Kevin
Traveling was tiring even before I became paralyzed, but traveling as a disabled person was downright draining. You wouldn’t think it would be, considering the fact that I no longer had to walk through huge airport terminals, dragging my luggage along like I did when I was able-bodied. Now I could just ride around in my chair and let other people do all the heavy lifting. But, let me tell you, traveling still took it out of me. I don’t know if it was the stress and anxiety, the early morning wake-up, or the bout of AD I’d experienced on the plane, but by the time I made it to my hotel room, I was beyond exhausted.
I looked longingly at the bed, missing the days when I could just lie down and take a nap if I wanted to. Now, it took too much time and effort to transfer out of my chair to the bed and back again. I settled for reclining my chair and closing my eyes for a few minutes.
“You okay, Kev?”
I opened my eyes to see Nick looking at me in concern. “Yeah,” I tried to reassure him. “I’m just tired.” My headache was gone, but the combination of dehydration and autonomic dysreflexia had left me completely drained. “How are you doing?” I narrowed my eyes at Nick, who hadn’t sat down since we’d arrived at the hotel.
“Fine,” he replied with a shrug. He had been buzzing around the room, unfolding my portable shower commode from its carrying case, hanging up our funeral clothes, and making sure everything else was ready so my routine would go smoothly in the morning.
“Why don’t you just chill for a second?” I suggested, patting the foot of the bed beside me. As much as I appreciated his attention to detail, I worried about him, too. He had been doing well with his sobriety and diet so far, and I didn’t want the stress and strain of traveling to derail him.
Nick flashed me a sheepish smile as he sank down onto the mattress. “This is squishy,” he said, bouncing a little. “You gonna be able to transfer in and out of one of these beds?”
“With your help, yeah,” I said, smiling back at him. “Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”
I couldn’t complain about the accommodations. It had been hard to find a hotel with an accessible room available at the last minute, but by calling around and dropping my name, I had managed to book us one with an adjoining room so no one had to share a bed. Nick had agreed to stay in my room in case I needed anything in the night, letting AJ have the room next door to himself.
Nick looked at the clock. “We should probably start getting dressed for the visitation.” He went to the closet to take down the dress shirt and pants he had just hung up. He laid them out on one of the beds as I backed my chair up next to the other.
Nick dug my wooden transfer board out of one of the bags and wedged it under my thighs as I shifted my weight. Then he helped me slide across it to the bed. I reached down and tried to wrangle my spasming legs onto the bed by hooking my forearms under my knees and pulling them up the way I’d practiced in therapy. It was difficult; I still didn’t have the upper body strength I used to, and my lower body was nothing but dead weight.
“Here, let me help you, dude,” Nick said, laughing as he lifted my legs onto the bed in one fell swoop. “That looked painful.”
I lost my balance, flopping backward so that I was lying flat. “You should have let me struggle,” I replied irritably, frowning at the ceiling. “I need to learn how to do more by myself.”
“I don’t mind,” he said with a shrug.
“Well, I do. I hate being so helpless, having to rely on other people to do the simplest things for me.”
Nick raised his eyebrows. “Sorry, bro, my bad. Here… have at it.” He tossed my clothes across the gap between the two beds. They landed on top of me.
As he turned around and started taking off his own clothes, I quickly realized my mistake. Lying on my back like that, I couldn’t even sit up on my own, let alone undress myself. But pride kept me from immediately admitting defeat. If I could push myself back up into a sitting position, I could probably take off my shirt and put on the new one. That was also something I had worked on in therapy, but only while I was sitting in my wheelchair.
Using the technique Ellis had taught me months ago, I swung my arms back and forth across my body, trying to gain enough momentum to roll onto my right side. Once I managed to do that, I was able to prop myself up on my elbow and use my forearm to gradually push myself back up. It was a painstakingly slow process, but I finally succeeded. I sat with the posture of an elderly hunchback, slumped forward with my splayed knees bent so I wouldn’t fall back again, the heel of my right hand planted firmly into the mattress to brace myself so I wouldn’t tip over sideways. I slid my left hand under the hem of my t-shirt, fumbling with the fabric until I had worked it up and over my head. Then I freed my arms by pulling them out through the holes.
