Hangin' Out

The Pain verses The Promise

Ron Morrison, whose watercolor paintings are to die for, recently left a comment on the previous posting. In it he mentioned that Andrew’s passing must have been hard on me.I can’t begin to describe how hard this thing is, but I can describe pieces of it…

It is human nature I suppose to want to have some level of control in your life. If you have a bad marriage you get a divorce. If you hate your boss you find a new job. If you’re too fat you can go on a diet. If your hair turns gray you can color it.But when something like this happens you realize that you have no control what so ever on the most important thing in your life. I can’t change this thing one bit. Your cellular vision crystallizes and you immediately understand that nothing…NOTHING… in your earthly life is in your ultimate control.

I have picked my words carefully because I see now that you think you have control but in reality you only have influence. Sometimes you have enough influence to change things but you have no control.

Another part of it is regret. Thank the Lord my son and I had the relationship that we had so there are none of those terminal regrets like needing to apologize for something or needing to tell him I loved him. He knew how much I loved him and I knew how much he loved me.

But I have small absurd regrets…I regret I never made him a custard pie. I regret I never read the books he valued. I regret I didn’t make the mints he loved for Christmas just because I thought we already had enough stuff. I regret I didn’t send him more “goody” packages. I regret I didn’t call every single day just to say hi and I love you. I regret the times I let myself get too tired to enjoy his company to the fullest. I regret the things I nagged him about because in the end they didn’t matter.

What I think I did do right is that I always told him how much I loved him. I always told him he was the most important thing in my life. I always told him he could achieve any dream he had. I always pointed out how talented he was. I always told him how proud I was of him. These are the only things that really matter.

Hard on me? Yes. The worst pain and blackness I have ever known. I would not have been able to continue to live myself if I didn’t know that I would see him again. The thought of him being free of the asthma that killed him for all eternity, to think of his beautiful young face never growing old, never frowning, never crying…never ever again gasping for breath. Well, that right there is what makes it all bearable.We have each have with in us the promise of Heaven, when all things will be made right. I love my Lord and I trust his timing and his ways. He knew something about this that I didn’t and I trust that. This lifetime is less than a blink of an eye in comparison to eternity. I’ll have all of eternity to be with my son.

I will learn to make custard pies then.

This is absolutely my favorite picture of Andrew and me. It epitomizes so many different aspects of his life and my place in it. He was first and foremost a character and loved dressing up for this picture. It was around this time that he focused on wanting to be an actor. I think he was somewhere around eleven years old when this photo was taken and we were at the New Mexico State Fair. His father, Robert, was on the Albuquerque Police Department SWAT team and that squad always worked the entire state fair so Andrew and I went by ourselves. But that was fairly normal. Due to Robert’s schedule in both the police department and the National Guard Andrew and I spent a lot of time together. We went on different outing almost every weekend. Andrew went through this “Billy the Kid” phase about this same time. He watched the movie “Young Guns” over and over and was always asking if there was any chance we were related to Billy the Kid. We had a great time that day..as we always did. Andrew was a great companion.

Today is Valentine’s Day so let me tell you about my son and his love, Jamie.

They had been constant companions for almost five years. They lived together, worked together and spent every waking moment together.

Andrew was a difficult person at times, and that is an understatement!

He was so passionate about his beliefs and would argue his point to the bitter end. Jamie was his balance. For the most part she seemed to support him unconditionally while ignoring his rants. She loved him and by his own admission she took excellent care of him.

I never had to worry while he was with Jamie. She watched his health, monitored his medicines, interceded on his behalf with doctors and kept him fed and watered and pruned him when nessacary.

But it was so much more than that. She loved him, she put up with him, she argued with him and she laughed with him. She made his family hers and made her family his. But most important to me was the fact that my son loved her. End of story – all the other aside, what mattered most is that my son loved her.

And I love her.

I miss my son, he was good company.

Andrew was an avid reader from the moment he could hold a book in his hands. Ironically it was his ability to read at a college level that caused him to not qualify for the help he needed in school. It was only when an astute diagnostician said she could see his learning disability but the standard tests are unable to measure it due to his unbelievable reading ability.
This same woman located a seldom used test to identify the problem and he was diagnosed as having a learning disorder. This was supposed to allow him to have the help he needed to complete high school but it never quite worked out that way. He continued to struggle and academically crawled to graduation. Not that it mattered to him; school was only the place Andrew went to try out his new material.

Still, I think of his voracious apatite for books, his constant need to absorb information.

Many times we disagreed on the books he was reading but he was undaunted, determined to read for himself and make his own decision on whether a piece was edifying or detrimental.

Once during his junior year in high school his teacher called me to ask permission to let Andrew read a certain book. She said he had ability to “handle”…yes, now that I think of it, she did use the word handle…weightier books. The asked permission to let him read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and made a point of mentioning that some of the story would not be suitable for most of her students but she felt Andrew possessed the maturity to handle it.

Sometime after that he picked up a copy of On The Road by Jack Kerouac. After he left us Jamie told me that he made a practice of reading this book at least once year. I found a copy on audio tape and began listening to it as I commuted back and forth to work. It was a very weighty piece of work. Exhausting for me. Many times I had to rewind the tape and listen to a passage over and over in order to absorb it. I consider myself a very good reader but I must admit I struggled with this piece of literature and I only had to listen.

