Goodbye for Now, Sunny

Sunny left us yesterday after a short battle with a very aggressive T-Cell Lymphoma.  She had just turned 3.  We adopted her as a puppy when she was released to a shelter with bowed legs that made her "unwanted" in some's eyes.

A Vet from Indy, where Barkley got his care for years, had moved to the Chicago area as her husband got a position with a big hospital here as a doctor.   She took care of Lorelei and Abby Lab at home at the end for us and did the same for Sunny.  In a moment that reminded me that even with this pain, God's watching over me - she told me her husband's new job is at one of the biggest hospitals in Chicago, one known world-wide for it's transplant services.

He's on my Transplant team.

In Memory

Sunny D. Lab

May 11, 2023 - July 29, 2026

Words from my husband:

"Back when we hadn't had her very long, I was just getting her past the overstimulation phase so I could walk her all the way to the tracks and back.  On one of these trips, I ran across a neighbor from the next block.  He and I had spoken before when Lorelei was still happily begging for pets up and down the street.  He liked dogs; he used to have great Danes, and he had fitted his little shoebox SUV with a bulldog hood ornament from a Mack truck.  

That day he was walking with his wife.  They stopped and waited patiently for Sunny to go through the cautious sniffing phase.  After a few minutes Sunny decided they were her new best friends and was happily getting pets and doing little jumps when she wanted more attention.  The wife was particularly enthralled with Sunny and praised her, saying she loved how, "She looks you right in the eye!"  After more pets and wags we went on our way.

You wouldn't notice it from a distance, but if you watched carefully, you could tell the lady was a bit frail.  It was several months later when I saw them both again.  They were going up the steps to their bungalow and she was leaning heavily on her husband.  They apologized for not being able to stop and pet Sunny, but I told them Sunny was just happy to see her friends and she wagged and gave a little woof.

Back in the spring I bumped into the husband on the street.  He stopped me to let me know that his wife had passed.  He didn't say what the illness was, but it had been a long journey.  He said that she had her favorite comfortable chair next to the front window of the house and that she would always smile and remark when she saw Sunny on the street.  It was always a moment of happiness for her.

That's how I would like to remember Sunny the most.  The dog who always brought a smile to a neighbor's face in her dying days."

Smoke on the Water

They showed up on the lake one night, visible in the morning, silent in the mist, their shapes nothing at all like what we'd seen before on this small body of water.  A few miles away was a large and swiftly flowing river, bringing with it goods from afar.  But this little lake was what we, as children, knew.  The water had seen canoes, and the occasional raft kids made out of a sheet of plywood and inner tubes, but these little paddle wheel boats were something new.

Dad, of course, wants to go for a ride on one, there at that park at the end of our block where he ran three miles every day after work. I didn’t want to go but I loved my dad.  He and Mom adopted my brother and me late in life and he went out of his way to make life normal, now that Mom had cancer.

So, I went with him, like most teenagers, secretly hoping that invisibility was an option but it was not to be. It was Fall, wood smoke from burning leaves drifts out over the little man-made lake in the city park, as people took advantage of the day to be out on the bike paths and walking trails. To make matters worse, he was waving at EVERYONE including other kids my age (invisibility now!) I pretended to be looking up at the birds in the trees, hoping the kids wouldn't notice me, but they did and pointed (forget invisibility, let's go for obliterating lightning bolt).  The ride couldn't end soon enough for me.

Had I been acting less like a teenager I would have noticed the stillness of the water before us, our legs propelling us forward as if in flight. I would have noticed how people reacted to my father, the love, and respect he got even as he gave it out.  I would have noticed  how he looked with an owner's eye upon the water passing behind us like spent memory, the peace of the water ahead, at the simple of joy of muscle and motion powering past those things that weighed us down, disappearing in the joy of a simple evening with his child, like smoke on the water.

