Say What Needs To Be Said

By Janice Anne Wheeler

On the first day of this year, I pulled an illegal U-turn and went back to visit him, in the nursing home.  Because somehow I knew I needed to, I knew I was running out of time.  I hope I turned around all the other times I needed to, sat there when I needed to.  Talked to him every time I needed to, every time he needed me to. 

My father is dying.  I know this.  I abandoned my life, moved here, to be with him, to assist in his care.  I've been with him for two solid years and they think I have at least that much more time as the disease progresses, stealing his abilities, his independence. 

I do not.  Our time is up.  Suddenly, very suddenly after all that waiting, he is gone.   My teacher, my sounding board, my supporter, my father.  That title has so much meaning.  Father.  My father is gone. 

Did he know how much I loved him?  That I would have done anything in my power to make his life better?  I hope so, I better have.  There is no second chance, no do-over. 

My grandfather walked down the street to buy milk and never came back, was struck, and died instantly.  I did not feel that I had said all that I wanted to, to him.  It was a hard lesson.  It has taken my lifetime to learn it well.  This book contains a few of those hard lessons, I hope they help you Say What Needs To Be Said.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janice Anne Wheeler
• Release date: May 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781096744535

Janice Anne Wheeler

Janice Anne Wheeler is a Chef Entrepreneur who is very excited to now be known as an author!  She grew up all over Upstate New York, graduated Cornell University Hotel School and headed West.  She is passionate about family, friends, healthy local food and Mother Nature.  Travel is in her blood, taking her amazing places, meeting incredible characters along the way.   Her Colorado catering business & organic gardens were her creative outlet for two decades; that morphed into writing, sharing her unique outlook on the world.  Still obsessed with food, flavors and nutrition, now she cooks for her 'Friend Basket' (curious? read the book!) and donates her skills as a Private Chef to organizations such as Susan G. Komen, Wounded Warriors, American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge, North Country Chamber of Commerce.  'Spicing Up The World' is her Secret Spice business; better Google that and get some! Janice returned to New York three years ago to spend time with her father, investigated her genetics and found she possesses the BRCA2 Genetic Mutation.   Without many resources to draw on, she made a drastic choice to save her life, and The New Girls was written as she recovered from a Preventive Double Mastectomy.  This experience brought a strong desire to raise awareness of Breast Cancer, genetics and BRCA, the choices it entails.  This first-time author has written a raw, personal, memoir. There are choices, drastic, serious choices, and The New Girls is written in a style you will not put down.  It is her profound hope that this resource helps others trying to face a decision similar to her own.  It has been a wild ride, and the journey continues.  If you or someone you know is facing such a decision, hopefully, The New Girls will give comfort, knowing that you are not alone. Her second book, "On Hold", tells of the precious time spent with her father at the end of his life.  Her third, "Say What Needs to be Said", is in progress, with other ideas pounding around inside of her brain.  She is healthy, happy, humorous and ready to share The New Girls with the world.  Follow her!  Write a review.  Share her story.

Book preview

PRELUDE

THREE YEARS AGO

The closet is empty .  Two metal hangers, the kind you used to be able to break into your car with, hang crookedly at one end.  The scratched accordion doors are slightly misaligned, the tracks rusty in the tropical air.  They need a bit of jiggling to open them all the way.  The room has a double bed, ceiling fan, wicker dresser that has seen better days and a bedside table complete with lamp, the cheap dented shade decorated with, predictably, seashells.  The mattress is bare, a little abused.  I walk back through the narrow doorway into the hall and find myself facing south. The view stops me.  Through the second story sliding glass doors I can see the concrete bridge over Route One, and beyond that the aquamarine water of the Florida Keys.  It steals my breath.

My dive gear is in the trunk of my car, and since I am headed north for Thanksgiving with my family, I leave it in the empty closet.  My closet.  I’ll be moving into it in just a few weeks when I return.  I have butterflies in my stomach at the prospect.  Good butterflies.  Gazing at the view, I laugh, out loud.  My new landlord glances over and smiles; he’s from somewhere up north and he gets it.

