Do Not Go Toward the Light

When my in-laws Marti and Leon lived in Norton, we often went to their house for dinner on Sundays. Lauren and Marti usually made either pot roast with potatoes and carrots or pasta and meatballs. Both were served with salad—twigs and leaves, Leon called it since it was always spring mix. Leon didn’t like twigs and leaves—he preferred “man” salad, which was pretty much iceberg lettuce and dressing.

After dinner, he and I usually cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. On the evening in question, we did our job, and as I finished hand washing a pot that wouldn’t fit, Leon said, “I think that’s it, Gordon. I just have to start the dishwasher and we’re all set.”

“Mind if I go sit?” I said.

“Go ahead,” he said.

A couple minutes later he joined me in the front room, and we turned on the TV. The dishwasher whirred behind us. A few minutes later, Marti and Lauren came from the bedrooms with Grant and Lucia in their pajamas, their hair still wet from baths.

Marti went into the kitchen. “Gordon! What did you do?”

I stood up. “What’s that?”

“There’s soap everywhere!”

I walked into the kitchen. Bubbles poured out of the top of the dishwasher, down its face, and all over the kitchen floor.

“Is your dishwasher broken?” I offered lamely.

She stepped around the expanding pool of bubbles and opened the dishwasher to make it stop.

“What soap did you put in it?”

“I didn’t put any soap in it. Leon started it.”

“LEE-unn!” she called.

He appeared next to me. “What’s up?”

“Did you put the green dish soap in it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? Was that wrong?”

“Get the mop! I swear you do this on purpose so I won’t ask you to do anything.”

When the mess was finally cleaned up, Leon settled into his favorite chair in the front room and said to me, “You know, you could have taken the hit for me there. She gets way madder at me than she ever will at you.”

Truth is, I just hadn’t been that fast on my feet.

“I’m never gonna hear the end of this one,” Leon said.

Back in that era, we spent some of summer vacation in Bridgeton, Maine, where Leon and Marti would rent a lake house. Getting there was always a logistical feat—Marti’s motorboat needed to be towed up; tubes, water skis, and wakeboards had to be brought; food for all family members had to be packed and toted. Leon usually towed the boat with an SUV he had at the time. We would typically load the cabin with water sport equipment and luggage, and one or two kids might ride with him.

Grant has always been black-and-white about most issues, and in our religion, we abstain from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, and harmful drugs. When Grant was around six or seven, he rode with Leon to tow the boat. The rest of us took major routes, but Leon usually went slower backroads. Sometime after they crossed the Maine border, they saw a sign for the (in)famous topless coffee shop in Vassalboro, Maine, whose main innovation was to have topless waiters and waitresses serve coffee and food.

As they passed the sign, Leon said, “There’s a topless coffee shop up ahead, Grant.”

“Okay,” said Grant.

“What do you think? Should we stop for a break there?”

Grant was fully alert now. He bellowed, “Bopa! We don’t drink coffee! Coffee is BAAAAAD!”

They didn’t stop. But that was one of Leon’s favorite Maine memories.

A few years before his passing, Leon had a heart episode that led to a quadruple bypass. From an old New England family with a stiff upper lip ethos, Leon was never great at saying how he wanted things or when he was struggling. Through trial and error, we discovered that he was more comfortable having me around for support than he was with women. He didn’t love getting anyone’s assistance walking or going to the restroom, but he really disliked it if the person was female (though he couldn’t quite admit it). So he and I spent a lot of time together in emergency rooms, hospital rooms, rehabs, and so forth over his final years. Before he went in for open-heart surgery, he asked me to give him a blessing by the laying on of hands. Upon completing it, I advised him, “When you are under, if you find yourself at the start of a tunnel with a bright light at the end, I don’t care how great it looks—do not go toward the light.” He laughed. Before they took him in, I said, “You have one job. What is it?”

“Go toward the light,” he said.

“Do not go toward the light,” I said.

He laughed again. “Hope I can keep that straight,” he said.

A few days after his successful surgery, he needed to hit some milestones to be able to leave the hospital, so I was to work with him on getting him to use a walker to get around the floor. We got out to the hallway together, and as we did, a woman with a hospital ID setup in the hallway with a large harp. She put out a stand and placed some sheet music on it. She began to strum chords in a soothing, beautiful melody. Just across the aisle from her was a patient newly out of surgery. He was still sedated, eyes closed, his head lit by a hall light bulb directly above him.

Leon stood against his walker for a few moments surveying the scene. Finally, he said, “Poor guy.”

“What’s that?” I said.

He nodded at the fellow just out of surgery. “Him,” Leon said. “Between the light on his face and the harp music next to him, he must think he’s joining the angels.”

You may recall from other posts that you never answered how tall you were in Leon’s presence: “I didn’t know they piled poop that high” was inevitable.

A few years after the heart episodes, Leon wound up at the ER for other health issues. I joined him for several hours while he waited for various tests and a regular bed to open. Finally, word came that a bed had opened and he was being taken to one of the main floors. I accompanied him as we started out of the ER and into the main wing. A nurse walked with us, a soft spoken guy from Cape Verde.

“Mr. Elliott, I need to confirm some basics as we walk,” he said.

He had a digital touchpad. Leon pushed his walker and I walked at his elbow.

The nurse confirmed his full name and birthdate. Then he said, “What’s your height?”

I laughed. Leon looked at me and shook his head.

“Mr. Elliott?” the nurse said.

“Go on, Bopa,” I said. “Tell the man how high they’re piling it these days.”

He sighed again and said, “Five foot eight.”

December 12 marks two years from Leon’s passing. We sang “The First Noel” at his funeral because it was his favorite Christmas song. He sang it as “The First Leon.” In the last few years of his life, when things went wrong around his house, Leon blamed me (they lived twenty minutes away). Why were the towels not put away? They had been, but I had snuck in and dumped them out again. Why did the basement flood in the heavy rainstorm? Gordon left the storm door open then came back and closed it to cover his tracks.

Ever since Leon passed, our water dispenser in the refrigerator has been haunted. Periodically, it turns on with no one around. When I was on a business trip recently, it turned on in the middle of the night and leaked into the basement. I get it, Leon. Serves me right—I should have taken the blame for the dishwasher. Now that I’ve acknowledged it, can we call it even?