CPUnk I write right. Right? Aye.

Sunday was a busy day (Updated)

It all began on Friday.

I had gone to Mass with Fr. Jack, and then cof­fee. We chat­ted for a while and then I drove home (I drove because I’m an Amer­i­can, and walk­ing more than 20 feet requires a car, or in my case, a truck).

[Note: a lot of this is really seri­ous stuff — but now that it’s some­what resolved, or seems to be that way, I can crack wise a lit­tle — some of it is let­ting off steam, some of it is because I watched 5 min­utes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadel­phia (shout out to Heather), so if I seem glib, under­stand that I’m really just vent­ing steam.  This entire expe­ri­ence was a trip.]

Wait, Mal­colm, did you say “Mass”?  Are you Catholic?

No, I’m not Catholic — but Fr. Jack likes to go, and I believe that the Com­mu­nion is about my rela­tion­ship with God, not which church I’m in — so I go, enjoy the ser­vice (it’s kinda cute, half the church is filled with Catholic Ele­men­tary School stu­dents, who also do the read­ings), skip over the Mary wor­ship stuff (hea­then) — get my wafer and wine, and head to cof­fee.  I’m being glib, but I actu­ally enjoy it.

So, I head home after chat­ting with Jack, and Kathy men­tions that ambu­lances arrived next door at our neighbor’s house.  His name is John, he’s 83 years old as of Sunday.

It seems that his kids had called 911 because he’d been in his chair in the liv­ing room for 9 days (or 7 at that point, I guess), and some of them were jus­ti­fi­ably freak­ing out.  After I got home, they called and told us that — and said that he’d refused to be taken away by the medics; and since he was “coher­ent” (more on that later), the medics decided to leave him there with gan­grene start­ing on his foot and con­ges­tive heart fail­ure build­ing in his chest while his abdomen expanded.  Lovely.  Thanks, medics.  I hate you.

So, I asked Kathy to make a sand­wich for him, and I took it over.  He looked really bad.  He had that dip in his neck that old peo­ple get when they can’t hold their heads up.  This is a guy who, in his prime, was my height, prob­a­bly beefier, and used to run tug­boats up to Alaska.  Tough guy.  Couldn’t lift his head.

A friend of his was there, so we all chat­ted — I asked him how he was doing, he said he was fine and that this would pass.  I asked him, point blank, if he was “giv­ing up.”  He said no, smiled and reas­sured me that he was going to get bet­ter.  He also told me that there was a doctor’s appoint­ment set up for Mon­day, and that he was going then.  Mon­day really felt like a long way away.

Well — I know this guy — and I know that any sort of con­vinc­ing is going to be a “long game” — and well, it’s not really my place as the neigh­bor to get in the mix, so I sat with him for a while, chat­ted with his friend, and then left.

Sat­ur­day comes around.  We’re all doing stuff — hang­ing out … but it was a rainy day, and the dri­ve­way filled up with water… I mean filled up … it was a swim­ming pool, and the storm drain was just a waste of time… Kathy had called Roto Rooter on Fri­day, and they arrived Sat­ur­day (busy sea­son for those guys).

So, I spend the bet­ter part of the after­noon with a very nice guy named Jeremy, try­ing to find the clog in our drain.  The snake goes up and around the entire skirt drain sys­tem of the house, but never makes it to the down part.  We spent hours.  He finally had to give up, was really sorry (gen­uinely), and then charged me $300 for the work.  He couldn’t help it — I don’t blame him, but at that point, I’m still underwater.

After that fiasco, which included rip­ping many of our down­spouts out so we could access the lame drainage sys­tem from all sorts of new direc­tions (someone’s gotta put those back, I guess), I might have just passed out in a chair or some­thing — then we had din­ner, the kids went to bed, and then there was a knock at the door.  It was late, night-time.

It was one of John’s daugh­ters, Randy, with her hus­band, Lee.

Now would be a good time to out­line some of the dynam­ics going on over there.  My under­stand­ing is that the youngest son, Michael, has power of attor­ney for John, and aside from that, all the other kids are shut out by John in terms of his will, his legal pro­ceeds, any­thing.  I could be com­pletely wrong about that — but well — that’s what I understand.

Even in the face of that, Randy and Lee show up pretty reg­u­larly to clean up for John, cook him food, etc.  He’s an ornery old dude — but he’s lik­able too.  Lee is slightly more out­spo­ken about how he feels regard­ing all of this — but Randy just grabs a bucket and keeps going.  As a final point of infor­ma­tion, Michael lives on the other side of John with his boyfriend, Roy.  From what I’ve heard, Michael comes in the morn­ing to drop off their dog with John (this is a dog that basi­cally (con­ve­niently?) blocks vis­its from all other peo­ple because it’s so jumpy, barky and freaked out), give John cof­fee, and head to work; I’ve also heard that Roy doesn’t come over, ever.