Tossing the t-shirt aside, I reached for my gray dress shirt. The top button was fastened to keep it on the hanger, and try as I might, I didn’t have the finger dexterity to unhook it. Putting on a pair of dress pants with no stretch seemed equally impossible. I watched Nick with envy as he stepped easily into his own pants, one leg at a time, and pulled on his shirt, his fingers numbly fastening the buttons as he turned back to face me.
I let out a sigh and swallowed the little pride I had left. “I’m sorry for snapping at you,” I said in a low voice. “Will you please help me get dressed?”
Nick looked up without the slightest trace of a smirk on his face. “Sure.” He didn’t say anything else as he dutifully took off my shoes and shorts and put on the tighter-fitting pants. I lay back down and glared at the ceiling again as he gradually tugged the pants up to my waist, lifting each of my feet, legs, and hips as he worked his way up. Finally, he zipped up the fly and fastened the front button before he sat me back up on the side of the bed. He held my shirt for me, helping me shove my arms into the sleeves. Then he bent down to button me up.
“Thanks, Dad,” I muttered dully, feeling like a two-year-old as he changed my socks, put on my dress shoes, and tied my tie for me.
Nick said nothing, just patted my shoulder as he straightened up and got the slide board ready to transfer me back to my chair.
Once I was settled, we went next door to get AJ. We had agreed to go to the funeral home early, hoping to pay our respects to the Doroughs and get out before our presence turned the visitation into a spectacle. Since the details of Hoke’s services had been published publicly in his obituary, I worried that fans would show up.
We all piled back into the accessible van I’d rented for the short ride to the funeral home. A line had already formed outside when we arrived, but the Backstreet Boys’ longtime bodyguard Q met us out front and escorted us inside. “Howie’s family’s almost ready to start seeing people,” he told us. “Brian’s already here.”
It was cold inside the funeral home; the air conditioning must have been on full blast to counteract the Florida heat and humidity outside. My body struggled to adjust to the rapid change in temperature from the van to the parking lot to the lobby, but I knew better than to complain.
Q took us into a small room, where Brian and Leighanne were waiting. “Hey, cuz,” said Brian, bending over to hug me. “How’s it going?”
“Not bad,” I answered honestly. My first anniversary without Kristin had been hard, one of the hardest days I’d had since the day she’d died, but since then, I had felt better about everything. Cleaning out her half of the closet had helped. In a way, it was cleansing for my soul as well. The empty shelves and racks where her clothes had hung reminded me of the hole in my heart, but they also represented a fresh start. While I could never replace Kristin, I now had room to grow and fill my life with other things that would make me happy. I finally felt like I could go on living again.
“How was your flight?” Leighanne asked.
Nick, AJ, and I exchanged glances. “Not bad,” I said again with a shrug. “Better than I was expecting it to be, anyway.” That was the truth, too. I was tired, but the trip had gone surprisingly smoothly for my first time flying as a quadriplegic. It could have been so much worse.
Leighanne smiled and squeezed my shoulder. “Good. I’m glad you guys were able to make it. Howie will be happy you’re here.”
“Have you seen him yet?”
Brian shook his head. “No, we just got here a few minutes before y’all did. We flew down this morning.”
The five of us made small talk for a few more minutes until a man from the funeral home came in to tell us, “The Dorough family is ready to receive friends now. Follow me, please.”
He led us down the hall to a larger, dimly-lit room with rows of chairs facing a platform at the front, where Howie’s father lay in an open casket surrounded by flowers. A lump rose in my throat as I looked around the room, blinking back the tears that had already begun to fill my eyes. The scene reminded me of my own father’s funeral.
Howie’s family stood up front with the casket. As we slowly approached them, taking time to look at the photos that lined the room, the other guys hung back to let me go first. Howie stepped forward when he saw us, leaning over to hug me tightly. “It’s good to see you, Kevin,” he murmured in my ear. “Thanks for coming all this way. It means the world to us to have you here.”
“I wouldn’t have missed it,” I replied, giving him a grim smile as he straightened up. “I’m so sorry for what you’re going through, brother. I know how much this hurts.”
Howie nodded, his hand lingering on my shoulder. “I know you do. Thanks, man.”
I continued down the line, offering my condolences to Howie’s brother, John, his sisters, Pollyanna and Angie, and their mother, Paula. Though the women accepted my words of comfort with tears in their eyes, they all seemed remarkably composed. I supposed they had seen this day coming and tried to prepare themselves as much as they possibly could have. Still, I knew from past experience that you could never be fully prepared for the death of a parent.
