The Mississippi on her Knees Chapter One

June 31, 2005

Father’s Day in my family usually means a cake, some small, meaningless gifts from us kids, and a family sojourn off to church. This year, my world was completely thrown off-kilter. I had been in Oklahoma for two weeks participating in a summer program for Native American students who expressed interest in joining the medical field. I called that morning and I should have known something was up when my dad said to me, "Allie, when I would imagine the kinds of people I wanted my kids to be, well, I didn’t have you exactly in mind but you’re pretty damn close." but I went about my day, thinking it was sweet but a little out of the blue. Later that night, I got back to my dorm room after study hall with our chemistry instructor. I was wearing my Duke sweatshirt; it had been unusually cold in the guys’ lounge that night where we’d been having study hall. It was ten o’clock and my dad had been having some tests run in the hospital for the last couple of days. I had been hearing that it was peptic ulcers or something along those lines. I wasn’t consciously worried. He’d had ulcers before. I was glad he was finally getting his stomach issues checked out–we all were. But, I’d been in his situation before-- the one where doctors run tests and poke you and prod you and knew it could be miserable. I think I sensed something was wrong but I wouldn’t think about it until definitive news dropped. It hit me over the top of the head that night.

I got back to my room and checked my cell phone. I had a missed call from Poppa. I called his cell phone even though I knew they weren’t allowed in most hospitals. He picked up right away and shot the breeze for about five seconds. Then he asked me to sit down, he had some news. It conjured a strange sensation. I sat down at my desk. It was littered with post-it notes, index cards, pens, pencils, calculators, brochures, and CDs. I stared at the one blank spot of Formica next to my shower caddy and waited as he drew in a breath and then gently exhaled , "I have cancer....of the liver and the pancreas." My immediate question was, "How advanced is it?" He didn’t have an answer. It took about a total of seven minutes for the shock to wear off. Tears were dripping off of my cheeks. I wasn’t breathing. If I breathed, I would sob and my first priority was hiding my crying from Daddy. But, of course, it came out eventually. I cried, he cried, my brother and sister cried, Mom cried. I cried alone. I swiped at the rivulets on my face with the edges of my navy blue sleeves but they didn’t want to abate.

I ended up at my counselor Theo’s door. He took one look at my face and the edges of his mouth pointed down. "My dad has cancer." It just croaked its way out of my mouth before I could restrain it. I had to tell someone. But I wanted to tell no one. And then Theo said the exact wrong thing. "I know."

I just howled. I wanted to sink to the floor of the guys’ hall but Theo’s pitying gaze was holding me where I was. I was more than crying, I was anguishing. The next day I would feel intense shame at my public disintegration but nothing mattered more at that moment than the overwhelming feelings that were coming off of me in waves. And poor Theo had no idea what to do. He tried. He asked, "Are you ok?" and I just replied earnestly, "No, I’m really not." He watched me bawl for a few minutes before venturing again, "Are you ok?" and this time I roared, "NO! I’M REALLY NOT!" I think this attracted the attention of some of his neighbors as he started directing me down the stairs to the head counselor’s room. The three of us had a terribly unproductive conversation that did nothing but impress upon me the fact that I had to be an adult and I had to make a decision. Stay or go home. I went back upstairs and decided that I needed a shower. Something I learned from my dad. Bathing is always a good way to stop feeling crappy.

I had almost made it to the haven of my room for my towel and toiletries when another counselor stopped me. She told me he would be ok. She had no authority whatsoever to tell me that. And then she started talking about God’s plan and I didn’t really give a flying fuck at that moment. All that mattered was me getting into that shower. And then she hugged me and I wanted to shove her away but she just held me in her arms like a vise. I resented her so much in that moment. I know she probably had no better idea than Theo as to what to do but it didn’t matter to me that night. All that mattered was that shower.

I finally got it. I stood sobbing under the spray and, amazingly, no one came into the bathroom the entire time I was in there. No one flushed the toilet. No one interrupted the scalding flow of water. And I don’t know what I expected to come from that shower, what miraculous occurrence was supposed to be bestowed upon me but it didn’t happen. I just kept standing there thinking, "I want my Daddy." and crying harder.
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In my mind, my last memory of my Dad is not from the last morning he was alive that September. It’s from another morning in late May of 2005. The morning was steamy and foggy and misty, to match what we know of memories in movies. It was hot. I was going away.

