Blame it on Rio

Day 2: 10:35 PM

You cannot be on Maui for very long without being introduced to the goddess of fire and volcanos, Pele.

Born in Tahiti she was sent away because she got into a fight with her sister, Namakaokahai, the goddess of the sea. She made her escape with the help of her brother Kamohoalii (the king of the sharks) who provided her with a canoe in which she her brothers used to sail to the island of Kauai. There, her sister, apparently still peeved over the affair with her husband, attacked her and left for dead.  But Pele wasn’t dead. She made her way to Oahu where she dug fire pits.  When her sister found her alive, she attacked. Their epic battle, fire versus water,  created Diamond Head. Again, Pele fled. First to Molokai, and then to Maui where another battle created Haleakala volcano.

Again, Namakaokahai left her for dead, but Pele survived and made her way to the big island of Hawaii. There, now fully in control of her powers, she dug her fire pit in the Halemaumau Crater at the summit of the Kilauea volcano where many say she now resides.

I love origin stories. When I was a kid, I used to love hearing how my parents met each other on a blind date and how my father “neged” (it wasn’t called that then) her into loving him. (He, an immigrant kid who fought in WW2 and just earned a degree from Syracuse University, teased her about growing up the only child of a Park Avenue physician.) Origin stories help provide an understanding of how cultures view themselves. The muses of Rome chose to have Romulus and Remus suckled by a wolf. It made their people far more fearsome than if they had been suckled by a cow, a goat or sheep.

I am also a romantic. I find it easy to imagine storytellers, before the days of ubiquitous content creation we currently live in, sitting around a campfire or hearth telling legends that were told to them by their ancestors.  Each narrator attempts to make the story a little bit more engaging and fantastic. Giving details that made the story more compelling to their audience.

The myth of Pele appeals to me for all those reasons. I love how organic it is. It explains the volcanic nature of the islands and explains it in a way anyone can understand. Two mighty sisters having a quarrel. Quarrelling siblings are universal. Everyone knows a pair of siblings who quarrel and no matter what life brings to them they can’t quite seem to put it behind them. Look at Levi and me. It also suggests that balance was important to their culture. Water balances fire. Our world can only be stable when there is balance.  Or said another way, without balance there is chaos.

Or maybe Covid has given me too much time to think about things like this.

I am contemplating all this sitting on a stool at the Alaloa Lounge. It is a small bar in a secluded corner of the Ritz Carlton with a long granite covered bar with teak wood framing and comfortable leather backed bar stools. The lighting is dim and indirect. Playing in the background is the omnipresent Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, Iz, singing “In This Life.” The lounge is empty except for an old woman with a cane nursing a drink in a Poco Grande glass with an umbrella. Me, I am  staring into the depths of Pau Vodka Martini with three olives and a twist.

This session of olive therapy has me thinking about the beginning of the sister’s trouble. Pele has an affair with the husband of her sister. This is a huge personal betrayal. I cannot think of anything bigger than that. It caused Pele to be cast out by her father, and massive destruction whenever the two confronted each other. But in the end, like Yin/Yang, the Ouroboros or the Medicine Wheel, they balanced each other. It is the battle for that harmony that created this paradise.  There is balance where there was none before. The universe craves equilibrium.

I plop an olive in my mouth. If this is a universal constant, then why can’t Delilah understand that everything that brought us to this point is what it is. There is no need to relitigate past grievances, to tear open wounds that are on their way to healing. Let go of the lies, the righteous and not so righteous indignation and find the gifts this “new” harmony provides you.

Tonight was the first time our merry band of travelers were together as a group. We had agreed to meet for dinner. I had not been looking forward to it. The last time I saw Del was in court during her and Conor’s divorce hearing. Then, she had called me names her pastor would have been shocked by, using fuck as a noun, adjective, verb and adverb. She had her reasons. I shared with the court personal emails that revealed her motives in the dissolution of marriage were more about revenge than an equitable distribution of assets. Since then, I had only received two emails from her. One was shortly before Conor’s death. She wanted to visit him and make peace and asked me to intercede. I had reluctantly brought the subject up with Con who had not just said no he said fuck no. I didn’t agree with his decision, but I understood. She was the cause of all his problems including the cancer that was slowly destroying his brain. I did not have the will to argue with him, especially as I thought he was right.  The second was to invite me on this trip which I felt obligated to join. Someone needed to stand up for Conor.

But I had no stomach for eating with her. I knew her well enough to know that she would want to unbury the past, rehash old grievances and find fault with everyone but herself in the divorce. As much anger, hurt and bitterness I held in my heart I wanted to let it go. Wasn’t that the point of this trip? Cast the past to the wind and let it drift away with the breeze. Which is why when Liam had suggested we eat dinner as a group I had said yes in the hopes that I was wrong about Del and we could find our version of harmony. I suggested we eat at Plantation House Restaurant. I had dined there years before with my parents. It overlooked a golf course, the Pacific and Molokai, had superb food and an elegant modern dining room clad in native wood and accordion glass doors that were kept open, allowing the outside in. Those doors and the constant breeze would make us feel more Covid comfortable. Hopefully a beautiful, subdued environment would encourage polite conversation and discourage the rehashing of past grievances.

I told them I would meet them there. I didn’t want our first meeting after so much had transpired to be in a closed vehicle. Putting combustibles in a tight space always heightens the effect of the explosion. Should the ignition come, I would prefer it to be in the open where the blast would cause less damage. As further insurance against unpleasantness I made a point of showing up late for our reservation.  An Irish entrance if you will.

Man plans, God laughs.

When the maître de showed me to our table I could see instantly that my plan had gone off the rails. On one side of the table sat Liam and Hadley, on the other side sat Del and her newly minted husband Sam. There was only one chair left at the head of the table with Hadley on one side and Del on the other. Much to my chagrin the restaurant, as a part of Covid protocols had a QR code invoked menu. There was no printed menu in which to hide behind.  I was not a coward. Given the right time and place I would not hesitate to butt heads with Del. I wanted to move on, and I knew me: if Del lit the match, it would take very little for my anger to explode.

Honestly, a confrontation was inevitable. Nature craves balance and Del and I were nowhere near that. There was too much hurt and animosity for homeostasis. It was just a matter of time before something leaked out that inevitably led to an explosion. However, I was determined it would not be me who set us on that path. I would not be the breaker of the peace. I give Del credit. She held out until I had been served my first Pau Martini before she said anything. Her opening salvo: “I just want you to know that I forgive you.”

One of Del’s great gifts is she can use terms of forgiveness and blessings as condescension. Where a phrase like “Bless your heart” means “that is the most ignorant stupid thing I have ever heard of” or “You look healthy” means “wow have you put on weight” or the famous “Isn’t that special” means “I am totally judging you and not in a good way.”

Del’s telling me she forgave me was just another way of saying “You were and are an asshole, but I am better than you and as I am a Christian and I bless you with forgiveness.”  I guess I could have smiled and let it go. Let it roll over me like water on a duck’s back, but I hated the condescension and more importantly, I had never done anything to her that required forgiveness. Trying to show restraint I replied “Thank you, Del. I appreciate your forgiveness. But I was unaware that I had done anything to be forgiven for.”