You can use the Whaler, too, he tells me, as soon as I get you checked out on it, referring to the boat tied to the end of my new front yard next to the palm tree.  I didn’t think my smile could get wider, but perhaps at that moment, it did.  And I could use a dive buddy some nights, he continues, there’s tanks under the house.  Do you fish? he inquires, and we can lobster.  Oh yes, I reply, I love to fish.  Did you say lobster?  I laugh again.

He is direct and honest, two of the most important qualities people can have.  I hand him a short stack of hundred dollar bills and we shake hands, scribble down a one-sentence lease, the deal is sealed.  I’ll be spending the winter in the Florida Keys.  A little planning and some alignment of the stars, depending on what you believe, went into this moment.  Fate?  Karma?  Was it meant to be?  I left my whole life behind, drove here, a place I had never been.  Sold my business a few days ago on the phone.  Found this coveted waterfront rental in the Keys.  I breathe. 

PRESENTLY, DECEMBER 2018

For nearly three years I have been telling people two things: my life is on hold and I’m exactly where I need to be.  Only one of those statements is true.  I used to believe them both. 

My life is not on hold.  I was wrong about that; my life is cruising right along.  I am exactly where I need to be, that part is true.  I am taking care of my family and they are taking care of me.

I live in my brother’s house, in my nephew’s room.  That is just the tip of the iceberg in my rather unusual life.  I’m not here because I’m destitute or lonely or crazy.  Well, perhaps a little crazy.  I’m here because an amazing set of circumstances led me here.  After a couple of successful careers and not-as-successful relationships that ended, my curvy path led back to the state I grew up in.  No mere coincidence.

I am here because my father is dying.  I can spend as much time as I want with him as his disease takes its toll.  I bring him celery and peanut butter, smiles, stories, magazines.  I try to make his life better.  His mind and his body are betraying him as Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) steals his capabilities.  His smile and blue eyes remain as bright as they ever were.  He accepts his circumstances with grace, more grace than I would.

For months after I moved to New York I would tell people I was here because my father was not well.  I was trying to be, what, politically correct?  Not sure why that was my answer, frankly.  Anyway, now I simply tell them that my father is dying.  This is the truth.  The cold, hard, truth.  And it eliminates most people’s follow-up questions that used to be, how’s your father doing?  I never knew the answer to that one, it silenced me, and now I do.  My Friend Basket does not ask.  They know how my father is, smiling in spite of everything, that is how my father is.  How lucky we are that he smiles.

A Chef by trade, I bring dinner to the nursing home.  This is a pleasure for me, occupying some of the long afternoons, catering to him and my stepmother every time, my brother when he can make it, sometimes my nephew.  Every time it is a celebration.  We are together. 

I can meet my brother at the coffee pot in the morning to say hello.  It’s our kitchen, he shares it with me, indefinitely.  We take care of each other.  We always have and I believe we always will. 

I can come and go as I please, semi-retired, we call it, laughing.  I can hang around and write books.  I can cook and create and put Secret Spice recipes on Facebook.  I can climb mountains.  I can travel, I can explore, I can take advantage of opportunities that people with different responsibilities cannot. 

I can try and make sense of things that don’t make sense, which seems to take up a hell of a lot of time, as it turns out.  My brother and I toss philosophies back and forth, at times redundantly, trying to figure out the meaning of life when we’re not sure if there really is one. 

I can walk exactly one mile and enter through my Stepmother’s unlocked door, for whatever I need.  Borrow some eggs, sure.  Just need some company?  Absolutely.  Glass of wine?  Even better. 

My Stepmother lives at what we call The Creek House.  My family and I bought it as a group effort nearly four years ago with insight that it was the perfect setup.  Three and a half acres split by a gurgling Creek that you can enjoy from all the bedrooms and the deck.  On a rainy day the flow increases and you can hear it as soon as you pull into the driveway.  It’s a beautiful sound.

We are at the top end of the road and the Creek House occupies the first lot; number six, she is the bottom corner, the Cornerstone, perhaps, in our world.  Certainly in my father’s world.  They lived there together, incredibly happy, until he needed the twenty-four-hour care and facility only a nursing home could offer. 

She is steadfast and predictable. I cannot make fast decisions like you do, she told me once, I need to think things through.  Perhaps this is why I find myself in many more predicaments than my Stepmother.  It is also why my list of friends is long and varied and International.  I put myself on a limb.  I live on a limb. 