The night before, my family had attended a wedding. A family friend’s. I didn’t dance or drink or eat anything. My mom and sister were sad that we left before cake. We left pretty early because I was flying out of Lafayette early the next morning, but moreso because my Dad was feeling a little sick. Looking back, it seems like we should have known earlier than we did.

I don’t remember if my brother got out of bed to hug me goodbye that day. He probably did. I think my sister was coming along for the ride to the airport. My mom was asking me if I’d checked everything off the packing list the Headlands Program had sent me and I was saying that I had. My Dad was driving.

It was my first time flying out of Lafayette and my third time flying anywhere. I was 12 years old before I saw the inside of an airplane, and this was almost six years later. I was 17 and I had chosen to spend the summer after I graduated high school studying chemistry, physics, and calculus at the University of Oklahoma. It was a program that was designed to target Native American students that had an interest in joining a Health Career and gives them enough proficiency to survive the “weed-out” classes that most pre-med students take in their first semester of college. It had been decided that I knew enough of this stuff and I was one of 3 selected to assist with medical research at the OU HSC in Oklahoma City. I was excited and flattered. And I was nervous that the airline wouldn’t allow me to carry on my hanging bag. That it was too big to be allowed. I didn’t yet know about the loophole of the Gate check. It wasn’t until I opened my messenger bag to get my boarding pass that I realized I’d forgotten my graphing calculator at home on my desk.

I guess I should explain something about my 17 year old self: I was really high strung, incredibly high strung. I was already stressed about the hanging bag full of business casual for the weekly trips we’d take en masse to the Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City every Wednesday. The calculator was a breaking point. I needed that calculator to do math. I had dropped out of a calculus class my last year of high school and hadn’t so much as thought about a cotangent in over a year since my Trig final junior year. I needed that calculator. I was feeling stupid for having forgotten it. My mom mollified me with the ever-popular, “we’ll mail it to you.”

“Mail it to me?”

“We’ll go home right away and we’ll drop it in the mail today. It’ll be there Monday.”

It wasn’t good enough, but it would have to work.
I hugged my family. I went through the security checkpoint metal detectors. I tried not to obsess about my hanging bag or my lack of calculator. I read a magazine I had brought along for just this purpose, for taking my mind off the wait for my flight to board. I talked to the Clark family, Grace’s friend Charlotte and her parents who were professors at the local University. They were flying that same morning to somewhere in Ohio—one of the C’s. Cleveland? Cincinnati?—to visit their other member, Meredith. I hadn’t personally met Meredith, but I remembered the reverence with which she was heralded as a former Lafayette High School debater when I myself was on the team in the 9th grade. But before long the Clarks were in the air and I was still grounded by my anxieties.

It must have been 45 minutes after I entered the security area that my flight boarded. I had the aisle seat, I think. It was one of the puddlejumpers that commutes between Lafayette and Houston. A thin, cylindrical plane that always seems unique to American Airlines. The kind that looks like a flying dart. Or, actually, they remind me of flying pencils. There were only 3 seats to each row, one seat on the right hand as you enter the cabin and then the other coupled across the aisle. I sat next to a guy in a suit. He didn’t seem to care about me and I was too shy to ask him about himself. He read the paper and I chewed my gum.

“Here we go,” I thought to myself as I turned a page of my magazine and settled into my self-contained concern. The airline hostesses had been zipping up and down the aisle for a while, readying passengers and belongings for takeoff. I didn’t bat an eye until the blonde one stopped right beside the seat ahead of me and extended a silver sparkly TI-83 Plus at my surprised expression.

“Your dad asked us to get this to you. He says to relax and have a good summer.”

I smiled at her. And I dug my khaki messenger bag out from under the seat in front of me. I zipped open the pocket on the top flap and chucked it inside. And because I was 17, I thought to myself that now everything would be perfect.
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That’s my last memory of my Dad. I suppose because that’s the last time he was able to fix something for me? That’s the absolute last moment of time we shared that I can draw up in my head that ends with a smile. So that’s the one I keep. If each of my memories is an artifact in a museum collection of my life, that’s the cleaving point. Every memory featuring Lee Andrew Gallaspy before that flight is my dad. Every memory after that is of cancer.

It might not be fair to think of it that way, but it’s all I’ve got. It might not be in the spirit of unconditional love, but that’s the only way I can live with it, make sense of it. Or, it was the only way I could do it at the time, when I was 17.