Instead of responding to my question, she took a different tack. She said “You know he cheated on me. Not just once. But throughout our marriage.”

Liam, who from his seat adjacent from his mother said sharply “Mom…”

Del shot Liam a withering glance and replied, “Let Danny and I talk.”

I took a beat and said, “Del, what does it matter. He is gone. You are remarried. You are in a better place. Why beat a dead horse? Let the past be the past. Also, what went on in your marriage to Conor is nobody’s business except the two of you and he’s gone…”

“But you always said that you didn’t think he had an affair.”

“No. That is not what I said. What I said is that I didn’t know if he had any affairs. It is not something we talked about. He told me that he didn’t and whether I believed him or not was never relevant. At least not to me. What was important was whether or not you two wanted to stay together. If you did, great you had some work to do. You don’t want to stay married? Also, okay. Figure out a way to move on and get on with it. I told you that from the very beginning.”

“You know I trusted him. Right up until the end. But when he started having all that “work” done, the hair transplant, taking HGH, I got suspicious and started looking through his computer. There were so many inconsistencies. Times where he told me he was going to be at a client meeting and instead he was at a hotel screwing someone.”

Through a clenched jaw I replied. “Del why are we doing this here and now. It is so unimportant all things considered. Let’s just move on. We have been through this. You don’t know, I don’t know, what Conor was doing at that hotel.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?” Del demanded.

I replied with anger born of frustration “It doesn’t matter because he is dead.” I should have stopped there. But my anger removed the chock blocks on my tongue.  I continued. “It doesn’t matter because if he was having an affair there was a reason he was having an affair. And perhaps, just perhaps one of the reasons he was doing that was something had gone awry with your relationship. No doubt that he bears a large burden for your relationship going to hell in a handbasket, but he was not in it alone. You have to take some of that responsibility. You can’t put it all on him. I don’t see you owning up to your mistakes. What I see, what I have seen since this cluster fuck of a divorce started is each of you blaming the other for why your marriage fell apart instead of each of you accepting you fucked up. That it was too far gone to fix. And instead of saying we had our time, we have two great boys and some good memories, you both went about trying to destroy each other. A divorce that could have been over in months didn’t end until it killed Conor.”

I could have gone on. I could have said “And it made you a millionaire. The person whom he despised most when he left this earth benefited the most. That is not just unfair, it is revolting. You could have had a civil divorce but instead you both declared war on each other, and we both know the result of that. Your divorce could have been a peace treaty but both of you created mutually assured destruction. But you survived and he didn’t and that will never ever seem fair to me.”

But I didn’t. Part of that was Des’s advice. Always the good angel sitting on my shoulder “Forgive don’t forget.” Part of it was fatigue. Over the past year, alone in my apartment I had waged this conversation so many times that having it again, live and in living color, seemed redundant and pointless. There is no way that Del would ever accept her role in Conor’s death and me bringing it up would only frustrate me and delight her.

“Del, Conor was my best friend. What real friends do is show up. They don’t ask why. They ask where and when. They know that somewhere down the line there will likely be an explanation, but you can be patient and wait for it. I showed up. I was there for him from the beginning until the very bitter end. I did not always agree with him. Sometimes adamantly and with anger. Those conversations were with him and me and they are going to stay that way. What I will tell you is that he was an imperfect as any other man, but I loved him despite his, and sometimes because of, his faults.”

Delilah opens her mouth and is readying a retort when I hold up the index finger on my left hand and say “I am not going to talk about this anymore. I understand and appreciate that you want to, but you will not enjoy where I take this conversation if it continues. I am not threatening. I am just saying. I am begging you in the spirit of what brought us all here, may we please change the subject. “

This quiets Del.  But I can tell from her twitching lips and flared nostrils she wants to say more. Before she can, Liam interjects “Mom and Danny, the sun is about to set. Let’s see if we can see the green flash.” We place a pause on our argument and are silent as we watch the sun, now a golden yellow orb with a crown of orange, make its terminal descent into the sea. Experience suggests that there is no chance of us seeing the flash, yet I hope to see it anyway as a sign from beyond the horizon that my message to Delilah is on the side of the angels.

It is a magnificent sunset. with pinks, oranges and mauve but no green flash. Regardless the restaurant still bursts into applause when the last arc of our star dips from view.

Just like that the conversation evolves into our excursion tomorrow. It is as if some internal switch has been shut off within her. I am grateful. She prattles on about all the work she has done to coordinate our efforts. How difficult it was to find a boat, but she persevered and found us the perfect boat for our ceremony. I barely listen. Just nodding and smiling when it seems appropriate, as I am seething inside. My mind is caught up in one of those thought whirlpools that grabs hold of you, will not let you go and threatens to drown you.

Del is a destroyer. She set out to destroy her husband of twenty-eight years and succeeded. No gun was fired. No knife barred or hit man hired. It was lawyers, guns and money, without the guns and with Con’s money. She savaged him and their family with no regard to the consequences of her actions. There were consequences. Awful, terrible world destroying outcomes that no doubt hurt her too but also solved some of her biggest challenges. Conor holds his share responsibility for what happened. He did not cover himself with glory. He had fallen into mortal combat California divorce style and had lied, cheated, obfuscated, and done what he could to destroy Del. He had lost. In that way he is responsible for his own fate, but I have not forgotten that he offered her a settlement. One that was fair and equitable. But she wanted more, and they went to war. That part is on her. Would always be on her. And it did so much damage.  Destruction that could not be imagined or repaired.

Dinner ends. I am sure it was a wonderful meal only because I have eaten here before, and the food has always been good but I cannot remember eating nor much of the conversation. Getting lost in my own drama, being trapped in my head, is a byproduct of Covid. Not the disease but the isolation in which I spent the last year. Spending time alone, when most of your conversations are with yourself and those that you can conjure, gives you full allowance to drift into a different reality and let the world go on without you. We say good night with handshakes and hugs, Del even whispering in my ear “I am glad we talked.” as if our conversation had resolved everything and wiped away the last few years. I am not entirely surprised. Her obliviousness, her inability to read a room, is an integral part of the destruction she has reaped.

Olive therapy was Conor’s dad term. A phrase he would use after coming home from a day on Wall Street as he mixed his favorite cocktail. He would, as he poured a healthy measure of Stolichnaya vodka into a cocktail shaker full of ice, provide us with the perfect recipe for a Martini. “You take three parts vodka and whisper the magic words “Noily Prat” and sim sala bin you have the perfect martini.” He would always garnish his Martini’s with pickled onions which I would learn much later technically made it a Gibson. I never favored the onion. For me the perfect garnish for a Martini is a blue cheese stuffed olive. I have told people for years that it is the perfect accoutrement for Martini Therapy as it provides sustenance along with your therapy. Which is why I am so pleased that the Alaloa Lounge stocks them. I had not eaten much at dinner and could use some nourishment, emotional and otherwise.

