The End of Something

I’d been sober and out of prison for less than a year when I flew to Florida with my mother to see my grandfather before he died. 

John Costello was a lifelong alcoholic. A stranger to those who loved him or wanted to be loved by him. Ex-Pat to his family and barricaded in a mobile home on the panhandle of Florida for the better part of four decades. His existence hung over my family like a question mark and as puzzling as his absence was, so was his refusal to die. My Grandmother, Roseann, always said he was going to outlive her and for the longest time she was right. Through strokes, heart attacks, and every hurricane—he just kept on trucking. Until one day, irrevocably, he lay dying at the VA care unit of Citrus Gardens in Fort Myers. 

Through my years of addiction, I’d come to understand my grandfather without ever knowing him. My Ghost of Christmas Future. My family line, and as my uncle Mike likes to say, “Our relatives hit every branch of the alcoholic tree on the way down.”

There’s a picture of my grandfather and grandmother at the Marine Corps all in what must be the late 1950s. Her white-gloved hand is pressed to his chest. John’s green uniform is adorned with medals. My grandmother, no more than twenty, holds a cigarette in her other hand. She looks past the camera, and John looks directly into the lens, a startled look in his eyes. They’re both beautiful and young. John has a square jaw, solid cheekbones, and piercing blue eyes. My grandmother’s hair is up. Her pearl earrings shimmer and she’s laughing. My family doesn’t exist yet. This photo is all hope and un-molded clay, out of this we would all come. This photo hangs at my parents’ house. In it is the hope of what could be. As if to say, See, this could have been beautiful. 

They would have four children and be divorced by the time my mom was 12. My grandmother worked at a daycare and raised the children by herself. She went back to school and took photography classes. She didn’t complain and has never been a martyr, but she didn’t have help. In some ways, the kids had to grow up fast, but they were a family and took care of each other. Each day of the week a different child was responsible for shopping and cooking dinner. The rest of them were responsible for the dishes. Sometimes John would take them to the Chelsea Piers, or Central Park. My mom remembers him leaving them in front of the bar while he would drink, or smoking a joint before he’d take them to the movies. 

When my mom was 16, her younger sister Nancy, was killed in a hit-and-run accident. She was walking down the road after working at the horse stables in Teaneck. She was 14 and they would never find who killed her. The driver was suspected drunk, and passing cars on the right shoulder. When Mom talks about it there's still a sense of disbelief. That Nancy, one day, just didn’t come home, and she never saw her again. My Grandmother can barely talk about her to this day.

After her death, John came to the house. My mom remembers him playing his guitar on the couch. He didn't attend the wake and shortly after that, he moved to Florida. The theme would be the same for the rest of his life. He didn’t make graduations or come to my parents’ wedding. He’d never set foot in Maine. The only thing I remember as an explanation growing up was that he was an alcoholic. I remember he would call drunk every few months and ask after us. My mom would always talk quietly, with an anxiousness to her voice, like she was a little kid again. She’d always end the calls with, “Dad, take care of yourself, okay?” 

The only time I’d met my grandfather was when I was 6. Mom packed Chris and me up and flew us to Key West. I remember his trailer. Paneled brown hallways that were narrow enough for my brother and I to crab-walk up with our feet and hands. My grandfather playing the guitar. I remember the bleached white sand and a deserted beach that seemed to wrap around the world. My grandfather with a fishing rod. A cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. Taking one cast and immediately landing a barracuda. My brother and I, shouting. The line taut and the rod bowed. Even now the memory stands like a Hemingway portrait. A character larger than life whose faults might be forgiven due to his suffering and great potential. And Florida, from then on, was a place I associated with him. A place where people go and never leave.

We made the drive from the airport to Citrus Gardens. Long stretches of highway broken by single-level strip malls. The palm trees staged at regular intervals. I look out the window and watch them pass by. I’m 31, and I had to get permission from my probation officer to come here. I’ve been a junky for a decade. I’ve burned my life to the ground over and over again. All my family could do was watch. Being sober feels odd, a new uncomfortable suit. One I’ve worn before. I hope sobriety sticks this time, but I’ve given up on bold promises, and I know better now than to make them. The truth is I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stay stopped. Even the confidence and hope that attended early recovery is lost. My problem, I’ve come to understand, isn’t drugs and alcohol; it’s life. Drugs were my solution to that problem, and the problem turned out to be much harder to solve.