I wasn’t there when it all started, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Probably neither. Just unemotional fact: I wasn’t there. I was in Oklahoma. I learned my Dad had cancer over the phone and then I stayed there. I went to class the next day. The instructors made vague speeches about illness and unexpected life turns.

That Wednesday we got into the conversion vans that took us everywhere: the grocery store, the bowling alley, Six Flags over Texas. That day they were taking us to the Health Center. I pressed my face against the coolness of the rain on the flip side of the tempered glass window. My tears were too hot when Tim McGraw’s timely hit single, “Live Like You Were Dyin’” played on the radio up front.
The day would get worse from there.

One of the aspects of the Headlands Program that I’d been most excited about was that we were all going to get to sit in on surgeries as observers. There was a strange lottery of surgeries to see. Most of the girls wanted to see pediatrics. They all wanted to work with children in their careers. One of them later said to the head of epidemiology that she wanted to be the O.B. without the GYN. About half of the students disappeared behind a door and headed to the pediatric hospital.

The others of us walked across a parking lot and into another facility. Here they used special codes on a vending machine-like dispenser to get us all scrubs. Mine were ill-fitting, of course. By the time my selection came around, all that was left were 3X on top and 1X on bottom. We changed and left our things in a locker room before we were taken to a whiteboard full of mystifying jargon and told to pick one.

I ended up the only student in a small O.R. This room had an exceptionally nice nurse who took the time to ask me my name and where I was from before letting me help in the tiniest ways possible with the prep. But when you know you’re going to see someone get cut open, everything feels intensely important.

The room I selected was being used for inserting port-o-caths on cancer patients. The doctor came in brusquely and everything felt even more serious. My mask and cap were already secured when he got there. He shook my hand and called me, “dude,” mistaking me for a man. That’s the only time that’s ever happened to me. It felt really shitty. There was no time or any real reason to correct him (nor would I have even known how to begin to correct him) so the assumption stood. The nurse asked me to tie the doctor into his robe, and I somehow thought that was so cool and that this made me indispensable.

The rest of the time, I stood slightly behind everyone else, craning to get a peek at the incisions under the patient’s collarbone, trying to see anything that might be useful or cool. The procedure is quick and usually uncomplicated. Almost as soon as one patient was closed, they’d wheel in the next. In the downtimes, the Dr. liked to impersonate William Hung from American Idol. I guess he thought it was funny because he was of Asian descent. “She bangs! She bangs!” was stuck in my head for days. And it was during one of these performances that I realized that this Dr. was an ass. So he was probably a really good surgeon.

I was expelled from the O.R. when one of the patients, an aging man that gave me the sense that he would rather be riding a Harley, got complicated. I don’t think I’ll ever forget how quickly this guy went from being one in a succession to being the only one. The mood in the room shifted just as quickly. They brought in an X-Ray machine and that’s why they told me I had to leave, but I spent the rest of the time in the hall, arms crossed, sometimes peeking in at the open heart surgery happening in the room across the way. I stayed there, feeling awkward until one of the other program participants found me and told me we were all supposed to change back into our clothes and meet for the drive back to Norman.

I slept for most of the ride on the interstate back to the OU Norman campus. I maintained a disconnect in my mind for the next few weeks in Oklahoma. For instance, I never realized that the next time I’d see my dad, when my family came to visit me during the 4th of July weekend, he’d have his own chemoport.

She bangs. She bangs.
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My family drove up to Norman in their SUV for the 4th of July weekend. It was a reunion we’d planned even prior to the diagnosis. But after I’d been told my dad had cancer, it became a fixation for me. In the space between being awake and falling asleep, I fantasize about upcoming events in my life. I try to imagine what I might say, how I might act at certain points. I try to see in my mind just how I’ll shake the Superintendent’s hand at graduation. And so I dreamed of what it would be like when my family got to me in Oklahoma. I’d lie on my polka dotted pillowcase and close my eyes, and I’d imagine that I would be sitting in a completely clean room with no dirty clothes on the floor and I’d look up from whatever I was reading or studying because I’d preternaturally know that they were nearing. And I’d run down the dorm stairs, pausing at the window on the landing between the first and second floors to get a visual before I bounded out through the glass door, took one bouncing step on the concrete sidewalk, and launched myself onto the asphalt of the parking lot. I dreamed that my Dad would be just as enthused to see me. That he’d be spring from the car the moment the brakes halted the wheels’ movement. That we’d stand in the middle of the street, embracing each other and smiling.

