“The State of Becoming”


By: Texas Stevens IV

 

The name Texas has been passed on to the men in my family for four generations. Even though one dies, pieces of his spirit live on through the capsule of the name. Rights and wrongs, accomplishments and failures; all of these are dragged along by five letters. Sometimes, I even think sins have found a way to rein in the name and ride it through the dust of decaying bodies. For the most part, I consider it an honor to hold the name that my great, great grandfather first held in the 1800s. However, I also hope that in my eventual burial, the name that I have considered an honor will rot in the ground with all my shortcomings, bound to the same fate as my dying flesh. I know my father wished the same of his own faults.

While reading, keep in mind that the final snapshots of a man’s life are merely beaten down, deteriorated versions of who he was, and that what you see are the final moments of the long, drawn out process of death, which are like a stone dropped in water. This is my way of burying what remained of my father.-TX


An IV camped beneath my father’s skin, pumping drugs of tolerance into his shocked system. A monitor next to his bed shot green lines up and then down, providing information on his heartbeat. Tubes ran out of his nostrils, supplying him with extra oxygen. One large, clear tube went underneath his generic hospital attire and into his swollen heart, draining it of excess fluid. His eyes were closed; I couldn’t blink.

Sometimes, when excess strain is applied to the body and its organs, the heart takes on more water than it should and swells to a size that makes it difficult to function. Sometimes, this begets a heart attack.


I would like to say that at a specific moment, the fragile, frustrated life left his body, along with his last breath, but that’s not true. The truth is much more horrific and a lot less poetic than what Hollywood films tend to show. People don’t simply cease to be; my father didn’t anyway. I don’t know when his soul was carried away. It took hours for my father to die, and trust me; patience doesn’t exist in a place like this, only sorrowful anticipation. The last time he was coherent was about eight hours before he was declared dead, done… gone. He seemed lucid, for a few minutes anyway. I knew he was going to die that night, the nurse told me. I had asked, hoping to gain power over the situation, to remain composed and strong; something that I didn’t see happening in anyone else whose warm, life filled body sat or shuffled in that cold, white room.

He blinked his eyes a few times and then managed to hold them open. The cerulean blue they once were had faded closer to a light grey.

I don’t remember if anyone talked at first. Perhaps we did, but it was siphoned into the void, which had already begun to manifest itself in the depths of our hearts. For now, his words were the only ones that managed to escape the gravity.

“You know, don’t you?”

The sterile, hard floor caught his heavy words before we had a chance to digest their meaning.

“Yes,” I said. The levees holding my tears back began to bow and buckle, but I refused their release.

He proceeded to tell me of a folder on his computer that contained letters to each person in my family. I’m not sure why he told me. Maybe it was because I’m the oldest, or maybe simply because I’m good with computers. He told us all other things which I don’t recall. I know he told us he loved us. He must have known this was his last coherent moment, for he took full advantage of it. For the most part, he stared, probably trying to take in as much of us as he could before he left. On the other hand, maybe he was in shock, trying to comprehend what was happening to him.

Sometime after his parting words, he slipped back into his comatose like state. For the remainder of the night, I would wander back and forth between my friends in the waiting room, the nurse behind the glass window to my father’s room, and my family inside the room; searching for comfort, searching for solace in a time where the word “waiting” is correctly applied to every corner of the universe, every corner of our minds.

It seems a cruel punishment from God that as someone’s soul is plucked from time and space and brought into the unknown, you’re forced to search your own. It’s like being gutted alive.

My searching began in the faces of my family. I had been away for a while, running from the inevitable maybe. Six months prior to my father’s death, I was already mourning. While my mother, my brother, and my sister stayed and encouraged his dying body to continue on, to resist the weight of death, I fled.

I began my integration into the restaurant world. A new hire, at a new restaurant; training was intense. I was taught how to sell food, liquor, beer, and wine for much more than their worth. I learned terms, such as “Pinot Grigio” and commandments such as “Rape their wallets!” These became crucial to the way I thought. Four people, sitting around a square table were to be referred to as “guests” and not “customers.” This was taken very seriously at the restaurant. During the larger than life orientation, three hundred or so of us were warned prior to viewing a video that it contained “the C word.” Of course, this meant “customers.”

I was escaping; my family was sinking deeper. Mornings for my mom consisted of helping my father out of bed and getting him to their bathroom, which contained his dialysis machine. She would take hold of a clean syringe, hook it up to the white, refrigerator-sized machine and then carefully pierce the discolored, scarred skin covering the raised artery in my father’s left arm. For the next two to four hours, my father would remain sitting in his chair, while the machine did what his kidneys could not: clean his warm, toxic blood and then reinsert it, now cold, into his body. My father’s kidneys had become the broken string in his symphony of organs.

My brother, the baby of the family, would get home from high school shortly before my mom would leave for work. Typically, my sister would be off with her boyfriend somewhere, so my brother was left alone. He took care of my dad most every night; making him dinner, bringing him something to drink or whatever else he needed. Maybe he would have left if he had had the option, but he didn’t.

My family was hard at work and so was I. Often, I would pull sixty-plus hour weeks. On many weekends, it wasn’t uncommon for me to go into work at 9am and not come home until 2:30am. The restaurant carried me away like a torrent and I did nothing to resist. 

The Tuscan inspired red brick building turned out to be a virtual vault, filled with potential cash. One night, the restaurant served as the location for a cocktail party. The man who was throwing it was the developer of the shopping center Brio was built in. The opportunity to work this party was clearly a privilege, only given to the best of the new servers. I was one among seven of these privileged few. The evening began with the GM throwing a stack of hundred dollar bills on the table for us; it was a non-tipping event. The evening was short. The other servers and I simply walked around and offered food or wine to guests. It was the easiest hundred bucks I’d ever made. It did nothing but spur my excitement forward.

