Nebraska Sandhills

Joey,

I love you and Happy Birthday

Nebraska Sandhills

(2009)

For the first time in my life I feel homesick, and like crying in front of people so they know how terrible I feel. I imagine this is what depression feels like, true depression, not just the kind where you don’t want to motivate to go to class, or you’re having a bad day. But the kind that starts somewhere deep down inside you, a place you can’t quite pinpoint, like maybe inside the lining of your stomach, making every part of your body unable to move. You don’t even care that you can’t move anymore because if you just lay here, don’t eat and die, it wouldn’t matter.

I have seen more cases of homesickness than most, due to a long career of being a camp counselor in high school. I hoped I didn’t resemble any of those snotty faced 10 year olds crying for their mom, but inside, that’s how I felt. Like crying and not caring how my face looked. I also knew that the only way to get over being home sick was to be active. “Momentum Sarah,” I would say to myself, “if you start you can keep going.” Unfortunately homesickness doesn’t care to help you move, it holds you still inside yourself, until you’re so miserable, you’re crying again.

So instead of doing anything, I sleep.

********

Camaro’s sit really low to the ground, with long front ends that stretch out before the driver, and give the passenger more leg room than you would expect from a sporty car. Unfortunately this extra room doesn’t give a passenger any release because even with short legs your feet are lifted up as high as your seat. All the extra space is spread out in front of you, instead of below the seat where it is needed. I shifted my weight from one side of my body to the other, reclined the seat as far back as it would go, and fell instantly asleep. Even in such an uncomfortable position, I slept. Anytime I could sleep was less time I was required to deal with the reality of being awake.

I woke up from a dreamless sleep only because my leg was becoming numb all the way from my hip to my ankle. It burned like small fire red needles were being slowly pushed into my skin because I had no room to adjust anymore. Nathan was driving my car this part of the eight hour drive. Mom asked me not to let him drive once we arrived in the bigger, crowded city because he had the aggressive habit of constantly accelerating around cars, so I rested now, while he maneuvered around cars on the interstate with one hand rested on the top of the steering wheel, and the other laying lifeless in his lap.

Although Nathan is younger than me, it’s sometimes a guessing game for others to see if they can tell that, either because I appear younger than my 20 years, or he appears older than 18. Right now he looked like hell. There was an absolutely blank expression on his face as he squinted out of the bug splatter windshield, watching corn fields and semis pass us by. I knew inside he was trying to also feel blank; show no emotion, feel no emotion. Maybe by faking it, he wouldn’t be focused on where we were going, or really why we were headed there. But even with him attempting to create a façade of stillness, I could tell he was crumbling inside. I could even though there was silence hanging in the car.

I suddenly felt guilty about sleeping, because I noticed the car was absolutely silent. All you could hear was the steady hum of an engine, and tires making fast time to Colorado. There was an occasional th-bump, th-bump as we ran over black asphalt lines on the uneven road. Since he had pulled off onto a smaller highway there were less frequently cars driving by creating a swish of air current between our car and theirs. However the windows still rattled sporadically responding to the bumpy road and wind. He had turned the radio off and sat in complete silence. I should have stayed awake with him to make sure that he was okay.

“They were playing sad songs on the country radio,” he flatly tells me. I understand. I would choose silence too.

Today Nathan and I were not older in the sense that the sun had risen another day for us, but that the new day brought new struggles. Our normally perfect two children, one dog, middle class family had encountered its first tragedy in the form of a small tumor. It seemed relatively small in comparison to the overall size of my father, however 12 millimeters is not small when in comparison to the spinal cord it has located itself in.

I looked over at Nathan, today he became older than 18. Maybe he even looked it. He shaved exactly 2 days ago, the day of his high school graduation. Now there was dark hair growing across his jaw line that didn’t quite fill in to a full beard. Instead it grew in sparingly in patches that he deemed too small to shave off. He had the broad shoulders of a boy turning into a man, and muscled arms from a year of lifting to play football. His dark complexion matched his hair and eyes. They were strikingly different eyes than mine which were sterling blue; because his were a chocolate brown so dark you couldn’t distinguish the color from the black middle.

When he walked across the stage last Sunday he looked tall until he stood next to the other seniors. Our father was not tall either, only reaching 5’9” when his was hair patted down. Watching Nathan graduate was hard to handle, not because I worried about him going to college. He was ambitious and taking a pre-med route; he made good choices, was level headed, and hard working. I was not sad that he was leaving; I had already located myself 14 hours from his college of choice pursuing my own dream. That moment was terribly excruciating because I held out a cell phone in front of me hoping the microphone the principle was talking into would create a loud enough sound to be audible through the phone.
“Randall Tyler Anderson” followed by clapping and some cheers from her family. He was next.
“Please work,” I prayed. My stomach felt like a hard knot that was slowly moving its
way up to my throat.
“Nathan Phillip Broeker”
“Please let them hear,” I was hoping. I waited until after the applause and yells and watched Nathan exit down the stairs of the stage before ducking my head below the crowd, “Did you hear it?” I asked. I could hear my mom choking back loud sobs. “Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Hearing my mom cry made me want to start bawling again. Neither she nor my father saw their baby walk that day. The pictures they see will never recapture his orneriness, although they will see he wore an old Sturgis Motorcycle Rally shirt under his formal gown. They will not see his pride, just a gold medal that means he graduated with honors.