I parked my chair in front of Hoke’s casket for a moment. From my seated position, my head was almost level with his as he lay on a bed of white satin. He looked nothing like the jovial guy I had known in the early days of the group, when Howie would invite us all over to his parents’ house in Orlando for Sunday afternoon barbecues and fish fries. His dad had reminded me of my own father, who had loved the great outdoors just as much as he loved the Lord, and he’d made me feel at home even when I was far from my family. But, just like my father, cancer had sucked the life out of him, leaving him looking like a mere shell of his former self. I could only bring myself to look for a few moments before I felt compelled to move on. Being so close to his casket brought back memories of seeing Kristin in the hospital, her face blank and colorless as she lay on a gurney, her body covered by a white sheet. Combined with the flashbacks to my father’s funeral, it was all too much for me. I fumbled with my joystick, forcing my chair to roll forward.
I waited in the corner of the room for the rest of the guys to finish giving Howie’s family their condolences. “You okay, Kev?” AJ asked when he joined me, noticing the tears in my eyes.
I nodded. “I’m fine. Just having a moment here,” I said, wiping my wet face with my fist. In spite of the wide, open space in front of me, I felt oddly claustrophobic, as if the walls were closing in on me.
AJ rested his hand on my shoulder as we waited for Nick and Brian. By the time they wandered over, other people were trickling into the room, so we didn’t stick around. I was secretly relieved to escape the dark, chilly funeral home and return to the light and warmth outside. The sky was overcast, the sun hidden behind a wall of dreary gray clouds that hung low over our heads, but I didn’t care. I sucked in grateful breaths of fresh air, glad to be out from under the heavy weight of grief that permeated the atmosphere inside the funeral home.
Brian and Leighanne went out to dinner with us after the visitation. “Poor Howie,” Leighanne said with a sigh as she absently twirled pasta around her fork. “It’s probably going to be so hard for him to go back on tour after this.”
Brian nodded in agreement, but Nick’s eyes widened. “Yeah, but it’ll be good for him to be busy again, don’t you think?” he asked hopefully, glancing at AJ. I heard the faint note of panic in his voice and figured he was secretly praying Howie wouldn’t want to postpone the tour again. Despite his recent health scare, Nick couldn’t wait to hit the road.
AJ shrugged. “I dunno… I mean, I didn’t really have a chance to grieve over my grandma’s death before we went back to work, and look at what happened to me. We need to give D as much time and space as he needs to get through this.”
Privately, I agreed with AJ, but I knew that wasn’t what Nick wanted to hear. “Howie’s not you, though,” he argued. “No offense…”
“Everyone grieves differently,” I said quietly, looking down at my dinner plate. “When my dad died, I just wanted to lay low and wallow for a while.”
The others fell silent as I spoke; I could feel their eyes on me. They all knew I was the only one who could fully understand what Howie was going through because I had been there before. Both of Brian’s parents, as well as his in-laws, were living. Nick and AJ still had their parents, too, although neither of them were close to their fathers. None of them knew what it felt like to lose a parent.
“It took me about a year to move on with my life. My mom finally convinced me to go back to Florida to follow my dreams because that’s what my dad would have wanted, but it was hard to leave her.” I felt a stab of guilt, remembering how she had tried to talk me into moving back home to Kentucky to live with her after the accident. I hadn’t taken her advice that time. Maybe I should have. Death reminds us that life is short. Someday, she would be gone, too.
“We’ll have to see where Howie’s head is at after the funeral,” Brian said reasonably. “No point in speculating about it right now.” That put an end to the tour talk. He and Leighanne took the conversation in a different direction, telling us about their latest home improvement projects and Baylee’s summer T-ball league, but my mind wandered back to memories of my dad and worries about my mom.
