By Adele Abrahamse Roof
I’d known Ron for more than two decades, though to say I knew him would be overreaching. For the past eight years, since his brother and I had separated and subsequently divorced, I felt uneasy accepting the generous gift cards he still sent for my birthday. Our socializing, if you can call it that, had been infrequent, our conversations friendly, but diluted, like weak tea. There was something about Ron that struck me (embarrassing though it is to admit) as spooky. Years ago, when I introduced my mother and sister to Brad, my new boyfriend and Ron’s younger brother, they were as charmed by his accomplishments, energy, humor, and warmth as I was. My divorced sister then asked me, a hopeful tone to her voice, “So, what’s his brother like?” I blurted out, “He’s different! You wouldn’t want to date him. He’s…he’s weird.”
Not weird like Bill McKeever, the middle-aged man who walked around my high school pushing an empty cart with one hand while hugging a teddy bear with the other. Not weird like the old lady I once sat next to on a crowded train, with deep wrinkles and wild hair, who shouted out obscenities to an imaginary someone. Ron didn’t call attention to himself like that, at least not until the end. He was unassumingly fat and flabby, with dark-framed wire glasses and sparse brown hair concealed under a Redskins cap. He had probably looked that way since high school. I’m imagining him as a teenager, slouching in the last seat of the last row of the classroom, elbows on his desk, hands hovering like umbrella spokes over his head, looking down as if he were concentrating on schoolwork, but actually just trying to make himself invisible.
He stopped by our place every year or so, wearing what seemed to be the same white sneakers, the same gray sweatshirt, the same khaki pants, and the same zippered jacket. Ron was soft-spoken and polite, never saying much, but when he did, he chose his words carefully, like they cost him something. He never complained, not even to the neighbors or the police when they broke into his house and found him on the kitchen floor, unable to move, down like that for three days, his back broken in two places.
Until his retirement, Ron had worked for the Pennsylvania Department of Weights and Measures. I’m thinking his job required meticulous attention to detail: His department made sure that ounces of cans sold at supermarkets and gallons of gas sold at the pumps matched what taxpayers in the Keystone State thought they were getting. One Christmas, when his boss asked him to head the department’s United Way drive, he brooded to his brother, “Oooh…I don’t know if I should take this on…I don’t want anyone to know who I am.”
Brad usually called Ron, but then Ron dominated the conversation with details, for instance, of recent dinners at the Veterans Club. In a low, husky voice, he’d tell Brad that they’d served roast beef and mashed potatoes with gravy last week, and that he’d already signed up for Friday night’s fried chicken fest. He was a member of several clubs but usually frequented the one in the neighborhood: He could walk there and not have to risk another DUI. His visits to our home in Virginia were short, just a quick “Nice to see you, Adele,” after the two brothers returned from Ron’s favorite outing: the big box store and then the buffet at the Golden Corral. One time there were snow flurries, and we urged Ron to spend the night. “Oooh…I can’t do that. I have to get back and check on the property.” Ron talked about “the property” with a grave sense of responsibility, like a devoted sexton guarding church relics. “The property” consisted of their mother’s former home, a small ’50s-era ranch—three bedrooms and a bath—in a working-class neighborhood. No central air; no Internet. Lois had left the property to both Ron and Brad, but Ron had been living there with her off and on, so when she died in 1985, Ron had squatter’s rights. He agreed to pay the taxes and utilities, and of course, take care of the place.
It’s hard to imagine someone suddenly losing his appetite, suddenly dropping fifty pounds, suddenly feeling abdominal pain, and not thinking to contact a physician. When Brad learned these things, he immediately arranged for appointments and diagnostic tests, convinced that Ron had gallbladder issues. Ron’s pain sounded similar to what he had experienced years before, which had necessitated the prompt removal of that sometimes-pesky organ. Brad cleared his schedule to drive to Pennsylvania and spend the day with Ron and doctors, asking questions that would never have occurred to Ron. But none of that happened. Just days before the appointments, Ron wasn’t answering his phone. At first, they couldn’t locate him. Then they found him, fallen on his kitchen floor.
Surgery soon followed, and an eighteen-inch steel rod was screwed to his spinal column, above and below the broken vertebrae. That alone would have left Ron incapacitated, unable to bend his back or sit upright for the rest of his life. Doctors hoped for partial recovery, though painful and slow. He would spend the remainder of his life in a facility where he’d never eat solid foods again. As Brad checked out nursing homes, most not even willing to consider someone with Ron’s limitations, Ron’s condition deteriorated. First, he appeared to get better; then he got worse. Then, a devoted younger brother knelt down by his older brother’s bed, weeping. He took hold of his hand and said, “They’ve found liver cancer, Ron, and it’s really bad.” Ron looked over at his brother and nodded.
Brad has thought about a memorial service, but the time is not quite right for that. Who would be there? Maybe a neighbor or two, or a couple of guys with whom Ron drank and played cards. Maybe an elderly aunt and uncle who invited him to Thanksgiving dinners. Maybe a few cousins. Maybe me. But what would I say? I might have mentioned the gift cards he sent me over the years, that initially seemed like such a thoughtful gesture. But Brad has since discovered that Ron died deeply in debt to Visa, Mastercard, and other companies—thousands upon thousands of dollars of debt. Ron was barely able to keep up with monthly interest payments, let alone pay down the principal. He had Social Security, a nice pension, and no mortgage. What was going on here? Brad thinks he was mostly getting cash with the cards. This was shocking: Before his retirement, Brad taught university students principles of accounting and auditing, instilling, and even drilling into them, the importance of fiscal responsibility. To live within your means was a creed, a question of personal and professional honor. My mind races to explain the need for cash: The casino in Charles Town, West Virginia was only an hour away. Maybe Ron drove over there for diversion. Another idea: Maybe Ron was losing at bingo or card tables. Even Leo Tolstoy had to give up the family home to pay off gambling debts. If it happened to the great Tolstoy, why not Ron? Gambling debt is pure speculation on my part, the anxious insistence of my mind’s need to fill in the blanks, to grab onto something definite because not knowing feels too wobbly.
