The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir Read online

  The Longest

  Trip Home

  o

  A M E M O I R

  John Grogan

  to j.r., r.s., and d.p., who taught me early on the meaning of friendship

  Contents

  o

  Preface

  v

  p a r t o n e

  Growing Up

  1

  p a r t t w o

  Breaking Away

  171

  p a r t t h r e e

  Coming Home

  235

  Epilogue

  329

  Acknowledgments

  333

  About the Author

  Other Books by John Grogan

  Credits

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  o

  The call came on a school night in the autumn of 2002. Jenny was out, and I was fixing dinner for our three children, who were already at the table. I grabbed the phone on the third ring.

  “John!” My father’s voice boomed through the earpiece. He sounded exceptionally buoyant. At eighty-six, Dad was quite the physical specimen. Just as when he was a young man, he began each morning with calisthenics, including forty push-ups.

  He always loved the outdoors and still cut his own acre of grass, gardened, shoveled snow, and climbed on the roof to clean the gutters. Dad bustled up and down the stairs of his home with a teenager’s vigor and routinely got by on six hours of sleep. His handwriting was as neat and controlled as on the day he went to work as a draftsman for General Motors in 1940, and he honed his mind each night by breezing through the crossword puzzle in the newspaper as he ate peanuts in his trademark way—with chopsticks so he wouldn’t get his fingers greasy.

  There was never enough time in each day for everything he wanted to get done, and fourteen years shy of becoming a cente-

  v i • P R E F A C E

  narian, he joked that someday when life settled down, he would get to all that leisure reading on his list. “When I retire,” he’d say.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Just checking in,” he said. “How’s everyone there?” I gave him quick updates on the kids, told him we were all fine. We chatted aimlessly for a few minutes as I carried the pasta and sauce to the table.

  I placed my hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s Grandpa,” I whispered to the children and motioned to them to dig in.

  “Everyone says hi,” I told him.

  “Say,” he said, pausing just a little too long, “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “Is Mom okay?” I asked.

  It was my mother we all worried about. Over the years she had grown weak and fragile. Her hips and lower back had dete-riorated, rendering her all but immobile. And in recent years her memory had begun to slip. Dad had become her full-time caregiver, helping her bathe and dress, and doling out a daily regimen of medications that was comical in its quantity and complexity.

  Always the engineer, he kept track of them all with a meticulous flowchart. There were pills for her heart, for her diabetes, for her arthritis, for her aches, for what doctors said were the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Despite Dad’s characteristically upbeat tone, with every phone call I wondered if this would be the one with the bad news.

  “Mom’s fine,” Dad said. “Mom’s doing all right. It’s me. I got a little bad news today.”

  “You did?” I asked, stepping out of the kitchen and away from the kids.

  “It’s the darnedest thing,” he said. “I’ve been feeling a little run-down lately, but nothing worth mentioning. Just kind of tired.”

  “You have a lot on your plate, taking care of Mom and the house and everything.”

  P R E F A C E • v i i

  “That’s all I thought it was. But a few days ago I took Mother in to Dr. Bober for her regular checkup. The doctor took one look at me and asked, ‘Are you feeling okay? You look washed out.’ I told her I was a little worn down but otherwise fine, and she said,

  ‘Well, let’s get you tested just to make sure you’re not anemic.’ ”

  “And?”

  “And the results came back, and sure enough, I’m anemic.”

  “So they give you iron or something, right?”

  “They can treat the anemia, but there’s more to it. The anemia is just a symptom of something a little more serious.”

  He hesitated a moment, and I could tell he was choosing his words carefully. “After my blood work came back, Dr. Bober said she wanted to rule out some other things and sent me in for more tests.” He paused. “They show I have a kind of leukemia, and—”

  “Leukemia?”

  “Not the bad kind,” he said quickly. “There’s acute leukemia, which is what you think of when you say leukemia—the kind that can kill so quickly. I don’t have that. I have something called chronic lymphocytic leukemia. It’s just lying there in my bloodstream not doing anything. The doctors say it could sit there dormant for years.”

  “How many years?” I asked.

  “Anywhere from a couple to ten or twenty,” Dad said.

  My mind raced to process everything I was hearing. “So that’s good, right?” I asked. “It may just sit there for the rest of your life.”

  “That’s what the doctor said: ‘Go about your life, Richard, and forget about it.’ I should try not to worry and they’d treat any symptoms, like the anemia, and monitor my blood every four months.”

  “How are you doing on the ‘try not to worry’ front?” I asked.

  “So far pretty good,” he said. “I just want to stay healthy so I can take care of Mother for as long as she needs me.”

  Standing phone to ear from three states away, I felt a swell of

  v i i i • P R E F A C E

  optimism. Dad always bounced back. He had bounced back from the heart attack he suffered shortly after retiring from General Motors and from prostate cancer after I was married. Dad, a man who greeted adversity with stoic determination, would bounce back from this, too. The sleeping cancer would simply be something to monitor as my father marched vigorously into his nineties, holding together the strands of the life he and my mother had spent more than a half century building together.