“Olive Therapy?”

Day 2: 11:05 AM continued

The purpose of a right cross is to surprise your opponent. Hit you with a punch from a direction you are not expecting and with any luck drop them to their knees if not knock them out. A week before we were to leave to pick up Con in California, I got a call from Liam. He wanted to know what I knew about his father’s one-million-dollar life insurance policy. I said  I knew that he had one it had been a bone of contention in their parents’ divorce and the last time his dad and I had spoken about it he had been trying to change the beneficiary of the policy from Delilah to him and his brother. Why? He explained that his mother had received a phone call from the broker who had issued the policy.  Someone was attempting to buy the policy and change the beneficiary. The transfer of beneficiaries required her signature as well. I told him I knew nothing about it, but I would call his dad, see what I could find out,

Conor was only too happy to discuss the situation. He explained, since his diagnosis, he had grown increasingly concerned about the fully vested one-million-dollar life insurance policy that named Delilah as the sole beneficiary. It had been taken out when the boys were small when his death would have caused a major upheaval in their life. The divorce, still on going and more bitter than ever and his own death foreseeable he wanted to make sure the boys, not Del, would benefit from the policy’s payout.“

I said “So why didn’t you just change beneficiaries on the policy.”

He replied “I tried that, but the broker told me that a change of beneficiaries required both my signature and Del’s. I knew she would not do that.”

“So how did you come up with the idea of selling of the policy?”

“Oh, people do that all the time.:”

“Well, I am not really smart with this stuff. Insurance and financial stuff are your bailiwick. But from what the boys tell me that the person who is buying the policy is not a company but an individual. What is going with that.”

“Oh, he is a friend of Lil’s.”

Growing wary I replied “Why are you trying to see the policy to a friend of Lilith instead of to a company that specializes in buying up folk’s insurance policies? Wouldn’t that have been easier.”

In a tone that suggested I had asked a very stupid question he said “Then Del would have found out. I would have needed her signature again. Lil said she had a wealthy former boyfriend who did this sort of thing all the time. He would buy the policy at a discount and take care of any legal problems that arose.”

I didn’t like how this sounded at all and asked “How would he get around changing the beneficiary? Wouldn’t he have the same problems that you had?”

“I asked him about that. He told me he did this thing all the time and that what typically happened is that in lieu of fighting a prolonged legal fight where only the lawyers make money a settlement is reached. He makes a little money off the policy, and everyone walks away happy.”

I blurt out “Didn’t that seem a little sleezy to you.”

“A little but at least it would keep Del from getting some of the payout.”

Concerned I say “Okay, how much was he going to pay you for the policy.”

“$500,000.”

“So, he was going to pay you one half of the value of the policy and what were you going to do with that money. You know Del has a lien on all of your bank accounts and would have put an attachment on the cash. How did you plan to get around that?”

He replied in a matter-of-fact tone “I was going to give it to Lil to hold onto and if I died before the divorce was settled, she promised to give it to the boys.”

Beginning to see a pattern I said “Oh. Let me ask you this. What happened to this deal? Did you ever get paid by Lil’s friend.”

“Oh no. We signed the papers assigning him the policy contingent upon him placing a claim on the policy. The insurance company denied him siting an injunction that Del had in place on the policy, so we tore up the contract.”

Curious I replied, “When did all this go down?”

“I can’t remember exactly. A couple of weeks ago maybe?”

The puzzle was complete, and I did not like the picture it displayed. Lil’s interest in Conor had died the minute the minute she could no longer shake any money from the tree. It was breathlessly heartbreaking. The woman my friend had called the love of his life was little more than a parasite. When there was nothing left to feed on, she left to find her next victim.

How could this have happened? Two and half years ago, my friend was living the life he had dreamed of since he was a boy. His home was in one of the most beautiful beach communities in the world where every night he could sit on his porch watching the sunset, hoping to see the miracle of the green flash. He had a job which was prestigious and offered him an opportunity for real wealth. More importantly he had a wife, who by all appearances loved him, and two boys who would fight over who would rush into a burning building to save him. He was the paragon of health, spending an hour almost every day swimming laps in the pool or in the surf just outside his door. 

His life was the fairytale I wanted. Or at least thought I wanted. But it was all an illusion. A piece of fiction. His marriage was a sham. Two people pretending that they loved each other until they could no longer put on a show for the rest of us. Façade gone, it revealed two combatants, locked in mortal combat, each one desperate to prove who was right and frantic to claim every spoil of war they could find. Their battlefield had cratered my friend’s life. It had taken his livelihood, his children, his health and thrust him into the arms of a siren whose song had shipwrecked him and left him to drown.

I had known for some time that there would be no happy ending to my friend’s ballad. Tragedy was inevitable. But this betrayal by Lil and facilitated by George’s indifference and neglect was beyond the pale.  How can a brother abandon a brother? I did not always love my brother Levi. He often infuriated me to the point where we would go months without speaking with each other. But if he needed my help, I would beat a path to his doorstep. How can anyone, let alone a woman who professes to be the love of your life, try to steal all your money, and then throw you to the curb when there is nothing left to steal

These are the stories of Greek myths and Russian novels. It should not be the story of the ending of your best friend’s life. I would love to say this adversity strengthened my resolve to help my friend and give him the best possible ending. And perhaps it did, later. But in the moment, hearing about Lil’s and George’s betrayal, and wondering how we got hear from the hope and glory of only a few years ago, broke me.

I did not tell Liam or Duke what had really happened with the insurance. It would only serve to throw gasoline on the bonfire of hate they already had for Lilith and make the job of extracting Con from her grip more contentious. I never confronted George about the type of man he was. He already knew.  Me letting him know that I knew would only be spitting in the wind.  Instead, I let it guide my expectations and plot my course more fully aware of the situation.

Con’s room at Eagles Rest was dominated by a king-sized bed he insisted on taking from his apartment. The room was small, maybe 12 x 10, and the bed made it difficult to maneuver as it ate up most of the available floor space. Opposite it was a gigantic fifty-five-inch television. Like the bed, no doubt a Costco purchase made after Del had left and salvaged from his apartment. The room was a mess. The floor was littered with various chargers for phone, iPad and laptop and clothes that he had discarded after wearing. There were candy bar wrappers strewn everywhere and a tray that contained the remnants of some past meal on the nightstand next to his bed.The small closet had more clothes on the floor than were hanging. The state of the room was not a surprise. Con had never taken to housekeeping. But his appearance was. A man who used to be spend more time in front of the mirror than super models, whose hair needed to exactly right before leaving the house was a mess. He was unshaven with a four-day beard. His hair looked dirty and was uncombed. He had visibly aged, looking more seventy-five than fifty-five. While his face had finally readjusted to his skull his eyes looked blank and confused.

