One Easter Sunday

by Lloyd B. Abrams

The ten-day Easter vacation - now known as Spring Recess - was an especially welcome break from the tedium of attending school and later, of teaching school. Easter Sunday, the annual milestone - who remembers all eight days of Passover? - was seductively and inexorably coupled with springtime's possibilities and promises.

On a gray Easter Sunday, 1982, when our two children were little, we strolled through the Bronx Zoo, serendipitously crowd-free because of unrelenting showers. On a perfect Easter Sunday, 1972, I earned $84, the most I ever made, driving a taxicab part-time in New York City. On a sunny and warm Easter Sunday, 1957, while we visited my aunt and uncle in Whitestone, Queens, my father suffered a major heart attack that struck without warning.

I was ten years old at the time. My cousin Harvey was a year younger, and we got embroiled with some neighborhood kids in an altercation, as boys of our age often did. In retrospect, it was just a rite of passage, a territorial thing, male posturing, or just plain orneriness on our part. My father, who was sitting on the front stoop watching our warring, suddenly grabbed at his chest.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed my mother and my aunt helping my father into the house. I knew right away that something was wrong. An uneasy truce fell over 20th Avenue when Harvey and I turned and ran back to the house. I took the steps two at a time, and was immediately shushed by my aunt when I tried to push my way into the bedroom. My father was lying on top of the bedspread, propped up by pillows. Partially-closed blinds filtered out much of the late afternoon sunlight, but I could still see how pale and desperate he looked. He reached his hand out to me but my mother's threatening glance stopped me from getting any closer.

At the same time they were trying to keep my father calm, my mother seemed so scared and frantic. I watched as she madly dialed the black telephone on her lap and then waited, and then loudly and angrily hung it up. Aunt Sarah told me, "Your mother's trying to get a hold of Uncle Fred. He's a doctor who lives nearby." At one point, my mother turned to glare at me. "Don't get your father any more upset..." and quickly added, "than you already have." Instead of the gentle reassurance that I needed to hear, her admonition took on a reproachful and accusatory tone. Often, my father had taken my side and defended me when she was on the rampage. This time, he was too weak to respond and was unable to protect me. While an elephant was sitting on his chest, as he described it, I was being blamed and I had no way of fighting back. He was captive to a weakness in his heart and I was being held captive by a lack of tender-heartedness.

When my mother finally reached Uncle Fred, she broke down sobbing and Aunt Sarah had to do the talking. Minutes later, I heard the wailing siren of the ambulance long before it turned down our dead-end street from Francis Lewis Boulevard. I ran to the front door to watch. Its flashing lights interrupted the approaching calm of twilight and lit up the high-ranch homes with red and white beams that rotated around and around. I was swelled with excitement, but, at the same time, I was ashamed that we had become the center of attention.

Two men in white uniforms pushed me out of the way as they rushed into the house. The shiny red Cadillac ambulance, parked at the curb, fascinated me and I wanted to go out and take a closer look. But, instead, I followed them all back into the bedroom. Between their hunched-over bodies, I was able to catch only a glimpse as they examined my father. "Is he going to be all right?" my mother shrieked as they lifted him onto a gurney. Then, "Tell me. Please tell me! What's going on?" Although she screamed for an answer they could not possibly give - "Please, lady. Let us do our jobs..." - even then, at ten, I knew that she couldn't bear to hear the truth.

Then it hit me. My father was going to die! I felt sick to my stomach, then empty, as if the bottom of my stomach had dropped out. I'm never going to see him again. This is it. This is the last time. But my mother was whimpering so much that all the attention was drawn to her. She was having trouble catching her breath and I thought she was going to faint. My aunt embraced my mother to comfort her. I heard her whisper, "Sylvia ... you've got to be strong ... for the sake of the boys."

