Seven years ago this minute...

Tony Gross was alive. It was at about this time I received a phone call telling me that the doctors at the hospital wanted to speak to me an I needed to come home. Lynnette and I were having a latte at Simone's pursuant to observing kindergarten classes (pursuant to beginning the writing of early-childhood-level curricula). Going home, I called the number at the hospital and was put in touch with a young resident whose message was basically that they felt it was time to shut off the O2 and perhaps bring Tony home. I thought that was a great idea, for even though he had been completely O2 dependent for about ten days, i knew what a fighter he was and thought that perhaps we could have Da at home for a while before he died.

When i arrived at the hospital, i was met by Dr. Slater, Tony's oncologist. He (who honestly, has the coolest collection of ties known to man) pointed vaguely at an xray film up on the wall and said, "Tony's lungs are destroyed. There's no more we can do." (Indeed this had been the case since he had gone into deep shock just before a transfusion, but the assembled multitude of doctors thought they should try. I had gone dutifully twice or three times daily for about 10 days, really having no clue as to what the "medicalese" spoken in my hearing meant and spending evenings there. I put up a sort of blog about Tony that described the reasons he was no ordinary patient and thanking the staff for compassionate care. He had gone from lucid to seeing things to O2 to on and IV, O2, IV nutrition and unable to speak...a cautionary tale for those who think their Living Will stipulates no extreme measures. He wasn't intubated, for that is "extreme" but he was O2 masked and was given a PIC for food after a while, and the concomitant insulin...not considered extreme.)

Dr. Slater gave me the look like, "You don't get it, do you?" and indeed i didn't. My response was, "Well, this is Tony we're talking about here. You never know what he will do!"
I thought Tony would last for a few days, and i sat down ready to sit there for hours on end and hold his hand through the bars on the side of the bed (he had, only three days earlier, decided he wanted to go home--it was a Sunday afternoon--and had taken off his mask, tried to remove the bladder cath and get out of bed. He was a little amazed at how hooked up he was (arm for morphine and IV, leg for PIC) even though the mask was off. He didn't quite sit up but his determination was something to see. I stepped into the hall, told a nurse what he wanted and the troops descended, upping the morphine, telling him there was no doc on duty to release him, and putting up the rails...you would never want someone to actually get up and go away! too messy! But i still wonder if i should have made them do what he wanted. How?)

So i sat, holding his hand. He never opened his eyes; his hands were drawn into a clawlike position and just once, he sort of clawed at his chest a little. At the last, i imagined the final ascent up to the Muir hut on top of Whitney and described the toughness of the trail. As i talked, he quit breathing but i said, "Come on, you're almost there!" and he started up again, drawn by that last vision, that last force of will from a guy who lived a lot on force of will instead of comfort. He breathed a few more minutes while i described the glacier, the trees, the rock, and at Muir hut, "Look! There's your dad! There's Gordon--and Jesus!" the words fell out of my mouth. I have no idea where they came from even now. He was in their arms and what happened here didn't matter now. He was gone at 1:05 PM, a kind of an echo of my old midwifing job: i became the official timer for the certification process.

I sat numbly for a couple of minutes, waiting to see if just maybe he would breathe again. But no. He was gone. Lungs solid. Everything stopped. I went over to the sink and got his teeth, the teeth he swore to me I'd never see him without. I rinsed them and put them into his dry, dry mouth, which now hung open a little. I thought of the Matthew Brady photographs i pored over as an 8th grader of Devil's Den at Gettysburg, young men lying dead and slackmouthed just like Tony now looked: golden, flat almost sepia toned. Two-dimensional and still.

I removed his wedding ring to give to Levi, the mexican silver ring i'd bought to replace the one he'd somehow lost (along with a note saying that i would marry him all over again, given the choice). I finally stepped out into the hall and said, "I think he's gone."
Nurses once again descended and pulled the curtain around the bed and said, "We'll leave you two alone." Why? What could we possibly have to talk about now? But i sat obediently for awhile, wondering what nurses were thinking to give people privacy with a corpse.

I wasn't prepared for any of this, tho we had known for five years that tony would be checking out sooner than later. Nor was i prepared for the visit to the funeral home to sign papers, and then a few days later, to pick up a detergent-box-sized metal container of ashes. Tony had done all of this in advance, me signing and sending checks to the company until it was all paid for. But i had no idea i'd end up with what Tony would have called "ten pounds of soil adamant." It was not easy to scatter. It's dried human, not firewood ash. Add water and you'd get a slurry of human being! It's sticky. I talked to it during the five weeks of so between his death and the memorial we had up at Horseshoe Meadow (starting point for the backcountry to Whitney trip Tony took with Jon). I had to put it in a drawer to keep from talking to it. It was just too weird. Everything was weird.

The trouble with all of this weirdness is that there is no escape from it. You want to run screaming but you are rooted to the life you are in, to the spot you are standing. There is no escape. You can only walk through it. Like the proverbial bombed-out building, you seem to be just fine on the outside and generally no one can see that you have been completely blasted out.
Seven years later and it still makes me cry.

But it would be wrong for this to be about me, because Tony is the one who moved on at about an hour from now. His favorite song? "I Was Born Under a Wanderin' Star" from Paint Your Wagon. "Wheels are made for rollin', mules are made to pack, I never saw a sight that didn't look better lookin' back..." He used to say, "The only thing better than having an adventure is planning the next one!"

He was born to a very young, very poor couple; Gordon had a degree in agriculture from Ohio State but he wasn't using the degree and wasn't making much money. Tony's first memory was of walking through the snow in the dark, going to the library behind his mother (which probably was because the library was heated and Kritzer's Bakery, below their flat, didn't fire up the ovens until the wee hours...so this was the warmest place for a poor young woman and her little boy).

This sort of creative poverty made Tony an imaginative, cheerful person who rarely complained about anything. He was nearly 10 before he had his own furniture...which he had made from orange crates (the wooden kind). The furniture was in the corner of the dining room; they had never had but one bedroom, and he'd slept on a cot in the hallway for most of his young life. But now, the luxury! He had his own desk, his own seat (another orange crate) and could keep his cot there. It fostered a lifetime of putting his initials on things that belonged to him: he wasn't being selfish, he was simply tickled that he had a new book or backpack and was a little afraid it would be lost, absorbed into the vastness.

When the Oak Ridge project created work for Gordon through Helen's sister's husband, (he was a glassblower by hobby and his brother in law was part of the infant nuclear research which needed blown-glass items), Gordon was employed at a higher level of pay and the family moved not much later from Cleveland to Oakland, CA. Tony kgot to know every luminary of nuclear research at Berkeley Laboratories, for he was a guest at their holiday parties and a visitor to their workplaces. His dad was not only capable but also intuitive and probably brilliant. Tony himself managed to get several degrees over his adult life, for he believed that if you stopped learning, you were cheating yourself and everyone else. Forest Ecology, Urban Land Use Planning, he read and wrote and researched and wrote and read some more.

I could go on much longer, but let this be said: He was a man who never knew a stranger, who was generous and adventurous and lived three times the life that most live. Besided the nations' youngest Eagle Scout on the day he was pinned, he also was a banker, a fireman, a park ranger and a Peace Corps Volunteer. He also used to point out that "If you want to be immortal, plant a tree." He planted many, from the highways of Northern California (from his Finestkind Nursery) to the slopes of the Guatemalan Altiplano to the Sierras (at SEKI, he oversaw many plantings and on his last Thanksgiving visit there, helped to plant "Gross Grove"). He lives on, through gifts scattered as widely and generously as the seedlings he sowed.