Our home, my brother’s home, is an incredibly beautiful place, one hundred and fifty-five acres of North Country deciduous forest complete with beaver ponds and rocks and black flies and whitetail deer on the end of the road.  You can get lost back there and I have.  The draw of the forest, any forest, any pristine work of art by Mother Nature, in fact, is in our blood.  We are at home in those magical places, the places with soul.  The Grand Canyon, Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, Arches and Canyonlands in Southeastern Utah, and, much closer to home, Poke-O-Moonshine Mountain, Silver Lake, Whiteface.

He chose well. Peaceful, removed, private.  The house is warm and cozy, in-floor heat radiates and keeps us at seventy-four degrees even on the days, and there are always a few, that are thirty below zero.  Below.  Fahrenheit.  The American scale.  Thirty below means your car doesn’t start and your fingers are stiff in ten seconds and no skin should show, maybe the cheek bones, but not for long.  Your glasses fog up and your breath comes out in a steady stream of frost that makes the little hairs in your nose tingle.  Then the frost builds up on those little hairs and it’s not sexy.  It’s the North Country. 

I have to admit it was quite a reality check when I pulled the Colorado license plates off my car and replaced them with shiny New York ones.  The Colorado tags are still in the pocket on the back of the driver’s seat; I could not toss out such a prominent symbol of my ex-life.  The exchange took five minutes, but symbolically ended twenty-five years out west.  Sealed the deal that I was staying for the duration.  Staying until my family didn’t need me anymore. 

Never thought I’d see the day I lived back in New York.  Never say never.  Never say always.  Wisdom bomb from Mom.  Thanks Mom.  She’s been gone sixteen years, wow, almost seventeen....  I miss her every day.  She instilled enough wisdom to make me the strong independent woman that I am.  I think she would be proud.

I reflect on life and the path it takes; the ironies it can contain.  Slowly, I am watching him die.  His disease?  No treatment, no cure.   When I study him, as I often do, it strikes me that I have chosen my path, his disease was thrust upon him.  Over the past year, I have taken dramatic steps to extend my life with a Prophylactic Double Mastectomy and Reconstruction, to beat the odds of Cancer, to try and control my destiny.  Is it possible to shape the future?

DECEMBER 5

The alarm on the new microwave drives me insane, I say to my brother, pulling the door open. It goes off nearly incessantly after the original signal that the time is up.  And goes off and goes off. 

He looks at me with wrinkles on his forehead and I hear myself.  I laugh.  It’s a short trip, to drive me insane, I say.  We laugh. 

Clearly I have absolutely nothing to complain about.  And I still leave things in the microwave and find them at the end of the day.  So.  Life is good. 

Some things do not matter.  Most things do not matter.  We can get annoyed by them, but we shouldn’t.  People matter.  We can get annoyed by them, too, but we shouldn’t.  Lesson of the day. 

THREE YEARS AND ONE WEEK AGO

Idid not know a soul .  For hundreds of miles.  Hotels.com, sorted in order from lowest price to highest, took me to Looe Key Reef Resort three quarters of the way down the Florida Keys.  It was the cheapest.  And there was a dive shop, and a giant Tiki Bar.  Let the adventure begin.  I made the reservation, three nights.  November of 2015.

My concrete block room, painted stark white, surprisingly opened onto a picturesque canal with palm trees and mangroves, iguanas and birds I cannot name.  The Lionfish picture on the wall was hung upside down.  In their defense Lionfish are fluffy and it can be hard to tell which side is up, the point is that the room was utilitarian at best.  There is no other detail or décor.  The towels are small and scratchy, but there is a small fridge and a coffeepot, my essentials.  I’m thrilled, honestly, thrilled, and sign up for the next morning’s dive. 

The next morning’s dive is over the top.  I am tripled up with a couple from Romania who speak little English, thank goodness the SCUBA signals are universal.  They are great and we take photos with four-hundred-pound Goliath Groupers under the boat.  Yes, four hundred pounds.  Amazing.  It is a regret to this day that they never sent me those pictures.  Language barriers, be damned! 

I relax the afternoon at the pool, read and drink rum and order seared Tuna which is delicious and think this is what I wanted, it was worth the hellish drive through Texas (may I never drive through