Although it was not my kind of book I regret that I never read it (or listened to it) while Andrew was here. It never crossed my mind. And now its too late to tell him that it blew me away that he read stuff like that. I could totally see that he would identify with the mad pace of the book. Not that he imitated it but rather that he would appreciate the manic speed with which the characters led their lives. It was so him that I dreaded coming to the end. As a side note, with irony that befit Andrew's life I finished the book
(tapes) on the same day his death certificate arrived in the mail.

On the day he died I found a copy of Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground on the bathroom vanity that he had been reading. Jamie told me that was also a book he read often as well as Orwell's 1984. In fact she told me that it was common for Andrew to be reading five books at the same time. How come I didn't know this?

I always bought Andrew books. I might have said no to a toy or a game but I never said no to a book. As a child I watched over what he read. As he grew older and began reading things I might have wished he didn't I always tried to discuss the material with him. As a young adult he liberated himself from this practice.

I always gave him books and when he came to visit he would raid my own library promising to return the books but never bringing one back. Before he died I was at Barnes and Nobel and I saw a book that I thought would make a great Christmas present. I bought it and hid it under my bed. At Christmas I wrapped it up and put it under the tree. It's February and the tree is long gone but the book with its silver holiday paper and fluffy bow are still sitting on the foot stool. Each day I walk past it and think about how this last gift will go unopened. It makes me sad and yet its a sweet reminder that we shared a love of books. It also reminds me of his love of learning, his romance with words and the rare ability to see with his mind beyond the horizon.

He was due to arrive on July 30th, he waited until August 12th.

He was born busy. Always too busy to take care of the little things, that was him. He was born so full of life that he wouldn’t nurse. Nope, not hungry! I stayed at the hospital for three days, the nurse finally brought him to me and asked that I try to get him to eat but he was quite content to come for a visit and leave it at that. He was born not needing me, born pulling away and getting started.

He was the strangest and most delightful child. I don’t believe I ever heard him say he was bored. He was always playing. Always playing…..

He is a precious soul, always joyful, always laughing, always creating something.

He was good company too.

And best of all, he instinctively knew the magic of laughter. He had impeccable timing and could make a joke out of things that would have better left alone. Make you laugh at something that you’d be ashamed to admit to later. So quick, I never ceased to be amazed at his quickness.

Everything in him was quick…too quick…

Maybe I’ll teach myself to write with my right hand instead of my left.

It’s a crazy notion but why not? My life is forever changed, why shouldn’t there be obvious signs of the change? Why shouldn’t I quit my job and become a full time artist. Why shouldn’t I move across the country, cut my hair, get a tattoo…okay so I did do that…but my life is different now. Totally changed and I didn’t even get a vote. It just happened.

You always live in fear of that phone call. You always wonder what you’d do.

I never allowed myself to dwell on it, always thinking everything was going to work out just fine. He’d learn to handle his health problems. He’s seeing a specialist now, getting regular treatment, on a good regimen with his medicines. After all, it hadn’t been more than a week since he told me over the phone that he had never felt better in his life.

Then the call came. It started out the same way the last two had began. In the last two years his asthma had put him in ICU twice. Both times he was put into a medically induced coma and on a ventilator while they pumped him full of steroids. Both times he woke up and charmed the nurses off their feet.

Jamie began the way she had before. She said he had an attack and was in the hospital but this time she added, “You need to come as soon as you can”. I asked if he was okay and she repeated “you need to get here as soon as you can.” Then I knew. I went ahead and asked if he was dead and she said “I don’t want to tell you that over the phone.”

And with that it was suddenly too late. Too late for all of the things you think you will do one day. Too late for anything you might have been waiting to say. Too late to say I love you one last time.

My heart stopped beating.
My mind raced. When? How?
My mind took inventory. What does his smile look like, the sound of his voice. When was the last time I saw him, when was the last time I spoke with him by phone. What was the last thing we said to each other?
My hands raced. Did I save that last email; is that last message still on my phone?
My heart stopped beating.

Pseudo sensibility kicked in like a macabre form of automatic pilot. I spoke with nurses, and transplant staff and called his father, my sister’s, thought of calling Dana but he was on his way to work and I didn’t want him to worry about me driving back home. I left my office still on the phone notifying people. Stopped at the front desk to sign out when my boss became aware of something amiss and took me to his office. He asked for Dana’s number and placed the call I should have. Then he took me back to my office and took care of me until Dana got there.

He took care of a ghost – my heart had stopped beating.

The last time I saw him was September 27th 2006. Almost two months before he died. He was healthy and happy and doing better than I had ever seen him do before. He had just finished his orientation period at his first great job. He was a dispatcher at Air-Evac. He had talked about how he was ready to get married and start a family. He was looking ahead and making plans.

To say I loved this boy, my child, my only child, does not even begin to tell the whole story. He was so smart, so clever and witty. Sometimes you hear that a person has an old soul, I can’t say this about Andrew, it’s not quite accurate. It was more like he had an immortal soul. A soul that was born out of time, no, that’s not it either. A soul that was born for all times. There, that’s it.

Some stars shine so bright that they can’t shine too long.

And now he is gone. But he is not a ghost, an apparition floating from room to room. No, that’s me. He’s gone on across the river Jordan and through the eastern gate. He will be there waiting when my turn comes to cross but until then…I’m the ghost…

Robert Andrew Romero

"PACO"

August 12, 1980 -
October 23, 2006

“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." Oscar Wilde