Citrus Gardens reminds me of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The case manager, Michelle, is friendly and competent. Perfectly pleasant in a practiced demeanor that seems warm even if it’s rehearsed. She tells us his condition, and that they are recommending hospice. He’s refusing physical therapy, and she calls him a bit of a curmudgeon. My mom laughs. Michelle tells us his room number and which hall to follow. A woman passes us in a wheelchair. Shriveled and slouched sideways at an impossible angle, pedaling with a single foot down the hallway. She holds in one crumpled hand a Minnie Mouse doll and wears large fun-size sunglasses with white rims. She peers at me over the top. We pass a birdcage, a blue cockatiel turns its head and scratches its neck offering a whistle. Some Residents are gathered around in medical gowns and pajamas watching the bird.

Mom knocks on the open door. A single curtain separates the two beds. A shared TV. It’s your standard hospital-looking room. My grandfather’s roommate watches a game show on the TV and offers us a nod as we walk past. John has the bed closest to the window and the shades are closed. He looks up and sees my mom and manages a smile. “Come to bust me outta here?” My mom bends down to kiss him and I can see his lips quiver from the strain of sitting forward. “Dad, this is Matty, my middle son.” She pauses for a second, and adds, “Your grandson.” It feels like an odd introduction. “Hey kid,” he says, almost as an apology. His eyes are blue and watery. His face wears every bit of his 79 years. His body is abandoning him, retreating into itself, forced to carry its fair or unfair share of his life choices. His arms and legs are atrophied, with loose baggy tattooed skin that almost melts off his body. He grumbles about the goddamned TV. 

My mom sits on the side of his bed and I sit at the end of his bed in a chair. “How are they treating you, Dad?” She asks. “Terrible,” he says defiantly and shakes slightly. He’s getting over pneumonia, and his cough wheezes and rattles in his throat. His voice wavers when he speaks—his mind is still sharp, but he has to roll the words around in his mouth before speaking them on account of the multiple strokes. The defiance is still there. He insists they're stealing his money, that they just want to get in his pockets. They won’t let him leave, the doctor won't see him, the nurses lie, and they're full of shit. “Full of shit” and “goddamned” pepper every other sentence. I listen to this from a distance, not sure what to feel. Part of me wants to hate him, and I wish I had a little more empathy, but mostly I just feel sad, or a void where I know an emotion should be. 

“They’ve got me over the goddamned barrel,” he says, catching his breath. “I just want to get outta here.” His voice pleads as much as he’ll allow. “Who’s going to take care of you?” Mom says and rubs his leg, trying to soften the blow. “I don't need anyone to take care of me,” he says. “I've taken care of myself my whole life.” Mom explains that he can’t even really stand up. He says he can. “Show me,” Mom says and he waves his hand and then looks away, a quiet acceptance of the things he cannot do, and will never do again. I see a side of my mom I've never seen before, a daughter, begging for her father. Her voice is softer. After all this, she loves him even though he can’t return it. I know the tone better than I’d like to admit.

“How’s the food, Dad?” she asks, trying to change the subject, but he doesn’t answer and looks away. His gown is open up his thigh. He has a diaper on. Part of me wishes I could comfort him, but more so I wish he’d died on the operating table as an act of mercy. No one deserves this. Mom says she’s going to check on the food. “Talk to your Matty, Dad, I’ll be right back.” She leaves us. I sit in the chair at the foot of the bed. His roommate Dennis is maybe 50. He keeps watching the TV but looks up to get my attention. “Nice of you to visit your granddad,” He pauses before adding, “No one visits me.” His left leg is amputated below the knee, his arms are covered in faded blue tattoos, flames that lick up the arm, distorted with time, the ink cloudy and faded, melting into themselves. “I was a sniper, ya know,” Dennis says, nodding. “Afghanistan.” “I don’t usually tell people that,” he adds. The game show babbles in the background and he turns back to it.

John asks if I’m Chris. I tell him Chris is my older brother. He nods. “You ever get that guitar I sent?” I tell him I did. I leave out that I left the guitar in the woods when I was stoned and it was destroyed. Maybe the only thing of value he ever gave to us. A 1960s Martin. I don’t ask him the things I want to ask him, it wouldn’t be fair, and I know there are no good answers. Why didn’t you ever come to Maine? Why’d you leave? Was this all worth it? 

