FEELING THE VOID

It was a year ago today in Southside Hospital Bay Shore that my sense of stability and security in all things I knew was destroyed and the idea that mortality does exist for me and all those who live in my world is, real.

I sat in the hospital room across the bed late one Sunday afternoon a year ago today where my brother-in-law John lay quickly passing from this world. His wife my sister Theresa and her three adult children and one grandchild Nick, sat alongside the bed, and we all felt the hopelessness as the event transpired, and the helplessness of watching a good man leaving us forever.

John was the brother I never had, and when he came along so many years ago, I didn’t need to wish anymore, I had a brother and he filled the void. Through the years when I was in need of help, he always was the first to respond, always came quickly, with a sunny disposition and his tools, and laid waste to my problem. If I could design such a brother, it would not be that good, because I couldn’t imagine it.

When I was in college and struggling to get through, he helped me on a Friday night, as I waited on campus for him to pick me up and drive me to his house when I didn’t own a car. In his Volkswagen Beetle we would tool along the LIE and discuss the Mets or football or even politics, as he shifted rather than own an automatic, because it was cheaper.

He was very much indeed family. He was a man who was serious with a light side that I could exploit. I teased him and he never got mad, we as a family would joke about his Polish heritage, Dad often causing him heartburn over the fact that he kiddingly felt John was cheap because my sister didn’t live in a mansion yet could afford to. John was frugal and practical, always looked for a bargain, but was never cheap. He treated his wife and kids like royalty.

On his birthday every December 26^th, he would buy his wife and kids presents! If I walked into his house at Christmas or Easter, he would reach for his bottle of Jack Daniels he saved for me and I would be on my own with it, another bottle in reserve.

He introduced Kielbasa and horseradish with pumpernickel bread for late breakfast, Polish phrases for any occasion and love for his NY Giants and Mets. We could argue like the dickens over unimportant things just to have a spirited conversation, and then turn around a talk like it never happened.

He had a great homespun sense about him, with his plaid shirts in the winter, his knobby knees in the summer shorts, loved his gardening and loved his landscaping. He was a great father and grandfather, up until his last days: he was a good man.

I miss him, wish dearly he was alive and listening to a Rachmaninoff piano concerto, or arguing the politically correct police. He was old school, really had no prejudices or a mean streak, coming from immigrant parents from Poland, his Mom dying when he was but a small child and his old world Dad raising him and three brothers in New York City. He immediately took to my mother, treating her better than her own children!

He once said to me when his first child was born, a little beautiful girl named Laurie Ann, that it took a real man to raise a daughter! He also said my Mets stunk. After a particularly heartbreaking loss, he would call me and say these words only: “Joe, your Mets stink!” This after watching them aggravating the heck out of him with their lousy play!

As I sat in the chair watching the events unfold in the hospital, I got up and went over to his side and held his hand, his head was slumped in his chest and his breathing was rapid, as the morphine hadn’t yet kicked in, and a sense of calm came over me. Pained as I was, I knowing the inevitable lose that was coming, kissed him goodbye, I had never kissed him before!

I searched the eyes in the room and could see them fading and hungry for one more time, one more dinner, one more day with John, we would settle for even seconds more than he had.

Sitting down I kind of drifted back to my youth in college, the time he lent me his car, the time we went golfing together for the first time, the first ballgame and the times I would wait up for my sister and John to come home so we could play a game of pool on my dad’s pool table. He could play pool, golf and bowl, (I called bowling the Polish national sport) and would half smile. He was a great softball pitcher, throwing no hitter after no hitter, always pitching for IBM on the softball team.

He was a customer engineer, and that was how my sister met him. She would break an IBM machine and he would come and fix it, in his corporate wing-tipped shoes, white shirt, tie and brown tool case that looked like an attaché case. If you remember the 60’s then you remember the TV show the Rebel starring Nick Adams. He looked just like him! Whenever he would come over, I would sing: “Johnny Yuma was a rebel, he roamed through the West.”

In July I took him down to Cape May, to enjoy a week in the sun and to get away from the constant agony of cancer, and to give my sister a reprieve so they could both enjoy themselves as life was meant to be. We went through

great lengths, especially my sister to see he had a scooter to get about town and be as free as possible. It was his last time as a free spirit, and the last time I would see him happy as was my sister. It was the one thing TLW (The Little Woman) and I did that made us feel good about ourselves, and I can only gratefully thank my brother-in-law Kevin and his wife Sarah for their generosity in giving us their summer home for the week, it made John happy!

It’s been too long John.