Other shocking simultaneous discoveries about Ron: he was a hoarder, and the house was a wreck. When Brad first walked in, he saw rooms of stained walls that had not had a fresh coat of paint since 1969; floors piled waist-high with junk, broken furniture, magazines, milk containers, old calendars, you name it, it was there. Bills, decades-old tax forms and other papers towered over the dining room table, and in Ron’s bedroom, a mountain of underwear and shirts, spotted with ketchup and gravy, was piled higher than Brad’s head. The washer and dryer were broken; apparently Ron had never gotten them fixed. He just bought new garments when the old ones got grungy. One friend thinks he didn’t call in plumbers because he was ashamed for anyone to see his place. Someone else thinks Ron was lazy. I’ve now learned that hoarding is a recognized mental disorder, and that victims of it experience extreme stress if they throw anything away. According to experts, hoarders are often lonely and withdrawn, disorganized, and indecisive about where to store things.
I don’t want anyone to know who I am echoes through my mind as Ron’s mantra, a mantra of shame. His ashes are in a box; I don’t want to put his psyche in another box—analyzed, judged, case closed. But at this point, it might even be kinder to think of him as having had a hoarding disorder and a lifelong depression that flattened his affect and dulled his senses, the inertia so great, it took enormous effort for him to even rise out of the easy chair where he watched television all day. Except for food, the only other times he became animated were when he viewed human suffering, as sensationalized by CNN. “Oooh…” he’d say to Brad, “that woman who drove her three kids off a cliff…that was really something.”
What was really something was my amazing former husband who was handling each new challenge with a stoic and steady patience. I imagine him tired, his back hurting, traipsing over what once was orange-colored shag carpet, now worn down with age, dark as dirt. In the bathroom, Brad found broken fixtures, and you could write your initials in the grease on the kitchen counter. How does one live in a house and not even own a broom? The basement was another bombshell: Ron, always respectful when talking about the woman he referred to as Mother, had either dumped or dropped her jewelry boxes onto the damp, dirty floor. Mold was growing on some of the pieces. Cartons of old mildewed books, clothes, and broken furniture were tossed around, plus their father’s faded leather wallet, where Brad discovered three school photos of Ron inside, but not one of himself. Still worse was the condition of Brad’s beloved train set, a treasured relic from childhood that he was hoping to salvage and set up again back home. It was left stranded in rainwater, the engine rusted out beyond repair, no longer fixable, just like Ron.
Since June, Brad and I have grown closer. Now, it’s November as I write this. The last of the heavy items are in the garage, hundreds of large-size trash bags delivered to the dump. The auctioneers have removed most of the furniture plus the smaller items that Brad boxed up and labeled for them. The wearying months of chores are winding down. Ron left a legacy of financial debt, a house in disarray. He was the lucky older son, wasn’t he, with parents all to himself for four years before the younger son was born. Psychologists say that’s a good thing. How could any of this have happened, raised as they both were by parents with solid small-town American values?
Thinking is no longer sufficient; words are failing me now. I wish I could paint my heart as it began to open to Brad’s courage and decency, his dedication and devotion to a brother who didn’t make it all that easy to feel close to. As my imagination travels through rooms of a house I’ve never seen, I’ve become aware that much of what distanced me from Brad these past eight years was my own tendency to hoard what I judged as his flaws and imperfections. My brain was weighted down with emotional baggage—painful images from the past: hurts, resentments, and judgments that had accumulated and were blocking even a narrow pathway to forgiveness, let alone reconciliation. If Ron had not died, or had died in a different way, I might have never allowed Brad back into my heart.
I sense that in time, memories from these last hard months will soften for Ron’s resilient sibling, who still has a lot of life left to live. In a fantasy, I see him bending down over a dirty basement floor to retrieve one of his mother’s brooches. He takes a damp towel and wipes off the stones. The brooch looks lovely again, its pink and green facets sparkling in the faint light. “To shrug it all off, wipe it clean, every annoyance and distraction and reach utter stillness” writes the emperor and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius. I’m trying to find that stillness, find compassion in a pile of dirty laundry, beauty in a dingy basement, courage in a room full of death. Life lives in the darkness as well as the light; I want to be at ease with that. It helps to remember that I, too, will probably die with some dirty laundry flung onto a chair and some dirty little secrets, never shared.
Last March, during the final days of Brad’s vigil at Ron’s bedside, I was in DC, making meals for my three-year-old granddaughter, reading books to her, and sleeping with her at night while her parents were at the hospital, her mother in labor. My grandson entered the world as Ron was leaving. I’ve thought a lot about the timing of those two transitions. This little guy is eight months old now, and crawling. In a video my daughter recently sent, he’s propelling his plump little body forward, his focus on a small, foam football. When he finally reaches it, he grabs the ball with one hand and tosses it again. He squeals, apparently thrilled to be able to toss a ball and watch it roll around. His smile lights up the room, radiating joy and delight. I’m sure a smile like that once crossed Ron’s face, once crossed all our faces. I wish I could paint it.