TKWLI
I press play in the middle of the iPhone voice recording taken on that swampy summer afternoon, and that scene, emblazoned in my brain, re-enacts itself. I was twenty-three years old and feeling far too young. My sweaty thighs suctioned to the peeling black pleather couch. Swaddled in blankets, my dad’s skeletal frame occupied the oversized armchair to my left. My older brother Conor sat to my right.
“It’s called To Know What Love Is. That’s the story I wanted to write,” my dad said languidly and laboriously, his words fighting the oxygen machine to be heard. “I have bins of notes and drafts around,” he added, pointing to a plastic bin labeled “TKWLI” nestled in the corner of the room. “You’re welcome to look through them.”
I traversed the room, navigating my way around the haphazard stacks of unopened medical bills, spiral notebooks, printed papers, New Yorker magazines, and post-it noted books—only a small fraction of the things he would soon leave behind. I bit my lip to keep the questions inside. What will we do with it all when he’s gone? What will I do with myself?
I brought the bin back to the couch, peeling off the black plastic lid to find papers peeking out of multi-colored file folders. Grabbing a thick, green folder, Conor took out the soft-covered notebook tucked inside. Out loud, he read my dad’s messy scrawl: “TKWLI: re-begun 11/4/92.” Conor looked up. “You must have re-started this right after I was born.”
“Any number of times,” my dad responded, the syllables dragging and cracking in the recording. “My whole consideration with writing a book and finishing it was [indistinct words]…but I struggled so much. But life intervened.”
I press rewind again and again and again, the cold iPhone speaker pressed tightly against my ear. I can only make out the same muffled murmurs: But I struggled so much. But life intervened.
***
Pages stacked on pages, written and re-written; drafts marked in red pen, drafts marked in black pen; notes on napkins and notes on notebook paper. This was what I found as I leafed through the file folders while on my solo hospice duty later that day. I paused on a printed page with the title “TKWLI 2001 notes” followed by bolded words, each with their own line of space:
“Incompleteness
Death
Rebirth
This is what I’m thinking about as I review the story events again.”
A chill shivered up my spine as I juxtaposed these words, written eighteen years ago, to the current moment. I rewound the week in my head, recordings etched in memory and captured in sound.
Six days ago: “The tumor in the colon has shown a 20% reduction since starting the chemo,” said Dr. Young, my dad’s oncologist, in his typical monotone, after reviewing the most recent CAT scan.
Four days ago: “There’s a fine line between offering treatments and then doing things which, in some ways, are torturing you, with the understanding that it’s not going to change the outcome. It’s not going to get you better,” said a blond-haired, unfamiliar, tired-looking woman in a white lab coat. “There’s no better way to put it. You’re dying,” she stated matter-of-factly, uttering the sentences that had clearly become commonplace for her—just another day at the office for an ICU doctor.
Two days ago: the silence as I searched and failed to find words while wheeling my dad out of the hospital for the final time.
I came back to the present. I looked down at the stack of documents spanning decades.
An unfinished story, an inalterable incompleteness.
I looked over at my dad’s fragile body, days from death’s door. Mouth ajar, nose plugged with plastic tubes, cheekbones protruding.
Where does the rebirth come in?
***
Wide awake, three months before becoming a de facto hospice nurse, I felt my sweat-drenched back against the hard twin bed mattress in my dad’s apartment. I listened attentively for any sounds that could signal the start of an impending disaster. I heard a car’s engine in the parking lot, running alongside my own racing heart.
When I closed my eyes to sleep, flashes of memories played like a Superbowl commercial on repeat. Eyes cringing in pain; a leg shaking while vomiting; a figure shivering under blankets; a head laid in hands as if the neck no longer had the energy to hold it upright. It had been less than three months since my dad was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, and yet each day since carried the weight of a decade. I was afraid to blink, to have the tape of my mind go black. To forget any moment that could be the last.
