Remembering Robert

Robert and Karen Bradley when they married (in Mt. Dora) in 2006.

Our neighbor Robert Bradley died last Saturday of esophageal cancer. He was 51 years old. He and his wife Karen had bought the house next to ours four years ago and made the commute up from their main residence in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea every three weeks or so until Robert got sick. They married in that house -- the second for them both – in a ceremony full of the maturer hope to go about love better and more fully.

They considered our little town of Mount Dora a part of Georgia, far from the hectic lunacies of overdeveloped South Florida; they loved to sit out in their back yard at night drinking wine together and listening to soft jazz, talking softly beneath stars you can't see in the mega-burbs. That house was their love-nest and they had planned to retire here.

I tell his story here because I have learned, through the grief-work which is Remembering Timm, that what we don't recall is quickly lost, subsumed in the vague darkness of oblivion. Robert was a good guy, like Timm, and he surely deserves a florid footnote here.

Robert in one of the CARTs he raced.

Karen was even game enough to be induced, by Robert, to try her own hand at CART racing. She shocked Robert and all of his buddies to fling around the track faster than anyone.

Robert was a car guy; actually, he loved anything with engines. He had been a pilot for years at a large municipal airport owned by his family. At the time of his death he was employed as head of maintenance for a private jetport. He had a boat and a big SUV and several race cars, which in better days he drove at tracks where enthusiasts got their moment under the lights, tracks like Orlando Speedworld.

It was one night when he and Karen were driving back to Ft. Lauderdale from a race several years ago there that they were rear-ended by a drunk coming at them like a bat out of hell, wrecking the race car and trailer and flipping their SUV into the weeds. Luckly they were strapped in and suffered the sort of injuries which only slightly maim-whiplash, neck and shoulder injuries. Had their dogs been with them in the car that night Scoobie and Auggie-Robert's babies-would have been killed. The drunk almost got away, calling a friend from the wreckage on his cell phone, but the state cop got there first.

As is the case with many crashes caused by drunk drivers, the victims suffer worst. The drunk got a slap on the wrist, a little jail time and was set free; he had no license to be stripped of, and there's little anyone can do from keeping him from getting behind the wheel again to drive drunk. For Karen and Robert, they entered the hell of an overburdened legal system with little power to adjudicate, battles with their insurance company (since they were the only ones insured, their own company fought over every dime needed for their care) and endless visits to the doctor as Robert had several shoulder operations and endless headaches.

Robert's ordeal following that accident was much like Timm's twenty years ago when he was almost killed by a reckless driver, thrown from the back of the VW bug he had thumbed a ride in. Timm's life was altered deeply by his accident, sending him down such a difficult road. His brain was injured, his hearing was severed in one ear, he had seizures and double vision and attention problems. Like Robert, he didn't die in the accident but instead became a living crucifix of it, transfixed by nails which may have faded in memory but remained fast to the life he had left.

It was on the 71st doctor visit in two years that the esophogeal cancel was discovered in Robert, beginning the next and final harrowing journey for he and Karen. He was given a 30 percent chance of recovery and entered into a regimen of chemotherapy and radiation treatments so harsh he spent the weeks between treatments in bed or on the toilet. He lost 40 pounds and took on that ashen grey look of the doomed. Robert remained upbeat though, clinging to the life that he had. On one visit they rented a boat and the four of us went out onto the chain of lakes outside of town, the day bright and breezy and warm for November, driving into canals between the lakes which were truly amazing relics of old Florida, where ancient trailer parks wedged up against pristine cypresses.

Lousy picture, but there we all are on that boat excursion last fall, Robert, me, Beth, and Karen.

Robert was adamant about his chances of beating this thing. After months of devastating chemo he decided to change course and enter a whole-foods program that had shown amazing results in reversing cancer. He passed on a PET scan in January, believing that whatever bad results were there could be reversed by the alternate therapy. Had he gotten that scan he would have seen how little time he truly had left.

Karen and Robert drove up to Atlanta to enter the whole-foods clinic in February, but by the time they got there his throat had almost completely closed up from the tumor, and from there he faded fast. A doctor inserted a stent in his throat, giving him hope to take the whole-foods treatment, but a PET scan showed the cancer had gotten everywhere in his body, all through his esophagus, his bones, his lungs. He was down to 130 pounds. They headed back to Ft. Lauderdale; he almost died in Ocala then rallied. The next morning-yesterday--back at their house in Lauderdale he died in Karen's arms.

* * *

Robert was a good guy, a big kid really who loved his toys. He was an engine guy, a fast car guy. Whenever he went to buy a tool (which he did all the time) he bought two. He had the soul of racing in his heart, the sound of the oval ran loud through his veins. Though nothing now remains of that.

My wife and I will miss Robert, and our hearts go out to Karen who's endured such a long, wrong nightmare. There are some things in this life which have no explanation; there may have been ascertainable causes for Robert's cancer -- a family history of cancer, long exposure to some chemicals through his work as a pilot and mechanic -- but such facts sum poorly against his good nature, his joy in living. We knew Robert only peripherally, a neighbor whom we had spent small time with, enough to grasp the pathos of the story.

