Highway O

That’s where Dad grew up. On the ridge. The road eventually was named “Highway O.” That’s not “0” as in “zero,” but “O” as in “Oprah.” I don’t know why Missouri has highways named with letters but it does. My mom grew up on “ZZ”. I suppose there are worse things than Highway “O”.

Anyway. Mom died. We were all surprised, I think. That’s because we were all in denial. I mean, the woman couldn’t lift a five pound bag of sugar. I cleaned her stove one day and she looked at me and said “How did you get all that grease off?” I had basically just wiped it down. But my skinny arms were so much stronger than hers.

So she died rather unexpectedly. I was the one who called 911 to get her to the hospital. Two nights before I had called to check up on Mom and Dad – Dan and I were renting an apartment in University City at the time – and she told me that she was getting ready to move all the living room furniture to prepare for the carpet cleaners who were coming the next morning. Since changing a light bulb seemed to be a challenge for her at this point I immediately went by the house and moved all the furniture for them. The next morning, while the carpets were being cleaned, I took her to the doctor and found out for the first time that her heart was on the fritz as well. When we checked in the nurse weighed her. This was December. She had on a heavy coat and a sweater, and still clocked in at 85 pounds. The doctor came in and looked at me and his first words to me – I’ve not seen the man in over thirty years – were “Are you feeding her?” to which I responded “I try.” And then my favorite memory of that visit was when he turned to her after she had an electrocardiogram and said “You are a decrepit old woman.” If she used such language, she would have told him to fuck off. They had an understanding.

So that night I stayed in the house. It was my first night staying there on a permanent basis, but I didn’t know it at the time. Dan came over, and we slept in my old room on a mattress on the floor – a twin bed mattress for the two of us. Correction: add the dog. The three of us. I spent the better part of the next day trying to get her in to see a cardiologist. I should have been getting an appointment for myself at the chiropractor. Anyway, she went down for a nap, and got out of bed four hours later. She looked like hell. She was confused. She was rambling. I thought she was having a stroke or something. She seemed to be functioning though on some level, so I suggested to her that we go to the hospital. She said okay. Big, big warning sign. For her to admit that she needed to go get some medical help was anathema to the person she prided herself on being. So she was packing a bag to go to the hospital, but still confused. I mean who takes a sewing kit to the hospital? I was with her when she took off her wedding ring before leaving, for safekeeping. She looked very confused. I made her sit down, grab my hands and squeeze them, and I said things like “Count from 10 to 1 backwards” and “Who’s the president?” I couldn’t understand her. Spittle started coming out of her mouth. I called 911.

Craziness. Dan showed up. Dan agreed that she was having a stroke. Then the paramedics arrived. EMT’s were firing questions at us. My father was standing there, with his cane, watching the whole thing. My car was out in front of the house along with a fire truck, an ambulance, and a police car. The EMT said I should go ahead and go to the hospital while they got her stabilized in the ambulance. He said I’d beat them there because they’d probably take it easy. Okay I said.

A few minutes later I’m on my way to the hospital, stopped at a red light, and I hear the siren. I look in my rearview mirror. Webster Groves does not have a plethora of ambulances, so when this one blew by me with the town logo on its side, I knew it was her, and I just said, over and over again, “What the fuck?” I turned on my own flashers and said cops be damned.

The ER doctors also seemed to think stroke, though it ended up probably being a TIA, one of those mini-strokes which leaves no indication that it ever happened. Or maybe she wasn’t getting any oxygen. Who knows what they knew but weren’t telling me. What they did tell me was that if I had any siblings I should contact them. “I have one sister in DC. Should she come out here?” “If she were my sister,” said the doctor, “I’d get her here.” What the fuck.

Mom lasted ten days, most of which she spent in a medicated coma in ICU while being intubated, thanks to the residents who asked her if she would want a “breathing tube.” They meant invasive tubes down the throat. I would have known that. But she did not. Had I been there, I would have said, “Mom, they mean hooking you up to a machine with a breathing tube down your throat.” But I wasn’t there. And she agreed that she wanted a “breathing tube.” To my own last breath I will swear that she would have thought they meant those little plastic tubes hooked up to oxygen tanks you see courageous people with when they go to the grocery store. And that was definitely not what they meant.

Angela did come out for the weekend. Then she flew back to DC, and then drove out on a long-planned holiday trip the following weekend. She arrived the following Sunday night after driving with her two girls and a dog from Maryland, and almost immediately I took her to the hospital, where Mom was in the ICU. It hadn’t really occurred to me that Angela had never been in an intensive care unit. As an Episcopal priest and some-time hospital chaplain, I had been in them countless times. Plus I had spent the week visiting Mom two or three times a day while she was there, unconscious. My mom, not me.

Angela has her own story to tell, but I have to say I felt really badly for her that night. The previous weekend Mom wasn’t in good shape, but she was able to talk, not hooked up to all these horrific machines and monitors, and in a private room which didn’t feel so scary.

The next day Angela and I went back to have “the meeting” with the doctors. While we were pretty sure what the outcome of the meeting was going to be, the doctor cinched it all when he said “If it were my mother, I’d remove life support.” So we said yes. Mom surprised us all and died twenty minutes later with Angela and me standing by her bedside. Typical Mom. She wasn’t about to let her kids decide anything for her.

So anyway, back to Highway O. Lulu Hasenjaeger grew up on Highway O, just down the road from my dad’s family farm. Don’t you love that name? It’s not an uncommon name around that area, but seriously, in German it means “bunny hunter.” Don’t believe me? Go to Google’s translator and type in “hasenjaeger” in the German to English translator. It comes up “bunny hunter.”

So Lulu Bunny Hunter is an old friend of the family. Her parents and my grandparents knew each other well. She’s on the Cemetery Board for St. Paul’s Cemetery where everyone is to be buried. Mom, Dad, uncles, cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents. They’re all there. Also a lot of Hasenjaegers as it turns out.

Dad grew up on Highway O, on a farm about three miles north of Marthasville. He’s written a lot about that, as have his brothers. They wrote a book they did. “Alex and Clara’s Boys” they called it. It talks about their lives on the farm, in the war, and what they’ve done since. A big theme throughout the book, besides the farm and the war, is cars. There’s even a picture of the Volvo my parents had for twenty years, along with their dog. These are important themes in understanding the Nissing boys.

I’m sure I’ll come back to these themes from time to time. For now, suffice it to say that Highway O is a spiritual home for me. I believe it was for my mother as well. I know it is for my father. His one-room school house is still there. Lulu has moved into town, but not far. Other families still own property in the area. My great-grandparents settled there. The house were my grandmother was born still stands. Highway O. It’s like a part of my DNA. It is part of the fabric of who I am.