So, there we are, with Randy and Lee knock­ing at our door late at night.

They inform us that they’ve been stay­ing with John all day, and they’re pretty con­vinced he’s not going to make it to the morn­ing.  So I grab my coat, put on my shoes and head over with them through the pitch dark to get to his house… this is still Sat­ur­day night.

I come in, he’s look­ing pretty bad, they’re freak­ing out (qui­etly), and well — it’s grim.  So I start talk­ing to him about his walk (he was a Bap­tist Min­is­ter at one point in his life).  I ask him if he declares that Jesus is his Lord and Sav­ior, he says yes, I con­firm with him that I wit­ness that.  We talk a lit­tle bit more about Christ — and he assures me that if the Lord is ready to take him, he’s not going to fight it, but he’s pretty sure he’s going to make it to Mon­day and get to the doctor.

I checked with him again, asked him if he was giv­ing up, and he was pretty emphatic that he wasn’t.

I asked him if we could pray together, he said yes, so we prayed — I prayed over him for heal­ing — and then I headed out.

Randy and Lee thanked me for com­ing — I told them that there wasn’t much else to do but wait until Mon­day — and prayed in my heart against any acci­den­tal curses against him from all the despair.

I headed home — feel­ing pretty heavy, but pray­ing it up to the Lord.

We went to bed,  I got to bed late (as usual).

Sun­day Morning

I wake to the sound of a sin­gle siren “whoop” — and real­ize that it’s gotta be related to John.

I get up, throw on some clothes, look out the win­dow over the hedge and see an ambu­lance in front of the house.  There’s a lot of wail­ing sounds going on — so I’m think­ing that it’s pos­si­bly the worst — but I’m not say­ing that out loud (James 1:26) … so I head over there.

On arrival, I see that there’s not only an ambu­lance, there’s also a Fire Dept. Med­ical truck there, and there’s a crowd.  Y’see, Sun­day was John’s birth­day, so his whole fam­ily showed up.

In the mid­dle of this crowd is Michael, who seems pretty upset, so I’m think­ing he’s been cry­ing, pos­si­bly for sad rea­sons — but then as I approach, it seems to become clearer that it’s an argu­ment — that he’s explain­ing his moti­va­tions, that he’s hold­ing off his entire fam­ily to do his best to honor his father’s wishes and refuse the medics the right to take John out of there.

Well — it’s bed­lam.  They’re all flip­ping out, he’s going in and out of the house, the ambu­lances are there — they’re ask­ing why they can’t go in, the medic actu­ally closed the door on the face of one of the fam­ily mem­bers — it’s out of control.

Ten­sions rise — peo­ple are chal­leng­ing each other — and then Lee tells me that Roy had Michael call the cops on me last night because I’d come over to John’s house.  I think Roy has some sort of spir­i­tual prob­lem with me.  I did a quick inven­tory of my actions, remem­bered that it was just a quiet visit with prayer as the result of an invi­ta­tion from fam­ily — so I just told Lee not to worry about it.

Insert more freak­ing out, crowds of cry­ing peo­ple, every­body want­ing to know why they can’t get in there — why are they being blocked, what’s going on?

Then Roy shows up.  Lee seemed to be less than enthu­si­as­tic about that.  He started chal­leng­ing Roy — Roy remained calm (well, I might use the word aloof), and stood apart from every­thing.  I go over to him.

He tells me that he “knows these things” and that John is dying, and wants to know why they won’t just leave him alone.  I am under the impres­sion that Roy has no fam­ily, so that sort of ques­tion might make sense to him.  I responded with silence.

Lee shouted over my shoul­der some­thing to the effect of, “Why don’t you tell him what you did last night, Roy?  Tell him that you called the cops?!”

Roy seems slightly sheep­ish, and says that yes, Michael called the cops and said that I’d been over there throw­ing things and mak­ing a scene.  I told him that wasn’t true and let it drop.

Then the medic (this guy’s my favorite), comes out with Michael, and decides to walk off to the side with Michael and Roy, shun­ning the entire fam­ily, in order to dis­cuss some­thing — God knows what.

So I walk over there, on my way back to my property.

Michael chal­lenges me to go away, so I explained to him that I was headed to my property.

I take Michael’s hand, shake it, and tell him I don’t care about last night and that I’m sorry for what he’s going through.

I then turn to the medic, tell him that Roy is not a fam­ily mem­ber, that I have wit­nessed neglect (empha­sis on that legal term), and I want his name.

He tells me that the police are on their way and I can talk to them, but that I should leave now.  So I head off.