It was a shock for me. But for the boys, it was far worse. The father they had last seen was young, vibrant, gregarious, and bold. The man they were seeing for the first time in almost two years had no resemblance to that person. In front of them was a zombie whose soul was slowly being leached away. It made them freeze as they entered the room. Even though they had been prepared to see an altered version of the man who guided them all their lives the reality blew every circuit breaker that governed them.  I understood. Dads are immortal to their children. Seeing that they are not, is 9.0 on the emotional Richter scale.

I said to Con in the most ebullient tone I could muster. “Buddy boy! We are here! How are you.”

He looked at me and with a disturbed look on his face replied, “You are late!”

I glanced at my watch. It was 8:30 in the morning. Exactly the time I had told him the night before we would be arriving. I said “No Con. We are right on time. Don’t you remember I told you would be here at 8:30 am last night? It’s 8:25. We are even here a bit early.”

“No, it’s not. It’s 11:30. I went downstairs at 8:30 and was waiting for you.” Pointing to his iWatch he said “See.” I looked and replied as kindly as I could “Buddy, the watch says 8:26.”

Con looked at his watch. Uncertainty rippled across his face. Then he laughed and said “I guess I was confused. That happens a lot these days.”

Had I not been in the same room with him I may have allowed myself a tear or two. This was my friend, my wingman in adventure and mischief, a man who in the past had no problem juggling three dates with three different women on the same day, getting confused over telling time. Instead, I changed the subject. I said, pointing to the boys “Look who I found hanging out on the street.”

Duke and Liam walked around me and for the first time in almost two years they hugged. It made me feel like an outsider. But not in a bad way. This was their tribe. Their relationship. I had mine with my father. A relationship that had always been good but had grown as we aged and understood better the man he was and the sacrifices he had made so I could be the man I wanted to be. A relationship that had reached its zenith when he had become ill, confined to a wheelchair when we used to hug like Con and his boys were hugging now. I wanted to tell the boys to savor every second of this hug. To rejoice in it because as I knew from my own well of sadness that when those embraces are gone, they will never be replaced.

We had breakfast in the dining room at Eagles Rest. It was a small room off the main lobby with about a dozen Formica topped tables for four and about half that for two. It was nearly empty when we entered. As Con explained, here most folks were finished with breakfast by eight. As we made our ways through the tables to one near the window looking out onto the courtyard, Con introduced us to some of his “friends.” They were all in their eighties, in various states of decline and treated us as if we were aliens visiting from a distant galaxy. Which I suppose, from their point of view, we were. It made me wonder, not for the first time whether or not placing a middle-aged man in the middle of a health crisis in a dormitory of death, was a good idea. Wasn’t there a place available where the focus was on moving forward and not giving in to the inevitable?

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My friend did not need to be here. He should have been somewhere the default was waiting in the lobby for the grim reaper to pick you up. He could have been living with Liam or Duke or me. And he would have had it not been for Lil. Had not been for her, he would have been and Liam’s wedding. If not for that, his boys, not her, would have been in control of his health. The outcome might not have been different. A the very least the boys would have had more time with their dad and Con would have spent more time with those he loved instead of gradually fading into the Formica.  

Packing up Con’s room took surprisingly little time. With the exception of his oversized television and his king-sized bed, all he owned fit into two large boxes. Between Del returning to their apartment while Con had been on a business trip and shipping most of their possessions to their new home and Lil’s haphazard dissolution of his last apartment there was not much left. Just clothes that no longer fit and a few family photos. Less than three years earlier he had enough “stuff’ to fill a 4,000 square foot home. I found everything about this terribly depressing.

I am feeling my sadness overwhelm me when Liam taps me on the shoulder and says “Look what I found” and hande me a clear acrylic block with a black and white photograph embedded inside. It is of two young men about the same height, dressed identically with untucked Lacoste shirts, straight leg Levi corduroys, and Topsider boat shoes. The boy on the left, is very waspy looking and has long blonde hair and a leather thong around his neck. He is resting his arm on the other’s shoulder who is sporting aviator glasses and a six-inch Isro.  They are both staring into the middle distance with the semi-serious look young men wear when they want to be taken seriously.

I smile and laugh and say “Jesus! This is a picture of your old man and I that was taken right before we graduated high school. When I found a copy of it, I don’t know a dozen or so years ago, I had this made up and sent to him.” My voice trails off and I mumble “I can’t believe he still has it. I would have thought he lost it a couple of moves ago.”

The picture snaps me back to the mission at hand.  I am not here to get angry at anyone. It is not my job to judge anyone. It can’t be about regret. Not that I wouldn’t want to change things if I could but I cannot, so regret is useless.

I need to leave judgement, regret, and pity at the door. I need to remember the reason that we are here. Con needs us. If I spend my time judging Del, Lil, and George for what they have or have not done, relitigating a past I cannot change, or feeling sorry for myself I won’t be able to do one thing I am here to do which is to help Con with whatever he needs, everything beyond that is nothing but a waste of energy.

My phone buzzes. I look at the screen and see it is Lil calling me. Not wanting to have a conversation with her in front of Liam and Duke I stepped out into the hall. and say, “Hey Lil, whatup.”

“Hi Danny. Umm. I am downstairs in the courtyard. I know the boys are here and I don’t want to see them. Will you come downstairs and meet me? Please.”

The courtyard is  a large patio surrounded by different wings of the facility. It  . I find Lil sitting in a far corner of the courtyard in chairs that are facing away from the doors and looking towards the haze shrouded Pacific.

I say, “Hi Lil” and give her a kiss on the cheek before sitting down. She is dressed what my father would have called “full battle gear.” Her make-up is perfect in the way that stencils are perfect. She appears to have a flawless sun kissed complexion, with puffy red lips, and eyes that are shadowed well enough to appear in a Margret Keane painting. Her dress is brick red, form fitting with a plunging neckline that calls full attention to her surgically enhanced breasts.

She hands me a letter size manilla envelope and says “Connie gave me this to hold onto when he moved in here.”

The envelope is heavy, and I say, “What is it?”

Lil replies “It’s okay. You can look?”

I open the envelope and reach inside and pull out a Rolex Sea Dweller Deepsea with a stainless-steel band, and bezel and deep blue face. I say, “Isn’t the watch you bought Con when you two went to London together.”

She smiles ruefully and replies “Is that what he told you?”

“Yeah, he said that that he had taken you to Harrods to do some window shopping and were looking at watches for the hell of it and you surprised him by buying him this.” As a watch lover, but never wealthy enough to own a watch like this I add “He told me what you paid for this watch. It was like twelve grand. Don’t you want to keep it? You bought it after all.”

Lil chuckles and says “I didn’t buy him this watch. He bought it for himself.”

“What?”

“Yes. We were in London, and it was right after Del had all of his bank accounts frozen. You know how he was back then Danny. He wanted to do whatever he could to fight Del. Didn’t matter whether it was right or wrong. All that mattered was keeping money out of her hands. And that meant no liquid assets. No money that could be traced back to him. I don’t who gave him the idea, but someone suggested buying things that either didn’t go down in price or if they did it wasn’t by much. He decided to buy a watch. You know how he is about watches. We went to Harrods and bought the watch. Our cover story was that if anyone asked, I bought it for him.”

