or God like or whatever it is. But it suggests to me there is a greater force in this universe we do not understand. Which gives me hope there is something more.”

I take a bite of my donut and add “I would also like to believe that we are more than just meat puppets. That our consciousness, our sentience, is more than just a biological function that ceases to exist when our bodies die. That when we die that consciousness lives on because the universe always recycles things. But I wonder whether or not that is just ego. You know like a play on cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. I am, so how can that just disappear? You know what I mean?”

He replies, “I guess.”

“But the reason I hope it is more than just ego is something that happened to me back in college? Did I ever tell you the story of my grandmother and the ring?”

He shakes his head. After finishing the last of the Tres Leches donut and I take another sip of coffee I begin. “When I was a senior in college, the old man gave me an art deco garnet ring that was owned by his father. He told me that his dad had bought it as a present for himself with the back pay, he accumulated while he had been held as a POW for seven years in a Siberian gulag. I loved it not just because it was beautiful but because my dad had given it to me. It was more treasure than possession. I never took it off. About a year after he gave me the ring, I drove to Florida over the holidays to play in the Keys with my friends. On the return trip, my orange VW Bug broke down in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. I was stuck there for two days while they fixed the car. I had nothing to do but smoke weed, watch three channels of television, and do pushups to pass the time. Longest two days of my life. Finally, the car was repaired, and I took off for home. Somewhere around Virginia I looked down at my hand and saw that the ring I treasured was not on my finger. It must have slipped off somewhere while I was in North Carolina, and it was too far in my rear view to head back to look for it.  I was upset. And embarrassed. I could not let my dad know. For the two days I was home before returning to college I kept my hands in my pocket so he would not notice. “

I look over at Con who has now finished his Yogi Bear and say, “You want to split the Walt Whitman?” He shakes his head and I take it off the grey cardboard coffee tray and take a big bite of it before I continue telling my story. “Anyway, a few months go by. It is now February and the middle of the deep freeze of the Syracuse winter, and I go to bed one night and have this amazingly vivid dream. In it my grandmother Sidi, my father’s mom, comes to me and she tells me that the ring I have lost is underneath the driver’s seat of my VW. When I wake up, I am completely shaken. I don’t have dreams like this. It was so vivid that I could remember frame by frame and didn’t disappear from my memory within minutes of waking up.  It bothered me so much that I decided, even though it was only moments past dawn, to go and see if the ring was where my grandmother told me it would be. In nothing but a pair of unlaced boots and my pj’s I went out into the subzero temperature and trudge through a foot of new snow and go to where my car is parked. I open the driver’s side door and kneel in the snow. Peering under the driver’s seat, a place I had looked a dozen times before, is my grandfather’s ring! Pretty amazing stuff, right? “

Conor looks me with a confused face as if to say, “So what does this have to do with anything we have been talking about?” and says in nonplussed flat tone “Sure.”

“Well, I thought it was pretty amazing then. But that is not the astonishing part of the story. So happy as a lottery winner I walk back into my apartment and make myself a cup of coffee. I take it into the living room and switch on the TV to watch the news. Just then the phone rang. It is dad. He called to tell me that my grandmother had died during the night.” I paused for dramatic effect, and then in an extremely poor attempt to imitate Rod Serling at the beginning of the Twilight Zone and say” You are about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination.”

This made my friend smile, for which I am grateful. He has had far too few of them lately. I went on “I told you. I am not a religious person. Mom is an atheist. She disliked all religions. She viewed them as nothing more than superstitious organizations that took your money and stirred up trouble. It was a club she never wanted to join. Dad was different. He was a scientist. IF you could not measure it or use math to describe it then it was not real to him. But during our travels I discovered that as much as he outwardly disdained organized religion he believed in something bigger than this world. I asked rhetorically, “you know what he said when I told him this story?” Conor, a little more relaxed, was reaching for the other half of the Captain Crunch donut, shook his head.

“Remember when he and I went to Austria together so I could better understand what it must have been like for him to return there at the end of the second world war? We were in Fahrafeld, the town in lower Austria where his grandmother lived and where his mother would send him to avoid the summer heat in Vienna. We were walking through a big open field, with a large stream running through it and he was telling me about what it was like being here by himself during the summer. And for reasons I cannot remember, I told him about the ring. You know that look he would give people, the one where he would raise one eyebrow like a lightning bolt? You know the look. It was the one where he had significant questions about the amount of truth in what you were saying. Well, he gave me that look.

Then he said “You see that shed over there? Just beyond it is a single railway line. A train would come up from Vienna a couple of times a day. When it was about a mile out or so it would blast its whistle to let everyone know that it was about to arrive. When I heard it, wherever I was, I could tell whether mutti would be on that train. And you know what I was never wrong.”

I added “Can you believe it. My dad, the award-winning scientist believing in something like this…although to his credit he had established a scientific protocol to determine whether or not the phenomenon was real. So, Dad.” and started to laugh which made my friend laugh too.

He said “Danny, I just wish I could be sure. You know? If I just knew it would make this part of the ride so much easier.”

I nodded. I understood all too well. Fear of dying, when it leaked out of the mental cubbyhole, I placed it in, had made me fly from bed screaming on too many nights to count. I say, “Do they have a chaplain at Eagle Rest with whom you can speak?”

“They do and I have. He was all dogma and had no heart. Do you know what I mean?”

