The Railroad Men Who Spoke For Harold

“I keep thinking there’s going to be a right time to drive out there and fix it,” he told me. “And then another year goes by, and there isn’t.”

I never tried to take Harold’s place as a mother to Kurt, because I was never asked to and it was not mine to take. But I will say this plainly. I watched that man love his son from a distance of four hundred miles and thirty years of bad history, and ache over it quietly every night of our marriage, and never once complain that it was unfair, because Harold did not believe in calling anything unfair that he himself had had a hand in causing.

Harold was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the January he turned sixty eight, eight months before he died, and from the day the doctor in Omaha said the word, I did not go back to the diner. I gave my notice the same week, because I had already decided there was nothing in this world I was going to do with the time I had left with him except spend it at his side.

I drove him to Omaha for chemotherapy eleven times, ninety miles each way, through two blizzards that should have kept any sensible person home, because the hospital does not reschedule for weather and neither did I. I learned to give him his shots. I learned the names of medicines I never wanted to learn. I slept some nights sitting up in a recliner beside his hospital bed because the one time I went home to sleep in my own bed, he called my name twice in the night and nobody answered him, and I never let that happen again.

There was a night in August, the worst of it, when Harold’s fever spiked so high the Omaha hospital kept him four extra days, and I sat up in that recliner until three in the morning watching a machine blink numbers I did not understand, and when I finally called Donna from the hallway because I could not make my own voice work right, she did not ask a single question. She just said, “I’m coming,” and she drove ninety miles in the dark in her nightgown with a coat thrown over it, and sat with me until the fever broke toward dawn.

Donna, my neighbor of fifteen years, brought casseroles twice a week without ever once asking to be thanked for it, and sat with Harold some afternoons so I could get to the pharmacy, and never once said a word about how thin I was getting or how gray, because Donna has buried a husband of her own and she knows there is a kind of help that talks and a kind that just shows up, and she only ever offered the second kind.