I was a little stunned. I thought Con always played it straight with me. I thought I knew all his secrets but obviously I did not and that stung a little. I looked over at Lil and mumbled “I thought Con told me everything.”

“He told me not to tell you. He said he wasn’t going to tell anyone who could be deposed.”

“Then why did he tell you?” I said with a little jealously creeping into my voice.

Lil held up her left hand showing me a ruby and diamond ring and said “We were engaged. If Del’s lawyer wanted to depose me, we would have claimed spousal privilege.”  

“Okay. I get it. But how did he get the money to pay for the watch without sending off alarms and flashing red lights to Delilah’s attorney? I thought they had him boxed.

Lil grinned “Oh he didn’t tell you about that either?” she said in a superior tone.

I replied, “Tell me what.”

“He had a secret bank account. One that he had been keeping from Del for years. He called it his “get on jail free” account. I think it had about one hundred and fifty grand in it. When Del’s lawyers started freezing his bank accounts and seizing the money. He cashed it out before they could get to it.”

I sat there in stunned silence. I knew none of this. This man had been my friend for decades, I had talked to him at least once a day since the beginning of the divorce. And I knew none of this. Lil must have seen the surprise on my face because she said “C’mon Danny. You can’t be surprised by all of this. You know how secretive and sneaky he could be.”

It was true. I used to joke with Con about his name. How he would love to play games with people. Whether that was pretending to be an Irish immigrant when picking up girls in bars so the fun they had together would be limited to one evening only. Or, back in the days when cocaine was king in New York, and he would buy for a group of us and skim a couple of grams for himself. But I thought that had faded with age. Now he was the guy that would say what he would do and do what he said. But clearly, I was wrong about that. Normally, I would have gotten in his face about this. Confront him with his lying to me. But that ship had sailed. Challenging him about anything now was worthless

I said “Yeah, I am surprised” and then with a fake chuckle “But not entirely astonished. It fits a pattern. So now he has all this cash that Del knows nothing about. He is trying to hide with physical things that can be located with a search of his financial records, or he can have some plausible deniability about. Do you know what he did with the rest of the money? I am not asking to be nosey. I just think the boys may want to know to pay some of his bills and things.”

Lil paused. It was clear from the look on her face that she was trying to decide whether to share the information with me or if I were cynical what lie to tell me. She says “Some of the money he used to buy diamonds. I think he spent like forty-five thousand dollars on them with a jeweler I know.   And the rest he gave to me to hold on to for him.”

“Would you mind me asking where the diamonds and the money are now. Honestly, I am not trying to be pushy, but the boys have some hefty bills coming up and if it can help them pay them it would be great.”

Lilith paused for a second and said “I don’t mind you asking. The diamonds were stolen.”

“What!?”

“Yeah, he kept them in a little safe he had in his apartment. If you remember right after he got out of rehab the first time we thought, that is he thought, he could live on his own the apartment with some assistance. It was a bad idea. I arranged to have someone come in and spend a few hours with him every day. A nice woman named Laetitia whose husband worked for me and did this type of work. She made sure that he took his meds, showered, and took care of himself, light cleaning and things like that. She was terrific and took good care of Con. Then one day she didn’t show up and it was shortly after that we discovered that the diamonds were missing.”

“Fuck. How did she know about the diamonds.”

“I don’t know. At the time Con was not making a lot of sense. You talked him then. There were times he was there and times he was on a different planet. He says he doesn’t know but I think he showed them to her for some reason or perhaps he had them out and she saw where he was keeping them. Who knows? “

“And of course, they were not insured because Del could then discover that he had them and was hiding money from him?”

“Yes. Which is also why we could not file a police report.”

“Fuckity, fuck fuck. So, what did you do?

“What could we do? I tracked down Laetitia. She claimed not to know anything about the diamonds. She told me that she quit because Con kept on asking for sex and her husband told her she had to quit.”

“Did you believe her?”

Lil shrugs and says” Who knows? I had nothing to prove it so I had let it go. But not before I fired her husband.”

“Jesus. What a fucking mess.” We did not say anything for a few moments. What was there to say? Did I believe Lil? Yes, I believed her about the diamonds and the watch. I had no doubt that Con had done what he could to hide things from Del. He had been at war with her and she with him. The rule book for propriety and doing the right thing, as far as he was concerned, had been tossed the minute she had walked out the door. He would not lose this fight. Did I believe Lil about the diamonds being stolen? I wanted to. But I could not. Not after the insurance. Not after abandoning my friend after promising undying love. It made a plausible story seem unlikely which made my next question both more difficult and a necessity.

I said“Lil, is there anything left. I don’t mean it to sound that way. I don’t mean to be pushy or question you, but the boys will ask, and I would like to have an answer for them.”

Lil’s face hardened. A muscle just below her left eye twitched ever so slightly. She said “If you are asking if there is any cash left, there isn’t. Between paying for this place and all of Con’s other expenses it has all been spent.” She hesitated for a moment and then added with a bit more defiance than I thought necessary “And if you don’t believe me, ask George. He has been managing all of Con’s other expenses.”

This was a path that led nowhere. George relied on her for information. GIGO. Garbage in garbage out.  If she was lying, which was likely, there would be no way to prove it.

 I said “Let me change the subject. How are you doing? I know this has been hard on you. And him leaving isn’t the outcome you had hoped for?”

Lil visibly relaxed and proceeded to go on at length at what sacrifices she had made for Con. How demanding it had been. How demanding he had been. That she had found her “true love” and how now she was losing him. That she was living in a tragedy worthy of a Mexican telenovela. After a few sentences, I stopped listening.  Her words were white noise. This was not her tragedy and everything she was saying, as far as I was concerned, were as hollow as a prostitute’s promises.

I had enough of Lilith. My ability to remain polite was waning if not already at end. I said “Lilith, would you like to come up and see Con.

“Are the boys up there?”

“When I left, they were. They were packing up the room. Not that there was much to pack.”

She contemplated it for a second and replied “I do not want to see them. I will come back later to say goodbye to Connie.”

Lil never saw Con again. She did not visit him that night. She did not visit him in Carolina. She had gotten what she wanted from him and when there was nothing left, she disposed of him of like an unwanted household item, placed him on the curb hoping someone would come along and pick him up. Whether she really was the devil’s bride before she met my friend or whether circumstances had created her, I will never know. It did not matter. I did not care. She was what she was, and I never needed to deal with her again.

Day 2: 11:05 AM

King David wrote about a Polynesian named Hawaii’I Loa.

He was the fisherman responsible for feeding his village. He would take his long canoe or wa’a, a vessel that was sixty feet long and a had depth up to man’s chest, on long fishing trips that roamed the Pacific. These trips could last weeks, months or even a year.   One day, his navigator, a man by the name of Makai’s, suggested they steer in the direction of Lao, the eastern star, to find new land. Using that and a star called Hoku, the red star, and a constellation that was shaped like a bird, they eventually made their way to the big island of Hawaii which is named in his honor.