  “It’s really nothing,” Dad assured me. “I’m going to follow doctors’ orders and try to forget about it.”

  That’s when I asked: “Dad, what can I do?”

  “Not a thing,” he insisted. “I’m fine. Really.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” he said and then added the one request that was so deeply important to him, the one thing that seemed so simple and effortless, and yet the one I had such difficulty delivering to him.

  “Just keep me in your prayers,” he said.

  p a r t o n e

  o

  Growing Up

  Chapter 1

  o

  Wake up, little sleepyheads.”

  The voice drifted through the ether. “Wake

  up, wake up, boys. Today we leave on vacation.” I

  opened one eye to see my mother leaning over my oldest brother’s bed across the room. In her hand was the dreaded feather. “Time to get up, Timmy,” she coaxed and danced the feather tip beneath his nostrils. Tim batted it away and tried to bury his face in the pillow, but this did nothing to deter Mom, who relished finding innovative ways to wake us each morning.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and fell back on an old favorite.

  “Now, if you don’t like Mary Kathleen McGurny just a little bit, keep a straight face,” she chirped cheerily. I could see my brother, eyes still shut, lock his l
ips together, determined not to let her get the best of him this time. “Just a tiny bit? An eeny teeny bit?” she coaxed, and as she did she brushed the feather across his neck.

  He clamped his lips tight and squeezed his eyes shut. “Do I see a little smile? Oops, I think I see just a little one. You like her just a tiny bit, don’t you?” Tim was twelve and loathed Mary Kathleen

  4 • J O H N G R O G A N

  McGurny as only a twelve-year-old boy could loathe a girl known for picking her nose so aggressively on the playground it would bleed, which was exactly why my mother had chosen her for the morning wake-up ritual. “Just a little?” she teased, flicking the feather across his cheek and into his ear until he could take it no more. Tim scrunched his face into a tortured grimace and then exploded in laughter. Not that he was amused. He jumped out of bed and stomped off to the bathroom.

  One victory behind her, my mother and her feather moved to the next bed and my brother Michael, who was nine and equally repelled by a girl in his class. “Now, Mikey, if you don’t like Alice Treewater just a smidgen, keep a straight face for me . . .” She kept at it until she broke his resolve. My sister, Marijo, the oldest of us four, no doubt had received the same treatment in her room before Mom had started on us boys. She always went oldest to youngest.

  Then it was my turn. “Oh, Johnny boy,” she called and danced the feather over my face. “Who do you like? Let me think, could it be Cindy Ann Selahowski?” I grimaced and burrowed my face into the mattress. “Keep a straight face for me if it isn’t Cindy Ann Selahowski.” Cindy Ann lived next door, and although I was only six and she five, she had already proposed marriage numerous times. My chin trembled as I fought to stay serious. “Is it Cindy Ann? I think it just might be,” she said, darting the feather over my nostrils until I dissolved into involuntary giggles.

  “Mom!” I protested as I jumped out of bed and into the cool dewy air wafting through the open window, carrying on it the scent of lilacs and fresh-cut grass.

  “Get dressed and grab your beer cartons, boys,” Mom announced. “We’re going to Sainte Anne de Beaupré’s today!” My beer carton sat at the foot of my bed, covered in leftover wallpa-per, the poor man’s version of a footlocker. Not that we were poor, but my parents could not resist the lure of a nickel saved. Each kid had one, and whenever we traveled, our sturdy cardboard

  T H E L O N G E S T T R I P H O M E • 5

  cartons doubled as suitcases. Dad liked the way they stacked neatly in the back of the Chevrolet station wagon. Both of them loved that they were completely and utterly free.

  Even in our very Catholic neighborhood, all the other families took normal summer vacations, visiting national monuments or amusement parks. Our family traveled to holy miracle sites. We visited shrines and chapels and monasteries. We lit candles and kneeled and prayed at the scenes of alleged divine interventions.

  The Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, located on the Saint Lawrence River near Quebec, was one of the grandest miracle sites in all of North America, and it was just a seven-hour drive from our home outside Detroit. For weeks, Mom and Dad had regaled us with tales of the many miracles of healing that had happened there over the centuries, beginning in 1658 when a peasant working on the original church reported a complete cure of his rheumatism as he laid stones in the foundation. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Dad liked to say.

  When I got downstairs with my packed beer carton, Dad already had the tent trailer, in which we would sleep on our expedition, hooked to the back of the station wagon. Mom had sandwiches made, and soon we were off. Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré did not disappoint. Carved of white stone and sporting twin spires that soared to the heavens, the basilica was the most graceful, imposing building I had ever seen. And inside was better yet: the walls of the main entrance were covered with crutches, canes, leg braces, bandages, and various other implements of infirmity too numerous to count that had been cast off by those Sainte Anne had chosen to cure.