Uncle Walter, meanwhile, had changed his shirt and put on a jacket. He gently took my mother's arm as he urged her on with "C'mon, Sylvia. C'mon. We've gotta get going." He walked her towards the front door so they could follow the ambulance to the hospital. As she passed me, she looked down at me, almost as an afterthought. Her eyes, wet and reddened, were filled with fear, and then with fury and loathing. Then, abruptly, she seemed to melt. She knelt down and hugged me. Her hands pressed against my cheeks as she said, "Lloydie, Lloydie. Don't worry. Daddy'll be okay." Even though she tried to sound convincing, and kissed me on both cheeks to soothe and reassure me, she couldn't conceal her own doubts, and stop them from oozing out and scaring me even more.

As my uncle helped her up, I yelled out, "Mom!" I tried to grab at her but she slapped my hand away. I looked up at her with stunned surprise. My eyes started to tear, but I refused to cry.

Horrified, she hugged me once again. "Oh, Lloyd, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it." She pulled me close and, instead of her usual sweet talcum smell, I was almost overwhelmed by the sour odor of sweat mixed with her despair and her misery and her fear of the unknown.

Suddenly, she pushed me away and composed herself. "Stay here with Aunt Sarah and make sure you behave yourself." My aunt stepped over to hold me, to restrain me, while my uncle squired my mother down the steps of the front stoop.

I pressed my face against the glass of the storm door and watched as she got into my uncle's Oldsmobile. Hurry, Mom, I said to myself. Before it's too late. The ambulance had already made a U-turn and was heading back towards the boulevard. Neighbors were out on the sidewalk like sentries, standing and watching, quietly talking among themselves as the disturbance to their tranquility subsided. Even the kids we had been fighting with were no longer giving me the finger, were no longer mouthing, "You're gonna get it." Freed of the insult and the assault of the siren and the flashing lights, the quiet Queens neighborhood slowly retreated back into itself.

My father was in the hospital for over three weeks, with many more weeks of convalescence. I was constantly warned not to be so noisy, not to fight with my brother, and "For God's sake, Lloyd. When are you going to learn? ... Leave your father alone."

I overheard my parents and their visitors speaking about the unspeakable with surprising ease - that what had occurred could have, indeed, been "the big one." I immediately understood what that meant. But I soon grew tired of their constant litany. I was disgusted hearing all the apparent causes being openly discussed and dissected. There was my father's obesity, his love for fatty foods, his smoking, his high blood pressure, his ongoing worries and anxieties, his pharmacy's declining profitability, my brother's leaving for college in the fall, and on and on. It was as if the heart attack were entirely his own fault, as if he had actually had a choice, and there was no one else to blame. Except me, of course.

Even though my mother never again mentioned the Easter Sunday accusation, I knew, as irrational as it sounds now, that it always simmered just below the surface.

* * * * *

Twenty years later, my father was still smoking, though he had long switched from unfiltered Camels to Camel Lights, and he confided to me that he was only occasionally taking his blood pressure medication. Some pharmacist, I thought, though I remained silent. He was also facing a move to Florida that would have taken him away from his "boys," away from all he had built and struggled and strived for. And his worries and anxieties still galloped on, unchecked, unimpeded and unabated.

The day after his 65th birthday, my father finally did have "the big one." His myocardial infarction, the cause of death on the official certificate, occurred less than four weeks after my wife was rushed into emergency surgery to repair a rupturing fallopian tube, and less than two weeks after my father saw me lying immobile in a hospital room after almost being killed in a freak motorcycle accident.

Maybe he just couldn't take it any more. I still cannot get out of my head that his having seen us both so narrowly escape death might have killed him, might have put it over the top for him. Or maybe, in some unexplainable way, he had made a deal to trade his life for ours. Perhaps, like twenty years before, I was again somehow and somewhat to blame.

There has never been a way I could know what had really taken place. Yet, I still carry a burden that I cannot seem to shed.

Rev 7 / May 7, 2004; Rev 8 / Jan 9, 2008; Rev 9 / May 9, 2008

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May 2004; January & May 2008…Copyright © 2004 and 2008, Lloyd B. Abrams