I dreamed that seeing my dad would make me comfortable. That he’d have the magic ability to repair the rift in my gut. That he would be able to get the newly-formed fault lines in my emotions to stop crashing against each other and causing me pain, fear, and tears.

I know now how unfair it was of me to expect him to be the same. And not just the same, but to expect him to have any sort of wherewithal to heal me when he was just trying to heal himself.

The actuality of the visit was slightly different from my imaginings. The actualities always are. Because no matter how thorough I think I am in my brain, there is always something in reality that I leave out.

I didn’t think of my cell phone. It was new, acquired expressly for the purpose of communicating with me while I was 600 miles away. And probably for when I would be in New Orleans, at college, too. But I didn’t sense my family’s approach to the University campus. I was informed of it. Once they got close, my mom would call for forty-five second updates on their progress until they were in the parking lot of the dorm. And I wasn’t upstairs, in my room, reading anything when they arrived. I was sitting in an overstuffed leather chair in the lounge, watching something useless on television. And I saw the white Dodge pull into a parking spot and I did what I thought was my part, by exploding through the door, enacting the scene I had conjured each of the previous 12 nights. But as I ran to my mark in the middle of the street, my Dad wasn’t there to meet me. I stood back, slowly beginning to realize that my family were not just actors in a movie my mind was directing. I began to understand, in increments, that I had missed something. That my mind had been working on old intel. That my 17 year old self couldn’t have possibly imagined that illness wasn’t working from any kind of script, that it would say and do what it pleased.

I stood there, watching my brother get out of the driver’s seat and stretch his arms over his head. That was wrong. My dad always drove on family road trips. He looked tired, too. And he just waved at me with a sad tilt of his mouth. And then my mom got out with the one piece of mustard-colored Tupperware that for my entire life had been dubbed “the throw-up bowl,” because it was our family’s de facto emery basin. And that was wrong. My mom came over to where I had stopped, frozen, still waiting for something to change, still waiting for my dad to hug me. And she started talking immediately. “Where’s the bathroom? He needs a bathroom.”

“Inside. On the second floor.”

And she walked back to the car, opened one of the doors, and steadied my dad’s frame as he slowly extracted himself from the vehicle. John Glenn exiting the space capsule, I thought. It was a reference to an old joke my dad had made years earlier, the one time he sat in the backseat of our Honda Accord. But there wasn’t anything funny about this confusion. And he was coming toward me. Walking at me, albeit not as I had seen it in my musings, and I hugged him, finally.

But he couldn’t really hug me back. Not the way I needed it. And I understood then. This was not a family road trip. This was not a fun, sight-seeing adventure. This was a mission. He could not fix the fact that my contentment was suddenly gone. Because he couldn’t hug me. And in that moment, the dad I’d known and loved was gone, too.

He was replaced by needs and tasks. We had to get him to the hotel. We had to check in. My family, my mother in particular, was operating from a rigid invisible checklist (and would be for the next three months). Things had to happen and they had to happen in the correct order or else everything would fall apart. Even more than it already had.

● We found the hotel she’d made reservations at. A cheap one. Next to a Walmart.
● We checked in. We got Dad to the room and he lay down on a bed.
● But the room smelled strongly of mildew.
● “He started chemo yesterday. His immune system is compromised. We can’t stay here.”
● We put the luggage back in the car.
● We put ourselves back in the car.
● We drove across the street and checked into a passably clean Super Eight. My family had never stayed in a Super Eight before.
● We got my dad to the room and he lay down on the bed.

It was early afternoon when they’d arrived and by the time we’d done all of that, plus called the doctor back home in Lafayette to call in some anti-nausea meds to a pharmacy in Oklahoma, it was evening. My dad went to sleep. My mom stayed with him. My brother, sister, and I went to Taco Cabana. We didn’t have fun, per se, but we were allowed to be alone together. We were only expected to perform the roles of stricken siblings and not dutiful children.

I remember getting dropped back off at the dorm that night. Everyone was out at the bowling alley when I got back, so I collapsed onto the couch in the lounge, watching Into the West until I drifted off myself. And I remember the startling my new friends Candace and Verrica gave me when they woke me up, stood over me, backlit by the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling and giggling. I listened to them tell of their evening without much focus.
When it was my turn, I told them, “My mom keeps saying, ‘we’re here to get our daughter,’ like it’s some done deal already. Like she’s made my choice for me.” My experiment in controlled independence had quickly spawned a nascent self-reliance inside of me that chafed at the old imposition of my mother’s will. They listened, but I could tell that there wasn’t a whole lot they could say.