Their trip was over twenty-five hundred miles across the largest ocean in the world. A body of water that had no land masses to guide them or resupply along the way and was prone to typhoons. This all happened sometime between one hundred AD to 1100 AD. A time when the European’s had only managed to conquer the Mediterranean a body of water 1/60^th the size of the Pacific in boats that were four times as big.

Compare this to today when many cannot make their way to the supermarket without Waze or if you really wanted to get them lost you would give them a map. Perhaps I sound elderly here, which I am not, but sometimes the truth is harsh.

And by the way, this one is not a one off. One lucky shot and done. Hawai’I Loa found his way back to Polynesia and became the island’s first real estate salesperson. He convinced a generation of Pacific Islanders to pack up their chickens, pigs, dogs, and breadfruit plants and come to this new paradise.

I am thinking of Hawaii’I Loa because I am lost! Lost is too harsh a word. I have a good directional bump. I almost always know where I am and can figure out how to get where I am going. Which is why instead of backtracking on the trail that brought me to the rainbow cove I decided to be adventuresome and take a different route.  I know where I am. It is on the map I was given at reception. There is only one promontory that has a vista pretty enough for a postcard and this particular view of Molokai and Lanai. I am not lost, I am just not where I I wanted to be.  I even know where I went wrong. But to find my way back home I still need to plunge into the jungle and hope this time I will not miss the path I am supposed to be on.

Which when you think about might be the story of my life.

It is late October of 2019, and I am in the front seat of a Black Chevy Tahoe driving through the gates of Horizons. It is a community designed to accommodate seniors (lord I hate that term, but it is better than elderly) from retirement to last gasp. For the recently retired it contains modest homes for those who are looking to downsize their living arrangements. When the burden for caring for a home has become too much there are apartments. And, when your medical issues overwhelm all other problems in your life, there is an assisted living and care facility. In other words, it is the last community you will ever have to join. On the positive side, this is no dormitory of death but more a campus for those whose expiration date is nearing.  While I have no desire to live in a place like this, I am impressed by what I see.

I turn to Liam who is sitting in the back seat, next to his dad, and say to him with a touch of awe “How did you find this place? Especially in such a short period of time.”

Liam smiles at the compliment, his boy like features breaking into a grin. He replies “I did a bunch of research. And Hadley’s mom has friends who are on the board of this place. They gave us a tour and it looked great.” Looking over at his wife, who at a little over five-foot, petite, looks incongruous driving this vehicle large enough for a helipad, chuckles and says “We liked it so much we almost moved in.”

I looked over at my friend Con who had been quiet for most of the drive from Charlotte Airport and say, “What do you think budrow?”  He replies, somewhat grouchily “Let’s see when we get to where I will be living.” I did not mind the grouchiness. I understood. It had been a long flight from L.A., a place where only two years ago he had been sitting on top of the world. Abandoned by a woman who had professed unending love for him he was heading to a place where, more likely than not, he would die. It was one of those moments in life where you wonder how you got here.

For me it had begun a little over three weeks before.

My typical weekday routine, when Nadine is not in residence, is to get up at around six am and immediately go to my desk and write. Some people meditate to sort out their life, I write. It allows me to exorcise with keystrokes what mantras do for others. With interruptions for Fenway’s morning dew drop and perhaps breakfast, I work steadily until 9 am when I need to focus my efforts on my workday. I work until my brain misfires and my eyes blur from too much blue light. To recharge, and allow for additional calorie consumption later, I head to Equinox gym. It serves as more than a place to build muscles and cardio capacity. It is the only time during the day where I have any interaction with other people. I am on a first name basis with the trainers, front desk staff and many of the people who worked out there. It is the office water cooler community I miss from the days when I worked in an office.

At the gym I make it a practice not to respond to texts, emails, or phone calls. My phone’s only function is to listen to music or perhaps an audiobook. I do not understand why so many people at the gym practiced downward facing Apple (stretching while staring down at their screen) or spend an inordinate amount of time between reps on their screen texting or answering emails. Isn’t this a place where you go to get away from the grind.  Besides, it is rude monopolizing floor space and machine time. You don’t own the equipment and there are better places to take selfies.  I rarely answered my phone if it rang. The only exception was Mom called as the only time she called was for emergencies. (Or what to her emergencies were emergencies which could include things like the printer ink being low or a light bulb needing replacement. Regardless, they needed to be dealt with or I would suffer the consequences) In recent months I had added Con to my answer list. While technically his brain tumor was in remission, we all knew that this was a pit stop. He was alone most of the time with nothing to think about except death and what lay beyond. If he called, even if we had talked a couple of times that  day, I gave up “my” time for him.

I was on the Stairmaster, about midway through my one hundred and thirty-nine floor climb of the Petronas Tower when my phone buzzed. The screen displayed “Lilith.” Ugh. I have no desire to speak with her, but this could be about Con. Something might have happened to him. I touch my right ear bud and answer my phone with “Hi Lil. What’s going on?”

She replied with the false bonhomie of a telephone salesperson “Hey I hope I am not interrupting anything, but do you have a minute to talk.”

I knew from my daily conversations with Conor his relationship with Lil had been rocky of late. He felt neglected. She was not visiting him enough. Despite the fact that she had volunteered to be his primary care giver, and lived just two miles from Eagles Rest, days would go by without a visit. Conor was lonely and scared. Who would not be in this situation? This was made worse by the fact that his universe of friends had been whittled down to three people. Lil, myself, and his brother George. It was a bed of his making for sure but Lil had supplied the mattress and Del the sheets. It was Lil who had made going to Liam’s wedding a line he felt he could not cross. He should have ignored her, but she manipulated him. It had alienated his boys. His friends, other than me, had largely disappeared with his divorce. Del had one the P.R. battle and the ones who stood by him, most of whom were at the wedding, were appalled by his lack of attendance and by Del’s fanning of that flame, they were no longer speaking with him. This put a huge amount of pressure on Lil to be Conor’s everything.

I had little if any sympathy for her. This had been her game plan all along. Conor’s only focus should be her at the exclusion of all others. She just had not counted on his getting brain cancer and him being his primary care giver. Man plans, God laughs.

I knew she was not calling to have a casual conversation. She did not care for me enough for touching base. There was something on her mind. I replied “Sure. But can I call you back in two minutes? I am at the gym and want to get somewhere we can speak more freely.”

I escaped to my car in Equinox’s parking lot and Facetimed Lil.  When she picked it up, I could see that despite the early hour in California she was ready to start her day. Her hair freshly blown dried and styled. Make up immaculately if not excessively done. Her surgically enhanced lips brightened by a fresh glossing of dark pink lipstick. It was not to my taste, but she was not my girlfriend. I said. Hi Lil. You look exceptionally pretty today.”

She said “Thanks Danny.  I am heading into Beverly Hills with my daughter, but we have a few minutes to speak.” She paused, a pensive look crossing her face, and said “I just got off the phone with George.”

“Oh.  what did he have to say?”