Agitation slithered like a snake beneath my skin, jolting me out of bed and sending me pacing around the room. I needed to get the thoughts, the images out of me. I ruffled through the desk to grab the object I knew was sitting there: the brown paper journal my dad had bought me back in high school, stamped with the red words “Life is short. Record it” on the front. I opened the cover to reveal the blank white page I had avoided for six years, afraid to mar it with my messy, meaningless ramblings. Purple gel pen in hand, I began.
***
Two and a half months after watching my dad take his last breath, I turned the key to his apartment door for the final time. I was met with a whiff of Clorox. I stepped onto the bare hardwood floor, remembering the red Persian rug that was once there. I looked over into the living room where the couch and the armchair and the stacks of paper used to sit. I grabbed the last few plastic bins of belongings stacked in the blank, white hallway. I looked back before shutting the door. How quickly the histories that shape us can be sanitized, thrust aside, hidden from view.
I walked to my car, weighed down by boxes. I drove the familiar route to Life Storage, the stone of my lips almost cracking into a smile from the irony of that name. I pulled up to the garage-like unit, thrust open the gray metallic door, and Tetrised the remaining items into the cold concrete.
I slammed the door shut with a clink. For a brief moment, metal scraped on metal as I wrestled with the padlock. Then, silence.
***
“When are you going to deal with all that stuff?” My mom asked over the phone as I sat in my car in the Movement climbing gym parking lot, 1774 miles away—a distance I had hoped would keep the past from following me. In the months after my dad died, I scoured the piles of possessions left behind in his empty apartment. A handwritten note, a highlighted New Yorker article, a heap of his poems. Thread by thread, each item unraveled me. With no end in sight, the threads tied themselves together like a noose around my neck. For the sake of my own life, I stopped reading. I stuffed what remained in boxes. I piled them high behind locked doors. I started a new chapter in a new city. I learned to climb. If I couldn’t let go of the past, I could at least get strong enough to carry the added weight of holding it inside. I turned myself into a container for grief—a plastic, pristine exterior that masked the mess inside.
“Can you at least acknowledge me?” My mom asked, irritated. “It’s been two and a half years and I want my house back.”
“I hear you, I just…don’t have an answer,” I said quietly, my eyes and my body sinking downward, pleading for disappearance. When my mom had learned that my brother and I were paying $168 a month to Life Storage, she offered to have the items temporarily moved to an empty space in her house.
“I mean we were divorced for ten years! My friend said I should just get rid of it…but I won’t do that to you,” she added.
“Don’t get rid of it!” I responded rapidly, loudly, emphatically. “I’ll fly back.”
***
I open the storage room door and am greeted with a rush of cold air. I navigate my way to the back, past the stacked cardboard boxes of books collapsing from their own weight. I grab a dusty plastic bin and bring it into the bedroom. I take out a typewritten letter peeking out of a green file folder. I read.
“I had the ambition to write from an early age. At a very early age, I sensed the process of thought that went into the stories I heard and the stories I read in books. When I lost who I was, I still held the ambition, but I became confused in what I wanted to write because I did not know who I was in relation to it. Now I know, and how can I explain a joy and strength that fills me without civil war taking place?”
I pause. I picture my dad’s caffeinated, coffee-colored eyes lit up with exuberance—mirrors of my own, lighthouses that have been gone for years. Dad, what do I do with it all? I keep reading.
“I have found in my own heart the strength to take a first step towards being my true self. And who is this person I am? I am someone with a story, too. For my own piece of mind, and for honesty’s sake, I’ve got to write it down. I can’t write of others, and the stories that define them, and leave mine out.” I stare at the plastic bin. A world of words. Stories stuck in boxes.
I read. I press play on the recordings. I write.
In addition to being a writer and former caregiver, Caleigh Cassidy is currently a graduate student at the University of Colorado Denver pursuing their MA in clinical mental health counseling. Their writing has been published in Still Point Arts Quarterly and Stigma and Health.