The next day I did laundry at the hotel. My mom suggested it and I still wasn’t sure whether I was going or staying, so it made sense to my overworked brain, I guess. Will, Grace, and I went on some other adventures that day. We went to a discount entertainment store and got cheap movies and cds.

Later on in the evening, Mom decided we would go eat at a cafeteria- style restaurant. I can see why she thought of it. It was convenient, it was easy, and Dad could choose exactly which dish seemed least likely to make him blow chunks. I remember green jell-o being involved. I remember that Will and Grace didn’t eat.

And it was in this cafeteria that my dad started down a conversation thread from which I would never be able to reverse.

“Allie, you know that I have pancreatic cancer.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I started chemotherapy yesterday.”
“Sure.”
“And-“
“Lee,” my mom interrupted, “Can we not do this here?”
He looked at her. And hung his head a little. And said, “Sure, honey.”

My mom shot up from her seat after that and arranged to pay the bill. We drifted back to the hotel room, where my brother and sister sat on one double bed and my Dad laid back down (why was he always doing that?) and my Mom probably didn’t sit and someone placed a chair from one of the tables at the foot of the bed, in entrance to the aisle between the two doubles and I was made to sit upon it.

My Dad started talking again. We were all in place.

“I’m doing an experimental chemotherapy treatment. It’s a new drug they’re trying out. And they’re having up to 20% success with it.”

20%? Okay. Does that mean something? That seems kinda low? I don’t know anything about these things. What was the survival rate for the old drug if this new one is supposed to be better? I remember he kept going for a while, talking around. It sounded bad, but not totally hopeless.

Until…

My mom crossed the room and sat down next to my Dad and took his hand in hers. And she looked right at me, they were all looking right at me, watching some weird drama exercise of a family meeting. “What he’s not telling you,” she started. She stopped. She kissed his hand. And that’s when I knew that they all knew something I didn’t. That’s when I started to feel really alone, when the placement of my chair stopped seeming unintentional.

“What he’s not telling you is that the doctor says he’s probably not going to be alive in a year.”
I was in a Super Eight in Norman, Oklahoma when I changed forever. My dad was dying. I was going home.

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After the crying jags had mostly subsided, my brother drove me back over the dorms again. We were leaving the next day. It was 8 o’clock at night. And I hadn’t even begun packing. I threw clothes and linens into my suitcases. They were a graduation present from my parents. Oh god. Would these crappy J.C. Penney suitcases be the last gift from him? It wasn’t really from him. I’d picked them out and asked for them. Shit. Inadequacy. The suitcases were not up to their new imbued significance. I was not up to my new imbued significance.

I packed furiously. My brother and sister helped me get stuff in the car that night. We made a run to WalMart for a rooftop luggage carrier because now we’d be making the ten hour drive back to Louisiana with five people, their weekend luggage, and my entire dorm room. It was going to be a tight fit.

That night, my last night in the Headlands Program, when my family had returned to their lodgings, I didn’t want to look at the antiseptic emptiness of my chamber. I knocked on the wall separating my room from Verrica’s, the same signal she’d used earlier that summer during a thunderstorm that frightened her. She was from the deserts of New Mexico. She’d never been in the middle of a tornado warning before. We met in the hall; she was wrapped in a woven blanket. I went into her darkened room, she didn’t turn the lights on. It was late already. I leaned against the white wall and we talked. After a while, I slid my backside down along the wall til my ass hit the linoleum floor and my legs stretched out in front of me.

“I’m going home, Vee,” I stated. “I have to go home. Now I know why my mom was so sure I would. Because I don’t have a choice. Not really. He keeps saying that if I stay until the end of the program, we’ll still have August before I have to go to school. ‘We’ll have all of August,’ he says. But Vee, I just keep thinking, ‘August isn’t enough.’”

The next morning Verrica, Candace, and Terri got up early to see me off. They hugged me and said the same platitudes that accompany the end of any summer camp. We’ll write. We’ll keep in touch. And then, when the other participants woke up, I was just gone.

I squeezed into the third row bench of the car, surrounded on all sides by black microsuede and the cheap rubber smell of Target luggage. I borrowed my sister’s knockoff MP3 player and listened to Avril Lavigne’s “My Happy Ending,” basically the whole time. I liked just putting in some earbuds and pretending that nothing else existed for a while.

We drove the entire ten hours from Oklahoma to Lafayette in one day. And then I began a transformation.