When I get home, I call 911 and talk with one of the offi­cers, and tell her that I think the sit­u­a­tion is pretty out of con­trol, and made some sort of statement.

Then Kathy and I prayed.  Large.  She got out a book of Inter­ces­sory prayer and we lifted it.  So, we sit there for a while after the prayer cover.

Through all of this, I’d say I was cruis­ing at about a 6 out of 10, even dur­ing the dis­course with the medic… which is slightly sur­pris­ing, but what­ever.  Dur­ing this time, I remem­bered my father (the lawyer) hav­ing told me a num­ber of times that the best thing you can do in a sit­u­a­tion like this is sit down and write your thoughts down while they’re still fresh in your mind.  So I grabbed my note­book, wrote across the top “Notes on John’s 911″, and started writ­ing… a lot.

Then God reminds me that I promised John I’d go to church on Sun­day and pray for him.

So I said to Kathy, “I guess the act of Faith now would be to go to church.”

So we got our clothes on, and even though it was late, we headed to the car (I’m still writ­ing in my note­book while all this is going on).

Then we found out our dri­ve­way was blocked by police cars pointed into John’s dri­ve­way.  (Mind you, through all of this, there’s a LOT of prayer going up — lots and lots — and I’m still writ­ing notes).

Kathy and I aren’t sure what to do — should we head back into the house?  We’re stand­ing in our ankle deep soak­ing dri­ve­way in our Sun­day best (I was wear­ing a fancy jacket even), sort of won­der­ing what to do.  Before we could head back in, I told Kathy to turn the car around and point it down the dri­ve­way — we’d wait.

We got in the car, pointed it down the dri­ve­way, and almost imme­di­ately, all the cars started to move.  We even heard some­thing akin to laugh­ter over by the house… which was a lit­tle eerie, frankly.

The police cars started pulling out, so we headed down the dri­ve­way, only to meet the Fire truck, so we gave that right of way, there was a big back and forth of cars, and we got through while other cars were leav­ing and other cars were com­ing back.  We had a job to do — to get to church — who knows what was going on with the cars … but it was really clear at this point what we were sup­posed to be doing.

A few blocks from our house, we stopped at a light, and the ambu­lance pulled up next to us.  I said a prayer over it, and it turned right on red and drove away… I con­tin­ued writ­ing into my note­book — did I men­tion I was still writing?

The light changed, we headed to church.

When we got there, the ser­mon was fin­ish­ing up — it was about prayer.  I hear it was about James 1, actu­ally — we missed the major­ity of it… but it had to do with the groan­ing of the Spirit as well — heavy stuff… I didn’t lis­ten to those few min­utes because … well — I was writing.

Then, maybe 5 min­utes after arriv­ing, we went into prayers of the peo­ple… that’s when the entire con­gre­ga­tion (some few hun­dred peo­ple), lift prayers together.  The way it works is that it starts out with some gen­eral prayers that are read out loud, and every­one in the room responds with “Lord hear our prayer.”

After the read­ing part, peo­ple can lift their own peti­tions, call­ing out their prayer needs.  So, almost imme­di­ately, I called out a prayer for John  … and then a few hun­dred peo­ple said, “Lord, hear our prayer.” … then I returned to my writ­ing until com­mu­nion … at which point, I was just about fin­ished, just in time to go and share bread and wine with the Body of Christ.

When church was over, we got a call, as we were walk­ing in, from Randy, who told us that John had, in fact, got­ten to the hos­pi­tal, and that the doc­tors were already say­ing hope­ful things about him.  Randy was con­cerned for him still, but Praise God, he’s in the hospital.

Whew!

Ok… so I think that’s about the time we all set out to nap or something.

But we still had a dri­ve­way full of water, so Kathy had called another com­pany who could come with a long endo­scopic cam­era and a water jet to take a look down the drain­pipe and see what the prob­lem was.  The sky had started to clear (metaphor­i­cally and lit­er­ally), so by the time the guy showed up (a nice guy named Adam, not from Roto Rooter, from a local com­pany), much of the flood­ing had dried off, but the drain was still quite full of water.

He was wear­ing a bright white linen shirt, as was I.

The first thing we did was get my wet-vac and suck out the remain­ing water so he could see with the cam­era.  It’s a long cable with a an infrared cam­era on the end that has an infrared light on it.  So down the rab­bit hole we went.  It was quite interesting.

Kathy had gone off to do a few errands, and Angie was on a sleep-over, so I called Nate out to see the fun.  He was mildly inter­ested for a lit­tle while, but wanted to get back inside and play the Wii (which we’d been doing together before Adam showed up).