“No, I called him.” Another pause and then continued. “I called to tell him that I cannot do it anymore.” Another pause, no doubt to give me time to ask what she could not do anymore but I remained quiet, so she went on. “I cannot continue to take care of Con anymore. He is too needy. He calls me at all hours of day and night and wants me to do things for him or come over or just talk. And if it isn’t him calling, it is Eagles Rest. He has done something, or they have a question about his care. Then there are the Dr’s appointments. Every week he needs to see his oncologist or another Dr. He cannot go by himself. I have to do it. It is taking way too much of my time. My relationship with my kids is suffering. I am not giving enough attention to my business. I am exhausted 100% of the time. I am fried. I can’t go on anymore.”

I was not shocked by Lil’s declaration.  Being a caregiver is not for the faint of heart.  I had been a primary care giver to my father for years before his death and was doing the same for my mother. Dad could be exacting but was always grateful for what I was doing and often worried that I was doing too much. He did not want me to put my life on hold for him. Mom, while much more demanding, and infuriating, but she too was always grateful. Con on the other hand was Con. If you gave him an inch, he needed two more. You had to be able to step away and say no. This was not easy in the best of times, let alone now. 

I sympathetically said “I get it. Con can be a real pain in the ass. I feel for you. I really do. When I was taking care of my dad, there were days all I wanted to do was come home and dive into a bottle of bourbon. And the only responsibility I had was to Mac and Fennie. I can’t imagine what it would be like with kids. Can I help? Do you want me to come out there for a few weeks and spell you? It would be a challenge, but I think I could figure it out.”

“No Danny. You don’t get it. I am done. I am not going to do it anymore. I told George come Thanksgiving Con is someone else’s responsibility.”

I went silent. This was a woman who had declared undying love for my best friend. Who had insisted she be the lone star in my buddy’s universet to the point she had forbidden telling me and his children of his diagnosis. The person who had insisted, demanded in fact, that she be the primary, if not the solitary care giver of Con when he got sick.  Who played with sharp elbows when anybody else wanted to get involved or had a suggestion about better treatment? Did she think Con was a rescued pet who didn’t work out? Just return him to the shelter, they will find someone else to adopt him.

Not giving up, especially when things get hard. Saying what you are going to do and doing what you say. Showing up. All of those things are now a part of my DNA. Sometimes even to my detriment, especially when dealing with no win situations such as relationships have gone south and businesses that were born to fail. But I still believed in the philosophy, and I could not understand why everyone did not share it. The sad truth is most people don’t and when they revealed that side to me, it  made me think less of them.

Being the primary caregiver to both my parents was an education. It is tough, often thankless blackhole of emotional reserves and time. You are dealing with sick people who are contemplating the great void when they are not suffering the agonies of their disease. It made them, depending at the moment in time, scared, angry and self-indulgent or a combination of the above. You had to rise above all that and remember that you are the lucky one. You are not sick, infirm, or suffering. They are. Whatever the hell they are putting you through at that moment of time they will always have it worse than you. Making that emotional leap of faith and summoning whatever inner strength you need to remain calm is not in everyone’s toolkit. My brother Levi did not have or chose to develop those skills. He wanted none of it and left the caregiving to my sister and me. It angered and frustrated me. I felt he was shirking a responsibility not only to Mom and Dad and all they had done for him but to Lotte and me. I thought him selfish if not narcissistic. It took time, and a lot of soul searching to realize he did not help, at least in part, because he had no capacity for it. While his lack of help infuriated me at least he didn’t make promises that he could not keep. 

My inner voice screamed “ You said that you loved this man. You said that you would take care of him. You made him choose between his family and you and now you are saying none of that matters because it is too tough. Fuck you for wrecking this man’s life and then abandoning him when he needs you the most. You heartless bitch.” 

Lil said “Danny?” Letting loose my inner screams would not help the situation. My anger turned cold. I replied without emotion “I understand Lil. Let me get on this and I will get back to you when we have plan” and clicked off.

I reached the point in the path where I had gone awry. It was an obvious mistake. The path had split with one trail leading to the cliff and the other heading back to the hotel. When I had come to the fork in the path, I assumed that the more defined trail was the right path. As it turns out that was misguided. The path that was well traveled led me to the cliff, not a bad destination, the view was phenomenal, but not the one that would take me to where I needed to be.

When I had been told of Con’s illness, he had begged me not to tell Liam and Duke. Lilith had told him that if his children were in his life, she would not be. If I shared the news of his cancer with them, they almost certainly want to communicate with him. This would have been especially true of Duke. Not only was he just down the road in Pasadena getting his doctorate at Cal Tech but his single mindedness, exacerbated by his bi-polar disorder, would have compelled him to reach out to his dad if not to visit. I suffered with the decision about telling them. They needed to know. It was their dad. And, I knew, even with Conor’s candy coating of his prognosis, he was dying. How awful would it be if one day they received a phone call, out of the blue, saying “Your father has died from brain cancer. He has been sick for months and I have known for months and not told you at his request.” I would be denying them the chance to say goodbye to their father, to forgive and be forgiven. It would cause incalculable psychic trauma. They would also never forgive me just as I found it hard to forgive Lil and George for their silence when Con was idiagnosed.

Despite all this I decided not to tell the boys. This was Con’s story to tell. Not mine. Besides I felt if I told the boys, not only would they be shut out of Con’s life but so would I. The only people left to care for my friend would be Lilith, whom I did not like and did not trust, and George who had been eager not to be involved in Con’s care. My being present was better than having no one in his corner and he would make sure my friend

That was the right decision. Now I had to pay the price for going down that path. I had to call them and tell them that their father had terminal brain cancer, that I had known for months, had not told them, the woman who had destroyed their relationship with their dad was now abandoning him, and we had to figure out a way to get him the care that he needed. And, I had to do it right now. There was no time for me to build up the courage for this conversation. We had three weeks to make this all happen.

I sent them a text asking to speak to them via Zoom and after a minimum of back and forth we agreed to speak late that afternoon. I spent the hours between when we agreed to meet and when we started our Zoom call agonizing over how to break the news to them. How to share with them that their favorite Uncle had been deceiving them, if not outright lying to them. Not about a little thing, such as having highly embarrassing videos on the internet or being a metahuman, but about their father having terminal cancer and denying them time with him when there was not much time left.

I called Nadine, who was in Brazil for the monthShe was outraged and horrified but not surprised by Lil’s decision. She said in her beautiful Brazilian Portuguese accent “You know my darling; I have always thought she was piranha. (Not meaning the fish but what Brazilian’s call vulgar women and prostitutes) she has no use for him any longer, so she throws him away.” She suggested that I be direct with my nephews. Give them the news about their father’s illness as straight and as matter of fact as I could. No hedging. Not bullshit. Be honest about why you had not shared the news with them sooner and apologize for making that decision. If it was a mistake, you take full responsibility, but you made the best decision you could make at the time. 