We were both quiet on the walk home, me because I wanted to be anywhere else, Dad for reasons I didn't understand quite yet. When we got back to the house, Mom was in bed, tears on her face.  I'd not seen her cry before and I don't think she expected me to, our arriving home early.  The tears encompassed more than pity or pain but rather that inarticulate recognition and despair of that cancer that blazed onto her inescapable earth, its fire, her ashes. I closed the door as he sat down next to her, the whisper of my bare feet on the floor, the only sound I could make

Years passed; the paddle boats disappeared as quietly as they came, with no mention of their passing.

Now, a lifetime later, I am the only family member remaining. As I leave to run an errand, I realize that little has changed, but for me. Dad remained the same man he was when I was a teen and so embarrassed to hang out with him, just as his home remained the same, but for the ghosts that remained.

But I have changed, as I realize that his wishing to watch closely and guide, was not based on control.  Rather, it was his realizing that I was still light in the burden of the years, not yet possessing the weight of the wisdom that keeps one surefooted on an inescapable path.  It was pushing me past the mundane and the limiting, if only briefly, out of that shelter we make for ourselves in times of self-doubt or danger, hiding underneath it as if it's some armor we don without knowing the full extent of what it's protecting us from.

It was his simply wanting me to know joy, while he spent more time with me, even as time ticked its final moments for his first great love.

In those last days before he passed at age 101, I entered the house and he woke, I asked him if he wanted to go for a drive.  He did, as always, hoping for a stop at Five Guys, but we don't go our usual route.  We drive on down to the lake where the paddle boats were docked long ago, walking carefully, he with his cane, down to a bench where we can see the water.

I looked at him and said, “do you remember those paddle boats?” and he hugged me and we laughed.  From the trees the chirps of birds erupted into music, the steady staccato of their sound ticking down the hours of one more precious evening with Dad.

On Brothers, Briquettes, and Barbecue.

The picture was in the local newspaper.  My brother had won a fancy barbecue in a contest to encourage kids to open a savings account at the local Credit Union.  They came to take a picture of him in his little chef hat, transferring a "baked potato" wrapped in foil with his official barbecue tongs to a little paper plate I was holding onto for dear life. In actuality, he wasn't old enough to grill by himself and it was spitting rain, the potato was raw, stone cold from the pantry. But the photo turned out great and I managed to look as happy and surprised as I think my brother truly was. What I remember most was his seriousness in holding those tongs, just like Dad, in his pride in wearing that hat. It radiated off of him, despite the cold, the wet, and the really lousy potato.

That old blue barbecue grill soon made its place at home and many a summer evening was spent around it. There was just something about cooking out. Whether it was perfect, burnt, or dried out, it was just good, because it was made on the grill. It was made by Dad and we got to eat it outside if we wanted. I guess it was that "willing suspension of disbelief" that you have as a child, that no matter what happens, your Dad will somehow ensure the end result is just fine, that dinner will be saved from the flame, and all would be well in your world.

How well you remember those days, when the air is burning hot, the whiff of lighter fluid in the air, the dark nuggets of briquettes, overhead a badminton bird flying over, the only sign of motion in the still summer air. Laughter as your brothers and cousins play. Shadows on the grass as you ran and played under branches from which smoke drifted like a soft touch. Shadows that got to those trees before you did, then faltered, so you could stomp them into the grass under your bare feet. Summer has just one date when you're a kid and that's the first day after school lets out when the barbecue is officially fired up by the man of the house.
But there was more than smoke in the air that first night of summer, something I was too young to understand, but I could sense. There was a war, and one of the boys in our extended family was going. A country I had never heard of. I didn't understand the details. I only sensed those urgent conversations in the kitchen among the adults as they prepared the food for the fire.

I knew my Dad had been to war and that he came home safe. Yet why were the women so worried? But I had watched enough reruns of Combat and old John Wayne movies to know more than I should. What I didn't know, I asked, though I did not get the answers I sought. Sometimes you have to work out your own answers, taking a small piece of the puzzle and turning it and turning it, til you see where it fits.