I nodded. He went on. “Do you know who I really wish I could speak to? Reverand Schein.” Reverand Schein was the bishop of the Anglican Church in our hometown. More importantly, he was the father of Shoshana who, before Del came along, was his most meaningful relationship. Shosh was everything that Con had wanted in a woman. Tall, lissome, and blonde she viewed the world with a sense of humor that was a little off skew. You loved being around her because she was fun, but you knew there was something deeper, more meaningful. Con once described her to me as being “both steak and ice cream.” She is the woman he would have married if not putting his penis into every vagina open to him had not been Con’s favorite hobby in college.

I said “I think he passed last year. I remember seeing something about it on Facebook.” Con shot me a look. It made me put two and two together. I laughed and said “You don’t want to talk to Reverand Schein at all, you manipulative sonofabitch. You want to talk to Shoshana, and you want me to reach out to her. Am I right?” Conor shrugged his shoulders and smiled.  I shook my head and spoke.  “You are an asshole. Okay. I will call her for you.”

Laughing he said, “Thanks buddy.”

Both of us were silent for a while. Content with watching the world go by. Which in Manhattan Beach at that hour of the day is primarily very fit women wearing the latest exercise togs from Lululemon. I have no doubt my libidinous friend was enjoying every moment as the average female resident’s age at Eagle Rest had to be in the late eighties. I would have enjoyed the view as well except that I had a very difficult question that I had been thinking about asking Con. It was a question I could have ignored if I was just interested in being pleasant, and not a friend.  That meant asking challenging questions, even though they might be hurtful in some ways because that was the kind thing to do. Still, I hesitated. I wanted to ask my question the right way and couldn’t seem to find the right words.

I finally decided to be direct and said “Conor, I want to ask you a question.”

He replied “You can ask me anything? Go for it.”

I leaned forward and said in a somber voice “Have you thought about what you want to happen at the end? When all is said and done.”

“You mean what to do with my body? Where do I want to be buried? Shit like that?”

“Yes. But other things too. Do you have a will? Is it the same will you had when you and Delilah were married? Because if it is your priorities changed. I am sure you don’t want to leave her anything. Is she still the beneficiary of your life insurance? Do you want her to get rich off of your death? All of that stuff.”

He said “Lil and I talked about what to do with my body before my surgery. I told her that if I die, I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered on the ocean in Hawaii? I don’t care where in Hawaii, but it has to be there.”

“Okay. What about the will and that stuff?”

“I need to do something about that…”

“Can the guy who is handling your divorce handle that for you? Or at least connect you with someone who can?”

“I can ask him.”

“Because if he can’t or won’t, we can go to LegalZoom and create a will together. I just did my will on it and it’s easy. They ask you a bunch of questions including what state you are in, and they create a legally binding document. Easey peasey.”

I could tell Conor was rapidly losing interest in this conversation as he was looking everywhere but at me. He said curtly “I will talk to my guy.”

It was a signal to me to back off. I knew it. But I pressed on because I had not said the difficult part yet. I said, “Do me a favor though when you do talk to your lawyer.”

“What is that?”

“Please don’t make Lil your executor. Make one of the boys or your brother George.”

He looked at me with a look of curiosity combined with annoyance on his face and replied, “Why shouldn’t Lil be my executor.”

I paused a second to summon up my courage and said “I guess I could tell you that it will cause far less problems if you choose them. There is no doubt in my mind that Duke and Liam will contest the will if you make Lil the executor. You know it and I know it. There is no love lost there and Duke especially will want to attack her. If you love Lil there is no reason for you to put her in a position where she is certainly going to be attacked.” I paused.

“What else.”

“I don’t trust her. I know you love her. I know she has been the one taking care of you out here. And, I have no criticism there. In fact, I am grateful beyond words. She has sacrificed a lot to take care of you. But when you got sick, despite the fact I had called her concerned about your health, she never called me. She let me wonder what was going on with you for weeks despite phone calls, emails, and IM’s. She left me hanging and hurting. Nothing she can ever say or do will allow me to forget that. I can’t trust her to do the right thing. And that is the sole role of the executor. She also hates your boys. Justified or not, she does. She won’t do the right thing by them, and you can’t let that be your legacy.”

“Doesn’t that cut both ways. The boys hate her. They will do everything they can to avoid giving her anything I bequeath her.”

“No doubt. So, make George the executor. He likes Lil. And even though he doesn’t get along with the boys he has a lot of integrity. He will carry out your wishes as best he can.”

“You don’t want the job?”

I laugh and say, “I thought you liked me.”

Mac is sitting at my feet, in his best good boy pose, back straight, his eyes fixed on mine. He barks, whines and then shoves his head into my chest. It is a familiar move. He is the only dog I have ever had who when he needed a little love, a bit of reassurance, or felt the need for a touch like we all do from time to time. would actively let me know his wishes. He licks the sunglasses off my face and then with a quick yap starts running down the beach. I see why. The rainbow, which had been so bright and vibrant with color just minutes before, is fading. I yell to my boy “Mac, come.” He hesitates. then turns, and ears flapping, raspberry tongue flying out of the side of his mouth he returns to me. It is not him who needs comfort now. It is me. I wrap my arms around his neck, hugging him. For a second, I smelled the glorious puppy smell of our first meeting. Perhaps that is something the gods give to dogs when they return to heaven. I tell him what a good boy he is. That he is loved, missed and never forgotten. He licks the tears off my face and then takes his leave, flying down the beach towards the rainbow that is now a mere glimmer of its former glory.

As Mac disappears into the rainbow, I see the lone swimmer making his way towards it as well. I yell “Will I see you later?” The swimmer pauses and then waving an arm yell “Yes!” and he too fades into the spectrum.