Three weeks later, we were pulling into Horizons. Liam and Duke had been incredibly angry. But thankfully not at me. They reserved most of their fury for Lil. While I had not shared the news about their old man’s illness and should have, they could move past as I had never stopped showing up for them and they were both smart enough to understand that I had been caught between a rock and a hard place. Lil though, had purposefully driven a wedge between them and their dad, but when the going got tough she got going. How do you abandon a person when you need them the most? But they never thought much of her to begin with, so it was just another brick in the wall of hatred they had built for her.

But Lil was not the only person they directed their anger at. Their Uncle George shared the podium with her. He had enabled the whole situation. He had given Lil medical power of attorney without hesitation. He hadn’t even considered taking it on himself or consulting with his nephews. He was not looking for Con’s best interest. He was thinking about himself. Taking care of Con was a burden he wanted no part of. He was so frightened he would be saddled with the care of his brother that he was willing to give it to anyone. Even a woman he had never met. The fact he had not even bothered to call them to discuss it and had bent to Lil’s will and not even called them to discuss it was an unforgiveable sin.

Part of what fueled their anger towards George and Lil was the disease that was in the process of killing their father. If we are fortunate enough to have parents who cherish and nourish us enough, we believe that they will always be there for us. It makes us feel safe. If they are around, nothing bad can happen to us. That does not mean we cannot be angry or frustrated with them. It does not mean we don’t want to have anything to do with them for a while or think them irrevocable and intractable idiots.  But as long as they are around, we have a safety net as we do our highwire act of living. Losing that, or the knowledge you soon will, strikes a primal fear that goes soul deep.

It was this anger that powered the day. Duke and Liam had their reasons for being upset with Con. He had after all abandoned them for this “piranha.” But the fear of losing him, without forgiveness or a goodbye was greater than the anger he had abandoned him.

It was quickly decided that Con staying at Eagle’s Rest was untenable. Not only would it leave him near Lilith, but Duke did not have the bandwidth to care for his father. His doctoral studies ate up a huge amount of time. Much of the rest was take up with his side gig, tutoring high school students in math and science which paid his bill. He was also a bi-polar, alcoholic. Those diseases meant he could not be counted on to provide the care and companionship Con required. This could have been contentious but thankfully it was not. Duke, who seemed sharp and not manic, knew his limitations, and volunteered that making him the primary care giver of his dad would be in no one’s best interest. Liam, who had a stable home life, a good job would have to be the primary care giver. But Liam lived in Charlotte which presented its own set of problems including transporting Con across country, finding a facility for him to live in and new physicians to treat his glioblastoma. All within Lil’s three-week timeline.

I took on the transportation problem. I was, at the time, Executive Platinum on American Airlines, with over three million miles flown. I had a bunch of miles banked and knew how to manipulate the system enough that our flight across country would be as hassle free as possible. I suggest that we all fly first class. This was not just for comfort.  Con was altered. He had a hard time getting around. He wore an adult diaper as his continence could not always be counted on. Finally, first class had a two-by-two configuration as opposed to a three by three in the back of the airplane. This meant we wouldn’t subject any other person if Con had a sudden outburst because he was confused or upset to be leaving Lil and California. I would use miles to upgrade Con and myself. Liam would pay for Con’s ticket and his own.

The next challenge was the when. We had a deadline, but we all had our own schedule. Once we determined when we could get there, we needed to figure out how many days it would take on the ground to get everything accomplished. It was more than just picking Con up and putting him on the plane. He had things in storage that needed to be sorted through and either tossed or distributed and shipped. Appointments needed to be made with all of Con’s various physicians. Not only did we need his medical records but Liam, as the primary caregiver, needed to have a full understanding of his father’s condition. The biggest challenge to that was getting their names and contact information from Lil. The boys had no desire to talk to her. For that matter, neither did I. How do you abandon a person you love when they needed you the most? Time had only hardened my feelings on that front. But as I was the only one of us who had a relationship with her, I volunteered to speak with her. Once we had all of that information, Liam could arrange appointments and we could schedule our appointments around that information.

We arrived in California on the night of Wednesday October 23. Thursday would be spent with Dr’s visits. Friday we would take an early morning flight to Charlotte and get him installed in his new facility. We thought we had things all sewed up. Of course, we didn’t. What was it that Mike Tyson said? Every plan is perfect until you get punched in the nose. We were hit with both a jab and a right cross that came out of nowhere.

The jab came from George. He held Con’s power of attorney not just for medical but for also for all of his financial affairs.  An attorney friend of Liam had suggested that George sign a release giving up his rights and abilities under the current power of attorney. It was a belt and suspenders sort of thing as a new power of attorney would automatically invalidate the previous one but better to stop a disagreement before it happens. It was especially important considering Con’s mental state. It could easily be argued that a person who had some of his brain removed was not medically competent to sign a new power. The boys asked me to set up a meeting with George to discuss the legal issues and discuss Con’s finances. They needed to know how they were going to pay for Con’s care.

I thought this would be simple. I will arrange the meeting. We would all have a kumbaya moment and we would move on. Needless to say, it did not go as planned. It started off pleasantly. Liam and Duke were polite to their blood uncle who they had only met on a handful of occasions. They explained why they wanted to have the previous powers legally rescinded, and George readily agreed. Things went south when they began to discuss Con’s finances. George was evasive. He had few answers to their questions. It turns out while he was only nominally in charge of his brother’s finances, he had almost nothing to do with them. Lilith was handling all that. He suggested we talk to her.

This struck a raw nerve with the boys. Not only was there no love lost for her because of the wedding but they could not understand how their Uncle George could just turn over his brother’s finances to someone he had never met. When Duke and then Liam aggressively questioned him on not supervising his brain damaged and often confused brother’s finances the conversation took an ugly turn. Much of this was Duke’s fault. His disease and intellect combined to hurl insults and that were cutting and spot on in terms of accuracy. Had I been in George’s position I would have felt foolish, embarrassed, and disrespected. After a few minutes of Duke’s abuse, with Liam adding his two cents, he told the boys that they were “ungrateful little shits,” “He understood exactly why Lilith thought they were “fucktards”, and he was “ashamed to be their uncle” and hung up the phone on them.

I met George in the city for coffee a few days later. I wanted to see if I could patch up the differences between him and his nephews. Considering Conor’s condition, I did not think they should be fighting. I hoped that I could get him to understand that if he had been in a similar situation, cut out of their father’s life by a woman they did not know, then finding out that he had terminal cancer and they had not been told for months by this woman and uncle, he too would be wearing his emotions on his sleeve. That it might make him say things that were pointed, impolitic, rude, and obnoxious. He should forgive them. He did not. He thought the disrespect shown to him was beyond forgiveness. What I wanted to say to him that his willingness to turn over all responsibility of his brother’s care to a stranger, not reaching out to his nephews or me and letting us know of Con’s cancer because Lil had decreed was beyond forgiveness. It was wrong on every conceivable level. I didn’t. Burning bridges with him would only make things worse. Besides, I needed him to sign the revocations to Conor’s power of attorney. When  he did and we parted without him ever knowing what contempt I had for him.

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.