We feel deeply for Karen, because we know that the road of grief for her will be deep and long. Robert's death affects us deeply for many reasons. He was young by most accounts--my age-certainly due much more life than he got. We were neighbor to all of the stages of his final tale, bystanders who stood close enough to the events to feel the cold wind of it. His death comes not quite a year after Timm's, which was a year after the death of my nephew Nicholas. All were guys who deserved a longer life, whose deaths imbue a lingering shadow over things, making us more desperate to enjoy what life we have and fearful of what news is waiting to ring in the telephone in the middle of the next night.

Death is a game-changer; for the fallen, their story is completed by it; for the living, our story is shadowed and chilled by it, changing the tone to something far more bittersweet. The mind does not comprehend that someone who was alive yesterday could be gone today; Robert and Timm and Nicholas (and everyone else each of us have lost) yet thrive in the half-life of our imaginations. I keep expecting to see Timm at the front door, tall, half in shadow, smiling, his hand raised to knock: I know he's gone in my head but my heart can't believe it, or won't.

We learn from Robert’s death that it doesn’t matter how one goes – in an instant or down a long lingering road – whether intimate or peripheral – still, the sense of estrangement from the main of life is the same for we who survive those deaths. These past few days both Beth and I have had a hard time getting into gear; it feels like the wind has been knocked out of us. We can’t believe Robert’s gone, that it happens so simply and blithely.

Belle curls on my lap as I write (laptop on a writing desk skewed to the right so there's room for her) and she looks so much like a younger version of Zooey, the old calico we took in for a year before she died of old age. Calicoes as a breed (we surmise now from our experience with two of them) are feisty and smart, attentive and loving; they are almost like dogs. I miss Zooey, whom we buried in the back garden last July, next to where we buried Red the autumn before after he was hit by a car. Hugo looks so much like Red, a shaggy male who loves his creature comforts.

Robert with their brood -- Bimini, the lost cat they adopted after a hurricane; and dogs Scooby and Auggie. Robert sure loved those dogs. Bimini is a true character. All of the pets travelled with Robert and Karen on their final journey to and from Atlanta.

Nicholas and Timm and Robert were all tall, boyish men who loved cars and the outdoors and adventuring. I think of Nicholas in his big truck at the mudhole outside of town, of Timm hiking alone in the mountains, of Robert in his race-cars and go-carts. They all found life exciting and rushed into it with arms open wide.

They all loved women though found them difficult, or rather the wounds in their own hearts made love more of a wilderness than for some. Robert had recently survived a very bitter divorce from an alcoholic woman; his son was 20 and terribly spoiled, vain and greedy and so resentful of his father that he never tried to see him all during Robert's years of sickness. Nicholas so loved a girl named Jamie whom had much greater ambition than he; she was planning to go on a mission when she was killed along with Nicholas and his best friend in his car accident in March 2007. Their love, such as it now it, endures in the two benches dedicated to each which face each other in a public cemetery in Orlando. Timm barely survived his first marriage; the wounds from that were so deep in him that he approached his eventual second marriage with great caution, much as he loved Christie.

We don't know if we'll ever see Karen again as neighbors. The house next door may just hold too many savaged memories for her to live in it again. If she sells the house, that could be another game-changer for us, since our neighborhood continues to decline with more houses for sale and an equal number now rented out to the more fleeting population, with all of their rough edges and noise. We would sell and get out if we could, but now is no time to consider that. Things are bad enough without these deaths-adding Robert's now to that toll-but as with events in the greater world, we have no control over how the wheel of mortality will empty its next bucket of cold water over us. We're grateful for what we have, perhaps more so because of these deaths; yet it all seems all the more fragile with each bit of grim news.

We'll miss Robert for sure, and we're so sorry for Karen. Yet with such harm there is also boon. Our own losses create empathies for others who are just now embarking on grief's road. Our grief for Robert grants a further measure of humility, that we are surely alive just for today. And finally, grief renews this work, making it oddly more vital. How much there is yet to remember for those we have lost ...

The memorial benches for Nicholas and Jamie.

Postcript

On Saturday I was over at Mom's helping to clean her garage -- mostly it was sweeping out and re-arranging stuff, trashing a few things, setting a few other things aside for an eventual yard sale.

Amid all that stuff was a big box containing childhood items which Nicholas has stored away after he had moved out of his parents' house. It had just been sitting there all that time, and Mom wondered if Molly was ready yet to decide what to do with it. I peeked inside - it was full of a boyhood's detritus, broken walkie-talkies and toy trucks and cars. A time capsule which my sister may be a long while further in becoming ready to let go of. Over at my wife's sister's house, they left their son James' room intact for years after James died in his car wreck. Stuff has a long afterlife. Most of Timm's relics are his photographs, and they will remain with us for a long, long time. In the garage next door is a huge toolbox filled with Robert's wrenches and calipers, stuff I'm sure will be there until Karen can't bear to carry that freight any longer. We must go on, yet the obligation to hold on to what's left of the departed is great. I didn't move that box in Mom's garage, just swept around it, clearing away some of the dust of what gathers over our loved ones' remains.

A photo from Timm's archives. I believe that's his hand turning the clock hands -- back or forward or stilling them, the gesture is the same in the aftermath of his death.