I see a man gripped by fear. A stranger, but responsible for me nonetheless. There are a lot of starts and stops, pauses. Awkward small talk as we both feel compelled to somehow connect, to span a lifetime we’ve both missed. Mom said he used to be charming, but all that’s gone now. He’s weak and even speaking takes concentration and exhausts him. After a long silence, he starts in. “It’s too much damn trouble, after the 3rd stroke, things just are too hard,” he says and shakes. "Who cares,” he says and coughs. “I’ve done all I could in this life, there’s nothing left to do, it’s depressing.” He looks toward the window and is silent again. “I used to be involved in everything, you know.”  He tells me about his childhood in Pennsylvania, and how he used to spend his summers there and hunt. “I had a .22 rifle I bought from JCPenney,”  he says, and we have a laugh about that. I tell him they don’t sell guns at JCPenney anymore.“No, I guess not,” he says.

Mom and I drive to John’s home on the outskirts of Fort Myers to pick up some of his stuff. We pull into Tropical Isles, your standard Florida trailer park affair. Mom directs me to his lot. A faded blue Oldsmobile sits in the driveway partially tarped over with bungees. His trailer is one of the smallest and most dilapidated. It has a single wheel on the front that you could attach to a truck and take off and go camping. There’s a lawn mower rusted into the weeds and a tipped-over trash can. Mom squeezes my hand as we get out of the car. 

The door is unlocked. We both wander around the house in silence. The water is off, and the phone disconnected. There are lots of books—1491, and other war histories and biographies of Washington and Grant. Mom tells me about how much he read, and how smart he was. “Maybe that was his problem,” I say. We look through drawers, trying to find anything that he might want. “Do you want any of the books?” she asks me. I’ve read most of them and I shake my head. I look through an old pocket-size address book. Old entries, far older than me, in neat cursive, preserved. Many of them are now crossed out. 

I find a picture, long faded, of a woman standing in a garden. I wonder where she is now and how she knew my grandfather. I find an old songbook with lyrics and guitar chords and flip through it, inspecting his neat handwriting. Mom opens the freezer and stares at the frozen pot pies. She takes out some saffron and begins to cry. I hug her. “ He was a great cook,” as if to say, Even this he gave up. “This isn’t a home, no warmth or joy, there’s nothing I can even look fondly upon, only sadness that this was how he lived.” I look around at the dirty trailer with holes in the floor, a dish satellite box, unpaid bills, and magazines piled up. I look at his couch with a noticeable indent on one side where he must have spent the majority of the past 20 years sitting. I sit down and sink into the couch. These walls, if they could talk they’d cry. 

We drive back to Citrus Gardens. Mom tells me she was most sad walking around and thinking of her own mortality, and that someday her kids would be doing this very thing, and she hoped there would be things in the house that would bring good memories, and joy, of a life lived and how strange, in the end, someone will be filtering through the things we’ve carried through life. I think of the couch with the indent of his body and the picture of the woman as we pass palm tree after palm tree. She knew him better than I did.

We buy Burger King for John and his roommate. Dennis nibbles on the fries and offers a thank you, asking what he owes us. “Nothing,” I say. Mom convinces John to get into his wheelchair and they set off down the hall to visit the bird screeching down the hall. They return ten minutes later. Mom goes to the window and opens the blinds. She tells him he’s got to find the joy in his life, the little bits. “I wonder what kind of tree that is?” she says and tells him that studies show that being able to see a tree outside your window makes you happier. “It’s science,” she says. John grumbles about the cockatiel. “I’d get some joy out of strangling that damn bird.” He’s smiling. A clever chuckle. Pleased with himself. The only time I’d ever see him laugh. 

We fly back to Maine, convinced that he will pull through like he always does. Mom calls me a couple of weeks later to tell me he is dying. He got the flu, then sepsis, and lost consciousness. They asked Mom if she wanted to give him a breathing tube and Mom declined. I can picture him, withered and gasping for a life he doesn’t want. She tells me all this as she’s crying. “It’s saddest that he’s dying alone,” she says. I don’t know what to say. I sit with it, death. It comes for us all, but even this seems cruel, that it waited this long, making the whole life a bit more tragic decade by decade—not a good death if there is one, but the wheels slowly falling off a grand old car, and the frame rotting from beneath it, the windows smashed, until finally, the engine seizes. 

John Costello died on January 12th, 2017, at 8:23pm. My uncle Mark was with him, holding his hand. My grandfather was unresponsive, but Mom got to say goodbye on speakerphone. My brother lit a candle for him at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. How do you mourn the potential of something?