Nine am to two am. Nine am to two am. That was my life, nothing more. Brio became, not my second home, but my first. The fake, peeling Tuscan villa painted, dirt colored walls were now as familiar to me as my own room. The dim lighting that glowed warm, behind the seemingly Jupiter inspired bowls that hung from the ceiling were as real to me as a sunrise over the ocean.

Being new to waiting tables, I always ran. This was also due to something in the Brio handbook, emphasizing a “sense of urgency.” It was never a matter of looking busy, which was never a problem. I was always busy. Table to table,

“Hi. How are ya’ll doing today?” No intelligible response.

“Great. Well, my name’s Texas and I’m going to be taking care of you tonight.” Pause and wait.

“What’s your name?”

“Texas.”

“Is it a nickname or what?”

“Nope, real name.”

“That is so cool!”

This job made clear to me what movie stars must feel like. They must get tired of people constantly asking who they are. “You’re Brad Pitt, aren’t you?” At least every other table took valuable time away from other tables, asking me about my name. People became very predictable and riddled with redundancies. I tried to maintain a level of surprise and gratitude, always thanking them for the compliments. I find it hard to believe that I was ever very convincing. I may be able to produce fictitious characters on paper with fabricated emotions but acting in the real world is another story.

Often times, on the rare occasion that I saw my family, my sister and I would fight.

“You think you’re too good for us, don’t you?”

“No. Are you serious? Why would you say that?”

“You’re never here anymore. We’re still your family, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. I just work a lot.”

These fights would go on until, realizing we were talking in circles, I would walk away. It always frustrated me that she thought that I thought I was too good for them. I didn’t think that. I don’t even know that she sincerely thought what she said. I know that she was going through a lot, we all were. I know that she just needed me around more, to help, to cope. But I couldn’t stay. The reality of it is, I was so caught up in what I was doing, that I didn’t hear her. I didn’t hear what she was really saying. I didn’t hear what she was asking. I wasn’t even able to hear myself. Like a mind-numbing drug, the restaurant was loud and kept me busy enough to drown out anything I might have been struggling with. 

I continued to work. My body was exhausted; my wallet was full. I eventually got used to the restaurant routine. I became quite good at it. While making money remained my main reason for being there, it simultaneously helped maintain the shroud of denial, which protected me from my father’s situation. However, when reality finally managed to penetrate the thick shield I had constructed, my denial crumbled around my black, polished shoes. My mom sent me a text one Friday night, while I was working.

  “Son, your dad’s at Baylor Hospital.”

I was quickly dropped back into the thick, muddied waters of reality.

I’m told that my sanctification, the process by which Christians are sanctified/made pure, is progressive. It is continual, not stagnant nor faltering. However, as I look at this point in my life, I cannot help but feel that at times my sanctification is regressive. I’m also told that everything, including sanctification, is given to me and maintained by God. Therefore, sanctification, as myself is at God’s disposal. But when I come to a point like the one I was at on that Friday night, when the whole world seems to stop and I’m forced to look at my life and examine its worth, its purpose; the thought that where I am might be of my own doing, becomes the catalyst for a whole mess of other thoughts.

My dad didn’t die that night. I’m glad, because I wasn’t able to go and see him until the next day. He did die the following night, while my family and I watched and cried. We sang old hymns to see him off into the next life. A group of friends I forgot I had, waited and prayed for us in the waiting room.

After the breath left his body, (I don’t know that referring to it as breath is very appropriate, for something in his body continued to contract and provide what appeared to be tiny gasps, long after he was gone) I had to carry the news, heavy as it was, to my friends. Many times, on my way to the waiting room, I was forced to stop, as I stumbled over lead soaked tears.

“He’s dead,” I told them. Then I collapsed into a friend’s open arms.

I’ve heard it said that music is in a constant state of becoming. After my dad died, mourning set up shop alongside music. He was gone and my family was melting.

There’s not one nanosecond that goes wasted between death and a funeral. The body starts to deteriorate at such a rapid rate that unless funeral preparations are made immediately, loved ones wanting to grab one last snapshot of their lost friend, brother, son, father, husband, won’t see anything more than a rotting, slightly decomposed version of the man they once knew. Physical preservation of the ethereal memory is crucial to making it through a time like this.

At this point, seeing my mom attempt to make the necessary phone calls, while puddles of salty tears formed around her feet, became too much to watch. I stepped in, found a pastor, and invited some close friends and family. Since my tears had long dried up, my emotions had to find another way to manifest themselves, to punish my body and make sure it didn’t forget what had happened. They did this by gathering in the top of my spine. The size of the communion filled the surrounding muscles beyond maximum capacity and caused my neck to stiffen. I pushed forward.

The funeral came and went, much quicker than my father’s long, drawn out death. I said some words, my Granddad said some words, and then the pastor said some words. After that, we played and sang worship songs. It’s the way we thought he would want to be officially seen off, with people singing and rejoicing to God; not crying and wondering, “what now?” He also would have wanted to remind us that he’d see us again soon; he’d be waiting. We did that too. I told everyone that he was looking down on us singing and that we should join him in song. The pastor gave us solid scripture, to reiterate the same fact.

I’m told and I believe that my father is in Heaven. Maybe he’s waiting; maybe he’s not. I’m also told that time doesn’t exist where he is, and that he’s able to see God’s face, something which is much more interesting and awe-inspiring than anything down here. And if time doesn’t exist, maybe he’s not waiting. Maybe we’re already there.


THE END