  All around us were disabled pilgrims who had come to pray for their own miracles. We lit candles, and then Mom and Dad led us into a pew, where we dropped to our knees and prayed to Sainte Anne, even though none of us had anything that needed fixing. “You need to ask to receive,” Mom whispered, and I bowed my head and asked Sainte Anne to let me walk again if I ever

  6 • J O H N G R O G A N

  lost the use of my legs. Outside, we climbed the hillside to make the Stations of the Cross, pausing to pray at each of the fourteen stops depicting an event in Jesus’ final hours. The highlight of the visit was our climb up the twenty-eight steps that were said to be an exact replica of the steps Christ climbed to face Pontius Pilate before his crucifixion. But we didn’t just climb the steps.

  We climbed them on our knees, pausing on each one to say half a Hail Mary aloud. We went in pairs, Mom and Dad first, followed by Marijo and Tim, and behind them, Michael and me. Step One:

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” As we uttered the name of Jesus, we bowed our heads deeply. Step Two: “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen.” Then we moved to the next step and started again. Over and over we recited the prayer as we slowly made our way to the top, Michael and I jabbing each other and crossing our eyes to see who could make the other laugh first.

  On our way to the parking lot, we visited the gift shop, where I picked out a snow globe with Sainte Anne inside. Mom filled a bottle from a spigot behind the cathedral, figuring it had to be as holy as the water from Lourdes and other miracle sites. The parish priest would later bless it for her, and she would keep it in the linen closet and bring it out whenever we were sick with a particularly stubborn fever or sore throat or earache, touching the water to our foreheads or throats or ears and tracing a sign of the cross.

  On the way home, Mom and Dad played the honeymoon game, which always delighted us kids no end. “Get down low, children, out of sight!” Mom coached and slid over in the seat up close to my father, resting her head on his shoulder and planting little kisses on his neck and cheek as he drove, both hands on the wheel and a quiet grin on his face. Dad wasn’t one for displays of affection—he sent each of us off to bed at night not with a hug or a kiss but with

  T H E L O N G E S T T R I P H O M E • 7

  a firm handshake—yet he seemed to enjoy the honeymoon game as much as the rest of us.

  “Smooch smooch, Richie,” Mom cooed.

  We four kids lay in a heap on the backseat, looking up at them in lovebird mode and squealing at our clever subterfuge. Every passing motorist surely thought our parents were newlyweds on their honeymoon. Little did any of them know that the smooch-ing couple already had four children hiding in the backseat and giggling with abandon. “Here comes another car,” we’d scream in unison. “Kiss him again! Kiss him again!” And Mom would gladly comply.

  Another successful family miracle trip was coming to an end.

  We had camped out in the crisp Canadian air, thrown rocks in Lake Ontario, eaten my mother’s famous pork and beans cooked over an open fire, and prayed our way up twenty-eight steps on our knees. Life was safe and warm and good. I had parents who loved God and each other and us. I had two brothers and a sister to play and run and fight with. I had a house and toys and my own beer carton in which I could carry anything I wanted. Best of all, I had the comforting knowledge that if anything ever did go wrong, there was always Sainte Anne de Beaupré just a day’s drive away, ready to use her miraculous healing powers to make everything right again. It was a dreamy, wondrous time.

  Chapter 2

  o

  My parents met in 1947, shortly after my father re-

  turned from four years on an aircraft carrier in the

  South Pacific. A year to the day later, they were

  married, and just weeks after that, expecting their first child.

  Before they set off on the road to pa
renthood, though, they made a pact that each of their offspring would be named after either the Virgin Mary or her husband, Saint Joseph, who had selflessly taken on all the responsibility of fatherhood without any of the fun of procreation. Immaculate conception was a given in our household, with no room for debate. The Holy Spirit had miraculously planted the seed of God’s only begotten son into the Virgin Mary’s womb. Uncomplaining Saint Joseph took it from there. Even as a little boy, I thought this terribly unfair.

  My sister, the eldest, got the Daily Double of Catholic names.

  My parents baptized her Mary Josephine, later shortened to Marijo. Next came Timothy Joseph and Michael Joseph.

  But before the boys there was another girl, one who didn’t make it. My parents baptized her Mary Ann, even though she

  T H E L O N G E S T T R I P H O M E • 9

  never took a single breath. The only one ever to see her, and then only for a few moments, was my father, who described her as perfect in every way, like a flawless porcelain doll. Hospitals administered anesthesia to women delivering in those days, and when my mother finally awoke, my father was waiting at her bedside searching for the words to tell her. He would never forget the look on her face in the instant she opened her eyes. She was radiant, a smile spreading on her lips, her eyes widening with joyous expectation. Then he squeezed her hand and said, “Ruthie, our baby’s with the Lord now.”

  They cried and prayed and told themselves this was God’s plan and there had to be a reason she was in heaven already before she ever had a chance to experience life on earth. Then they arranged for a Catholic burial, her tiny casket resting to this day between my grandparents’ graves in Ann Arbor.

  I came along in 1957. John Joseph. Mom and Dad were hoping I would be a Saint Patrick’s Day baby. When I missed that date, they rooted for Saint Joseph’s Day, which would have been fitting, given all our middle names. Late again. When I finally arrived on March 20, I had other bragging rights. I came into the world on the first day of spring.

  Mom called me her little daffodil.