I drive to Grandmother’s the next morning and she pours me a coffee. We sit on the deck that overlooks her gardens, which are covered in snow. “How do you feel?” I ask. She shrugs. “It’s hard to believe he’s really dead.” She sips her coffee. “How do you feel?” she asks. “Me? I don’t know, I guess,” and the truth of it is, I’m relieved. For him, and for everyone who tried to love him. It’s a warm winter morning. One of those days where it’s 40 degrees and sunny in Maine. She says it was sad, matter of factly, not for her, but for her children—and it was sad in that it was the end of a life. “The end of something,” she says, and she’s quiet, thinking, but no words follow. 

I think of the picture of them at the Marine Corps ball. Beautiful, and ageless. All potential. An unfulfilled promise. Their whole lives are ahead of them, my grandmother is looking up, out of the frame, and laughing. I don’t mind that it represents the good, the best of us, and the best John could offer them, or our family. A promise and a legacy the rest of us would weave together. That we choose to hang the good pictures even after the world breaks open is a testament to the human spirit and our will to forget and forge something beautiful, even if it’s half fiction. If only…and see! They were happy once. And they always will be, in that photo. In that illuminated specter of two-dimensional satin gloss.

Being an addict and alcoholic I understand my family's pain, and my grandfather’s misfortune, wherever the blame might lie. There is no alcoholic gene. Trauma, through genetics, is passed from generation to generation. It changes the structure of your DNA, some sort of evolutionary mechanism. This makes me understand this isn’t all my fault just as it wasn’t all John’s fault—but it’s still our responsibility. We are given certain things to work out that precede birth and have been passed on since the dawn of time. No one is born into this world with a clean slate. We all get a short deck, this I know for certain. In a baby’s first cry is the anguish of our ancestor's pain and the unspeakable sorrow contained within it. And we all contain a degree of sorrow. This is countered with the indescribable joy and love transcribed at birth. Human survival depends upon it. Yet the scars are surely there. Ineffable, but there nonetheless. We cannot remember the pain - and this is the gift. For it would be unbearable.

I see myself in my grandfather. The arrogance, the anger, and underneath it the fear that drives it all - and the lengths we will go to blot that out. Long after everyone gives up, even those that love you most they still wonder what they could have done. Our inability to help, to have ever helped those who need it most is the saddest and truest part of addiction. That makes it easier. There was never any other way this could have gone. He didn’t want help. He just wanted to return to his trailer at Tropical Isle.

I picture him at the end with his sharp watery eyes, and the skin hanging loosely from his bones. The memories I do have. Sneaking him Tums, and a pair of scissors to trim his mustache. Eating Panera bread together, and the subpar, according to him, roast beef sandwich. Walking through the old bookstore and picking out the books he’d never read. I can’t remember what I got him. No Country For Old Men, I think. A military history. I remember the saffron in the freezer and Mom saying, “Dad, remember when you made that bouillabaisse?” as she sat on his bed holding his hand. “Come on, Dad,” pleading for him to accept some help, tentative, not wanting to push too far. From a daughter who never asked much of her father, because she knew she couldn’t.

We are shaped by absence as much if not more than the things we know and love. When things aren’t there, something moves in to fill the void. There can never be a vacuum in space or in the human soul. Maybe it’s what we’re not given that makes us the way we are. Like a toy missing a crucial button and it’s up to us to find it. The problem in my experience is we don’t know what piece we need to find. Maybe watching him die, those were the missing pieces for me. Maybe that was what allowed me to become sober. 

I never used again after seeing him. It was as though some question had been answered forever. If you live long enough the end is diapers. It’s game shows and Jello. A talking bird. It’s so much sadder than you could ever make up. The worst sort of eulogy written by a Grandson who doesn’t know you and none of this is fair to him, but it’s all I have. In the end, I know the only difference between him and me is the family I got. The family that fulfilled the promise of the picture on the wall in spite of all the reasons to break under the weight of its own tragedy. 

A year later, we motored out on a lobster boat into Penobscot Bay. My grandmother, and her three surviving children along with my brother Chris. Mom had the bag that contained John’s ashes. In the half-light of an August dusk, we circled around as the orange rays shimmered on the water. My mom cried and told her dad that she loved him. She poured the ashes over the side of the boat and they mixed with the current, swirling and sinking in an ashy water color. My Grandmother laughed with tears in her eyes and in the way that only she could say, “ Well, we finally got the son of bitch to come to Maine.”