Although it was 20 years before I learned the true scientific methods of investigation, I read, I gathered up every little newspaper clipping I saw, and I watched the news surreptitiously out of my eye while playing with my toys. When a war movie was on TV, I'd watch the adults' faces out of the corner of my eye to see if something showed through, fear, worry, skepticism, waiting for a "that's not the way it was, it wasn't that dangerous, see, I came home!" But no one said anything. All that was in the room was the sound of gunfire and rockets on the TV, and a clock ticking in a long undiminished parade of time we pretended not to hear.

All we could do was continue on with our family traditions, our faith. The barbecue was there in rain, cold, and wind, on nights when we quietly gathered in the house around the table for meatloaf or pot roast. Nights when I'd politely ask to be excused as soon as I was done, so I could go back outside, to where I wanted to be, despite the rain, a mist that had dampened that night's attempt to cook out.

As the rain let up, I'd walk on down the back alleyway, to a neighbor's little pond.  There I'd stop to stare down into the water, its surface as placid as a priest's face,  hearing all my fears and sins, its surface still and nonjudgmental, a watery veil laid over the mystery of my distress. I looked down where I could see almost to the bottom, the last rays of sunlight playing like orange fire on the surface. There on the surface, a leaf. After a long time in the water, the tissues of the leaf decay, leaving only the fiber, swirling in the surface like soft bones, light from the last of the day's sunlight playing on them like a flame.
Another summer passed, the badminton set forgotten for lawn darts, one less place at one family table. And with my growing, came understanding. I think we spent so many nights out at the picnic table thinking that if we were out back and someone in uniform we didn't know came to the front door, we would not have to answer it. For my Dad and my Uncles had all served in the Great War, and they knew too well that age and time do little to remedy the pain of knowing.

For that night we had the barbecue, a communion of family shared with bread and lighter fluid. I would sit in quiet, as we all would, in prayer, for the bacon-wrapped salmon, for unintentionally extra crispy beef, for extra pickles, for another day of safety for those we loved. As we said Grace, I turned towards the coals, looking deep and hard so they wouldn't see a tear, watching the blackness turning to red and light and fire.

Then my Dad would look at me, put his hand under my chin and say "It's going to be OK, we have hamburgers that I didn't burn." I would nod, knowing what he was trying to say, as he watched his children realize that life wasn't all sunlight and playtime, that it also had another side, one of approaching darkness on which faint ashes of light would only appear at the perimeter. But his words made me feel better. My brother was my friend and playmate, but my Dad was my protector, and I found comfort in that.

There in that simple meal, in those rituals we could maintain, there was solace. We couldn't change the outcome of what was happening worlds away but we could hold on to each other, in prayer, in squabbles over the last cheese slice. We couldn't change fate, but we could fight with it, in the form of a cantankerous piece of controlled fire, with tools, tongs and curses, and sweat. We could at least conquer the grill and put dinner on the table. Dinner together as family.
My cousin came home from overseas safe and sound and summers went back to simple evenings of fireflies and lighter fluid.  But times were changing, as they say. My brother, growing like a weed, took more responsibility for helping around the house, especially as Mom was fighting cancer again. The war was over, the one where hundreds of young men, with their hopes and dreams, and aspirations, were released by that invisible hand of honor to come home to their loved ones.  But at our home, the war was still on, raging there behind the lines around my mother's eyes.

I wondered what happened to that old blue barbecue. I can't recall. But I do so well remember the night so many years ago that Dad handed my brother the lighter fluid, the big tongs, and the meat patties, ready for grilling, all by himself. I can picture him there, as if it was today, under that dark sky with such bright stars, whose distant glitter lured one's gaze into the expanse of immense darkness. And yet the light from our table illuminated his boyish face, his countenance claiming the alliance with those things that I had only trusted my Father to possess, the child in him fading away, to reveal the growing man. My brother simply nodded and took his place, his smile just visible in the fading swirl of spinning fire, the glow that for a moment, drives the darkness away. - Brigid