Inevitably, I wound up thinking of Kristin again, longing for my wife and the life we could have had together. When Leighanne described her plans for renovating their kitchen, I remembered how Kristin had wanted to repaint our dining room. I used to give her crap for being indecisive when it came to things like picking out paint colors. Now I would have given anything to spend another day running errands with her, bickering over shades of beige in the paint aisle at the hardware store. When Brian talked about teaching Baylee how to run the bases, I imagined me and Kristin taking Mason to his first T-ball game together. I pictured her sitting behind the dugout, looking cute in a ball cap and baseball tee as she cheered for our son, while I stood beside first base, coaching him and his teammates. The vision put a smile on my face before I realized it could never be. When Mason was old enough to play sports, I would have to watch from behind the fence in my wheelchair and tell him his momma was looking down on him from Heaven, never knowing whether it was true or not. My smile faded along with the fantasy as my eyes filled with tears.
Blinking, I looked down at the small, round bulge Kristin’s wedding band created beneath my shirt, where I always wore it resting close to my heart on its chain. I felt a hunger that had nothing to do with the food on my plate, a craving that could not be satiated. I missed her so much, it hurt.
After more than five months without her, my grief came and went in waves. Sometimes, it was just a series of little ripples that lapped around my feet without throwing me off balance. But this time, it rolled right over my head like a tsunami, knocking me down and dragging me out to sea. The dinner conversation continued around me, my friends seemingly oblivious to the fact that I was drowning.
***
As it turned out, Nick had noticed.
“You were quiet at dinner tonight,” he commented as he helped me get undressed for bed that night. “You okay?”
I nodded. “Yeah… just tired. It’s been a long, emotional day.” I lay on my back on the hotel bed, looking up at the ceiling. “The visitation brought back a lot of memories of when my dad died… and, of course, I kept thinking about Kristin.”
Nick gave me a sympathetic smile as he loosened the button on the waistband of my pants. “I know. Me too, man,” he replied, lifting my hips so he could pull the pants down my legs. “I mean, we just went through all this for her a few months ago.”
Not all of us, I thought, swallowing hard. While Nick, AJ, Brian, and Howie had mourned with Kristin’s family and sung at her memorial service, I had been confined to a hospital bed, barely able to move a muscle. I had mourned in my own way, of course, but I had also missed out on most of the traditional grief rituals. My friends’ and family’s memories of the days following my wife’s death were a lot different from mine.
“I’m sure it’s a lot harder for you, though,” Nick added quickly, almost apologetically, as if he thought he was being insensitive. “Besides my Grandma Barb, I’ve never really lost anyone I love.” He sounded so young then, more like the innocent kid he’d been when I met him than the man he’d become.
I smiled at him. “It’s not a competition, Nick. It’s hard for everyone to see one of your friends hurting, no matter what your history is or what kind of relationship you had with their loved one.”
He nodded. “I know. Just saying.” He finished taking off my pants and folded them neatly before putting them back in the suitcase he’d packed my clothes in. Then he opened the bag that contained my medical supplies and found my overnight catheter bag.
“Thanks for taking one for the team and staying in here with me,” I told him as he hooked it up. “I’m sure you’d rather have a room to yourself like AJ.”
“I don’t mind.” Nick shrugged. “In all honesty, I never minded sharing rooms with you guys back in the day. I get bored being all by myself.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, well, when you can’t do anything on your own, you miss being by yourself. Now, I’m never alone.”
He snickered. “You sound like Professor Quirrell.”
I didn’t get the reference. “Who?”
Nick just shook his head. “Never mind.” He held up my night bag. “Now, where the hell am I gonna hang this thing? The bed doesn’t have a rail like your bed at home.”
That was one thing I hadn’t thought of. “Can you just set it on the floor?”
He made a face. “Will it still fill right that way? What if it leaks? Or I accidentally step on it when I’m turning you in the night?”
I cringed, imagining a full bag of urine bursting under Nick’s foot. “Yeah, that wouldn’t be good. How about a waste basket? Could you put it in that and hang it on the side?”
His eyes lit up. “Good idea! Gimme a sec.” He took the trash bag out of the waste basket by the desk and brought it over to the bed. I couldn’t really see what he was doing from my position, but my plan must have worked because a moment later, he announced, “Perfect fit!”
“Good,” I said, relieved.
Nick tucked my feet under the turned-down covers and pulled the sheet and bedspread up over my chest. “Comfy?”
Since I couldn’t feel the bottom three-quarters of my body, it was hard to know if I was truly comfortable or not. But I answered yes anyway, knowing I could count on my trusty AD to kick in and let me know if something wasn’t right.