So we were muck­ing around, keep­ing our­selves rel­a­tively clean, and Adam worked and worked to get this thing unclogged.  It ended up being about 50 feet of pipe down to the road, which he did clear — which is amaz­ing, and we only blew an 0-ring once (send­ing a jet of water in my gen­eral direc­tion, thus caus­ing me (with a bad back, btw) to leap about five feet with the speed of a jaguar) … but we had got­ten through and were begin­ning to get clear, as the day pro­gressed towards the late afternoon.

Kathy had returned, we’re play­ing in the mud, keep­ing our shirts clean, and then Kathy comes to the door with the phone and is chat­ting with some­one in a friendly tone.

“Honey, it’s for you”, she says, some­one mys­te­ri­ously.  I kind of shrug at her the way hus­bands and wives do to ask “who is it?” and she shrugs back and scowls in order to say, “don’t ask me that now.”

So I walk up, and when I get close enough, she mouths, “it’s the police.”

Ahhh… good think­ing, my love — let us not have the drain guy won­der­ing why the police are call­ing … glad she did that

(Mean­while, at the last minute, yes, I did get mud on my shirt a lit­tle — just a touch.)

So I take the phone, and speak with a very nice woman who is seek­ing to gather infor­ma­tion.  She asks me a bunch of stuff that I likely shouldn’t dis­cuss on a blog — but suf­fice to say, it was back­ground on the fam­ily, an apol­ogy that nobody had called me back ear­lier (I had called 911, remem­ber), and a few ques­tions about my point of view.

“You know, offi­cer,”, I said, “I have notes.”

“Oh, really?!  Could I have those?”

We then worked out how to get them to her.  She orig­i­nally thought per­haps she could just have them — but I explained that they were in my note­book.  I offered to type them up, but she said that her pref­er­ence would be to have a copy of the hand-written notes — which is more com­pelling for authen­tic­ity, it would seem.

I was offer­ing to bring them to her the police sta­tion is right by the ferry ter­mi­nal, when all of the sud­den, the chicken alarm went off.  Some­thing was attack­ing the birds.

With the police on the phone, I ran out the door, apol­o­giz­ing and explain­ing that I have poul­try, grabbed a broom, and Kathy started yelling “it’s a hawk!”

So, there I am, yelling into the phone to the police all about a hawk, demand­ing to know where it is, with a broom in hand.

No chick­ens had been hurt.  We shep­herded them to safety.

I agreed to bring my notes to the offi­cer, apol­o­gized for the hub-bub, hung up the phone — and wrote that I’d spo­ken to the offi­cer into my notes.

I finally got to the police sta­tion after a few false starts (she had to run off to deal with a domes­tic issue (all the false starts were doc­u­mented in my notes)), she made copies of my notes (“Oh, you have lots of notes!”), and she and I chatted.

She was aware of the entire sit­u­a­tion — it seems pretty evi­dent that John was suf­fer­ing from some sort of par­tial or tem­po­rary (we hope) demen­tia, and she even tan­gen­tially sort of waved me off of the medic … which is fair enough. She told me that all indi­ca­tions are that John may actu­ally even get bet­ter than he was before all this started, now that he’s see­ing a doc­tor.  He may be able to get up and walk around again (which would be very nice, if it’s God’s Will).

We chat­ted for quite a long time, actu­ally — she’s a very nice per­son.  She’s been doing her job for 25 years, we even dis­cussed how some­one like her could take some­one like me down (I asked, she’s a lit­tle shorter than Kathy).

As I was headed home, hav­ing worked with Kathy to chase the preda­tor away and clear the clog that was mak­ing every­thing back up — Kathy called to remind me we had to get to Bible study… where we stud­ied … James 1.

Praise God for tak­ing care of John.

Wednes­day (Update)

We got news this morn­ing that John died at about 3:45AM last night in the hos­pi­tal.  Every­body was under the impres­sion that he’d get bet­ter — but for some rea­son that many of the sib­lings don’t under­stand — he just died last night.  Thank­fully, Michael was with him.  Roy was too.

Per­son­ally, I’m really com­forted by the fact that the last time I saw John alive, we prayed together and he con­fessed Jesus as his Lord and Sav­ior.  Con­sid­er­ing the way that Randy and Lee came late at night to basi­cally get me — it was def­i­nitely a God shot kind of thing.  I wish I had more matter-of-fact state­ments about how this makes sense to me, but I don’t… and that’s ok.  Always is.

I’ll miss him, that’s for sure — but I just gotta admit that I know he’s in a really awe­some place.

Too bad his kids are still strug­gling to get along.  I pray that God will guide me on how to be a good neigh­bor and Wit­ness through all of this, and that the Lord will bring them to some sort of Peace together now.