Being parentless during that time I spent the rest of the day of the verge of tears. Every time I greeted a newcomer to Nathans’ party I smiled, welcomed them inside, and pointed them in the direction of the new graduate and the food line. I stood at the front of the door for a reason, so I could answer the question “Where are your parents at?”, and save Nathan from having to answer.

“They discovered a 12 millimeter brain lesion in Dad’s spinal cord. They thought it might be MS, but he started to get a lot worse this week.” I would say as quickly as possible, “So they both decided to go to Colorado to see a doctor out there. They had to leave two days ago, but please help yourself to some cake, it’s delicious, it’s caramel.”

It was an abbreviated version of what had happened, but it filled people in with enough information. Although they could obviously read between the lines and realize that ‘worse’ was bad enough that they left two days before their youngest child’s high school graduation. However they didn’t know that worse also meant, unable to walk, or sleep, and in so much pain he was begging my mom to shoot him.

Nathan and I went through all the movements of celebrating a graduation, and then quickly packed everything up and left for Aurora Colorado. It was a long drive we were trying to make in the quickest time possible. Neither of us spoke much; in fact as a general rule if you weren’t driving, you were sleeping. Because otherwise you started to think “What if we don’t make it in time? Should we have left too…”

We were the only car driving down the thin gray road. It led us towards an unknown stage of our lives. The idealist dreams we had of being protected together as a family was shattered by a small white line on the scanned picture the doctor sent home on a cd. It looked like a smudge in the picture, maybe just an error in the machine. But picture after picture proved that this mark was not going away. At first Nathan and I just continued with our everyday movements; wake-up, eat, smile, sleep. We didn’t speak of the smudge on the pictures, or what would happen if this unknown disease was degenerative or even lethal. At the end of his graduation party we opened each envelope and gift. We both tried to parent each other, me attempting to control the events, running between the house and the party, fixing the decorations, setting out the food and greeting everyone, and Nathan by being his relaxed self. He never worried something wasn’t going to go right, or stressed about the success of the party, he simply went with the flow, letting me release my emotions into the chaos of the preparations.

Rarely in the last two years had we had time to spend between just the two of us, and now the situation was less than ideal. Before I had gone to college Nathan and I had a close relationship, but I never imagined we’d need to pull together closer for support. The last two years when I had been 14 hours away we rarely spoke on the phone. However when I came back home it felt like that time away had been days. He would pick up telling me a story like just yesterday I’d heard the beginning. He would recall his adventures of senior year and we’d even reminisce old adventures we’d had. Like the time we had gone to haunted graves together, and I made him walk behind me so nothing snuck up on us. The last few hours made me realize how I was now coming to respect Nathan for the man that he was becoming. I knew over the last few months with dad’s health slowly decreasing Nathan had been put in charge of watching him and making sure he didn’t overwork himself. Even when the doctors didn’t know that a growing brain lesion was what was making him feel sick, they knew something was wrong. I wasn’t there to help, or be comforting; I know Nathan had to handle everything on his own. The only thing I could do in return for him was host a graduation party, call mom to hear his name called when he graduated, and divert people from asking him too many questions. It didn’t seem like enough for what he’s already had to do.

We kept driving as the Nebraska landscape lay out before us; rolling sandhills dotted with tuffs of green grass and long fences with beer cans on the posts that paralleled the straight highway. It was a consistent view, only changing by a variation of hill location and a difference in the ratio of sand to grass, green to brown, life and still. We were becoming fully immersed in the hills. Around us were tumbleweeds tucked in the rusted barbed wire fence. Cows began to appear in the shadowed crevasses from one peak to another. The towns and cars became fewer seen. We were in a haven of isolation, left alone with poor radio signal, our thoughts, and our own limited company.

It’s always been interesting to me how scenery becomes more beautiful when you’re on vacation. You suddenly realize how beautiful the sunset is, or mountains in the distance. A small brook beside the road is suddenly means to stop the car and awe in the wonder of nature. Death made me feel the same thing. The sun was rising up in shades of bright oranges behind us, like we were trying to race the daylight to the border. The brown hills I’d always dreaded traveling through were suddenly a wonder. If I die tomorrow I’d want to remember this, exactly as it is now. I wanted to make Nathan stop the car and show him, look behind us at the sun, look at the orange soaked landscape. We are in between its daylight and the night time. It’s May 19 and it’s cold outside this morning. Mom and Dad drove right through here last week, the pioneers traveled through here 160 years ago. But we are here, now, May 19, 2009 and nowhere else. We are not safe here and time has not stopped, but we are alive to witness this moment. We can breathe in this clean cold air, and maybe tomorrow if we’re lucky we can do it again. But there is no time for us to think of the tomorrow we might have, we must simply focus on this time we have together, to drive across states and admire green hills.