While Nick puttered around, getting himself ready for bed, I called my mother-in-law, who was staying at my house. “Hi, Susan,” I said when she answered. “Just calling to check in. How’s it going with Mason?”
“Great!” she replied cheerfully. “He’s been a delight! I just got him into his PJs, and we’re about to read a bedtime story.”
“Ha, same here – well, not the bedtime story, unless Nick wants to read me one.” I glanced over at him with a grin. “Glad it’s going well. Can you put Mason on the phone? I don’t know if he’ll understand what’s going on, but I wanna tell him goodnight.”
“Of course! One second.” I heard her fumbling around in the background for a few seconds and her voice, fainter, saying, “Mason, Daddy’s on the phone. Wanna talk to Daddy?” Then she came back to say, “Here he is.”
I smiled, holding the phone tighter to my ear. “Hi, Mason! It’s Daddy! Can you hear me?” I waited, listening hopefully for his babbling, but he didn’t say anything. “I hope you’re having fun with Grandma!” I went on with my one-sided conversation. “I miss you, buddy. Daddy will be home soon. I love you!”
Mason didn’t make a peep until Susan must have tried to take the phone away; then he started to cry. “Oh dear,” I heard her say. “I didn’t mean to cause a fuss.”
“Aw, it’s okay,” I said, although the sound tugged at my heartstrings. “I better let you go anyway so you can get him to bed. He’s probably just tired.”
“Yes, he didn’t take the best nap earlier,” she admitted. “But don’t you worry about a thing. I still remember how to rock a baby to sleep.” Hearing the note of sadness in her voice, I remembered that Kristin had been her last baby. “Get some rest yourself, and please give my condolences to the Doroughs.”
“I will,” I promised. “Thanks again, Susan. Goodnight.”
I got off the phone just as Nick came out of the bathroom, wearing a wifebeater and boxer shorts. He helped me plug my phone into its charger and set it on the bedside table. Then he turned on the TV, shut off the lights, and crawled into the other bed. As he flipped through the channels, I felt a comforting sense of normalcy. Lying in bed with the lights off, I didn’t look or feel disabled. It seemed almost like the good old days we had talked about earlier, when we’d regularly shared hotel rooms. It was nice to feel like my old self again, if only for a moment.
But the moment passed, replaced by a sense of melancholy as I reflected on the day’s events. I thought about Howie and his siblings, who were preparing to bury their father, and of their mother, who would have to say a final goodbye to her husband. Although I wanted to be there for Howie in his time of grief, I was dreading the funeral the next day. Hearing Howie’s siblings eulogize their father would take me right back to my own dad’s funeral, while listening to the priest speak about the promise of eternal life after death would no doubt make me think of Kristin. I prayed that the Bible was right about Heaven, that I would be reunited with both of them at the end of my life on Earth.
Some days, I wished I could join them sooner rather than later, escape the broken body I’d been imprisoned in since the accident and be free. But I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Mason behind. The sight of Howie and his siblings standing teary-eyed next to their father’s casket strengthened my resolve to stay alive for my son.
Remembering Mason’s cries as Susan took the phone from him, I felt homesick. I missed my son. I missed my dad. Most of all, I missed my wife. My disability would have been so much easier to manage with her by my side. But I was grateful to Nick and AJ for stepping up to help me the way they had. Once they went back on tour, I would miss them, too.
And then what? I wondered. I still hadn’t hired anyone else to help me, and I only had a month to figure it out. In the stillness of the night, the worry that I wouldn’t be able to find the right place to take Nick and AJ’s place as my personal assistant and Mason’s nanny crept into my mind. In spite of how tired I was, it took me a long time to fall asleep.
I felt like I had barely closed my eyes when Nick’s alarm went off. I heard him groan as he got up, fumbling for the light switch, and stumbled out of bed. “Sorry, Nick,” I muttered, feeling bad for being the reason he had to wake up in the middle of the night. But I wasn’t willing to risk getting pressure sores from lying in the same position on a hotel mattress all night.
“‘S’alright,” Nick replied as he pulled back my covers and rolled me onto my right side, carefully repositioning the pillows around me to keep me in place. Then he pulled the covers up over me again, climbed back into bed, and turned out the lights again. Within a few minutes, he had fallen back to sleep.
But I lay awake, listening to his deep breathing and longing for Kristin.
***