Left To Me
By: Loukia Borrell
Unwashed
2026-27 Edition
Left To Me
There was trouble the first day back, even before we got into the house. I was carrying my son in one arm and my brother’s hospital bag in the other, watching as our dad tried to get the wheelchair through the front door. At 80, Dad was still on the lean side of things in his arms and legs, less so in his midsection. He heaved hard, ramming the threshold, and nearly pitching Andy out of the chair a couple of times before they made it inside. I wanted to leave, but I knew our parents were not ready for what was happening now or what was going to happen later. None of it. Andy knew it, too. Speech slurred, the first thing he said to me after waking up from a stroke was: “I can get out. You gonna be there?”
He was my new job.
We ruled out his townhouse. I wouldn’t be able to get him upstairs. My place wasn’t an option either. My husband worked from home. His kids from his first marriage lived there. It was a busy house, no place for my brother and me, two hapless siblings. We agreed on our parents’ place, a brick ranch close to the oncologist’s office and hospital. Mom and Dad could help me with my children when I needed to take care of Andy. We got a hospital bed with rails and put it in a bedroom at the end of the hall, along with a portable toilet and a card table for his mail and pill bottles. I took a room down the hall with my kids. I would see my husband when I could. It was going to be OK.
That summer, the days and nights all ran together. Andy’s sleep was disturbed, and he was usually awake when I opened his bedroom door each morning. I’d help him piss into a urinal. Bathe him. Brush his teeth. He couldn’t manage zippers and buttons, so I dressed him in sweats and T-shirts. Used a gait belt to guide him into a wheelchair. The rest of the day was about doctor’s appointments, toileting, pills, meals, errands, watching the kids and cleaning up. There were no periods of silence, even in the deepest part of the night, someone was always moving or needing something, and each generation fought for control of the house.
I knew Andy felt entombed and anxious, so I stayed up late with him, even though I needed sleep. I would prop him up in the hospital bed, lift the blinds and pull back the curtains so the streetlights illuminated us in melancholy brown-yellow. We murmured to each other, kept our voices low and the lights out. I always sat near the bed, in a folding metal chair, and we spoke of random things: The kidney cancer that had settled in his brain, ready to kill him, nightclubs we used to go to, why he kept in touch with his old girlfriends, movies, homes we grew up in, college, why we never quite fit in, the stranger I slept with that I thought gave me AIDS, people we felt like killing, Madonna, the most he’d ever pay to see Rod Stewart in concert, the wreck he had with his Camaro, church, Sharon Tate, how glad we were that Jackie Onassis died before JFK Jr., Midnight Cowboy, weed, and how we were both born in the same state as Paul Newman. We dissected our parents and events that shaped us, and while we said a lot, more would always be unsaid, lost in irreversible, permanent silence.
Night after night, I could hear our parents tossing in their beds. Dad put down Andy’s illness to poor choices. He didn’t take care of himself. Mom’s most overriding belief was that life is a mean trick. Why take away her only boy in the whole world when there are living and breathing scum walking around who genuinely deserve to die?
Her displeasure was planted long before. I first detected it on a summer afternoon, when one of those giant Midwestern storms with tornadoes and hail was coming through our city. I was five or six. The wind carried me to the house, two steps at once. She was in a lounge chair in the front yard, wearing a green sundress with a pleated skirt and square neckline. Not 40 yet, her hair was black, her face unlined. Come inside I called, running up the yard. She turned toward me, her green eyes like a doll’s, blinking blankly. “I hope the storm carries me away.”
The marriage lasted, but it was underscored with disagreements and punctuated by long silences. She waited seven years to have a second child, doing so only after a trip to her homeland and urging from her mother, who had eight children, and her mother-in-law, who had even more.
When we found out I was a match to donate stem cells for him, Andy said, “Now we know why you were born.” It was something you say to a good friend over beers, maybe if both are a little drunk and trying to get a laugh out of something hard. A stem cell transplant was suggested after immunotherapy didn’t work. We were put into a clinical study, but the year before more than half the people with Andy’s type of cancer took part in a similar study and died. They never said he would beat it, just that he might live longer if it worked. Might and if is all we knew anyway.
That changed when he failed a brain MRI and we were dismissed from the clinical trial. They tried radiation for a brain tumor, then he had a stroke that paralyzed him and left him partially blind. The ifs and mights switched to will. Andy was going to die. “This summer might be interesting,” I told him. “It will be the last time we’ll be together with our parents. The original four.”
Time started to move faster, carrying us through the rest of the year and into the next, as he continued to weaken. I was still helping him, but his girlfriend moved up from Georgia to help, taking him to live in his townhouse, where a bed was set up downstairs. He slept more, said less, was more swollen, his eyes vacant and his skin flaky. The main doctor would look at me, wondering if I knew how to let go of someone.
My brother died on a Tuesday morning in November, about 18 months after the stroke. He was near death, ashen and gasping for a tiny puff of air when I got there. The color under his fingernails was blue. I stood in the kitchen, called the cops, the funeral home and wrote his obituary while our parents cried on the floor. Later that day, the last time I saw Andy, he was stretched out on a gurney in a funeral home room. My father and I sat in chairs, facing the body. We only spoke to list the reasons Andy died. Started a shipyard job right out of high school and used to come home covered in dust, pieces of metal stuck in his coveralls, hot and dirty. Too many vending machine sandwiches, too much sex, too many cigarettes and strong moonshine. We touched him on the way out, cold. He wasn’t even 50 years old.
Twenty years on, I can’t remember the sound of his voice. I can’t hear him anymore. I don’t try to remember the way he looked, smelled, or felt, or even the things he would say to me. In dreams, he emerges as different men, as a marionette with broken limbs, a wheelchair-bound invalid who is locked out of his own funeral, a spirit who told me he is fine and doesn’t have worldly problems that plague me. Other times, he is doing big brother things, fixing a problem under the hood of my car. He calls out: “I’ve got to hurry; there’s a hearse coming for me.” I look down the street. There it is pulling into the driveway, long, sleek, and black. Andy gets in. The hearse turns into an airplane, heading over cliffs and mountains. I’m the pilot now. I look back. He is sitting quietly, no longer blind or paralyzed. He is healthy, looks at me straight on, encouragingly. I tell him we need to get higher. His lungs are perfect. He takes a deep breath and up we go.
