This was originally posted as "Fags are Stupid"
Larry Denham.
Now, that’s a name that means a whole lot me, personally. I wouldn’t have been here without it, after all.
He, however, would still be here if not for the cancer that festered in the two to three packs of cigarettes he smoked every day and hung concentrated in the air of the bars he regularly frequented for decades, then spread to his lungs and beyond, and eventually killed him.
On April 17th, my family will note the fourth year since the passing of my dad.
It’s become just another day, now, as it should.
Depending upon the level of activity that comes my way, it might dawn and set with hardly a thought to the substance of the day. But that’s okay.
To hang on to the past, to not let go, is not good for the mind or the soul, a little fact proven by the nervous breakdown suffered by my stepmom a few months after he died.
He was cremated, and she still has his ashes, of course. They will be buried with her, in her casket, when she dies. My dad’s idea…..saving money by buying only one casket.
Ironically, she’ll be buried in the plot next to my mother, one of the two my dad purchased in 1980, when she died.
At any rate, my stepmom had used the ashes to make a shrine to his memory, placing flowers and a picture of him on top of the wooden box containing the ceramic urn, and every day lighting a candle in front of it. Part of her treatment was agreeing to go home and, in front of her therapist, put the ashes away; letting him go.
She placed him in a purple velvet bag on the top shelf of the bedroom closet. Out of sight, out of mind. She does get him out for holidays, though, which I feel is kind of creepy, but whatever gets her by.
I always tease her when she tells me she got him down for some holiday or other, like Christmas, for example. I always ask if she perhaps wrapped lights around the box, or maybe put a Santa hat on it. You’d have to have known my dad. He’d have found such reverence on his behalf to be somewhat silly.
Not long before he passed, I joked with him, asking if he was really sure he wanted to be buried there; after all, he’d be stuck with both of them for all eternity. He just smiled and chuckled a little, as much as his weakened lungs allowed, then firmly told my stepmom to "just be sure to dust me every day". As I said, you had to know my dad; he always had a good sense of humor. He faced most every obstacle with a grin, and Death’s impending arrival was just another rock in the path.
Larry Eugene Denham was born on August 30th, 1940, in Monroe, Michigan. The family later moved to Wheeling, West Virginia, where, as a teenager, he met my mother.
His parents, Ollie and Madalyn Strautmann Denham, both died young, some years before I was born.
Granpap Ollie died in a car accident in 1950, I believe, Grandma Madalyn of an illness I can’t just now recall, in 1964 or ‘65.
In the late Spring of 2000, at 59, my dad had a heart attack. He was off work for several months, of course, and returned in November or December. He worked for a few weeks, but passed out as he was making his rounds (he was a security guard), and was rushed to the hospital, where they performed a CAT Scan of his chest. It was then that they noticed the spot on his lung. Surgery verified the diagnosis.
He fought it well for months, retiring officially and spending what would remain of his "golden years" going back and forth to the hospital for chemo and radiation treatments. He got progressively sicker and weaker from the poisons pumped into his system, and foods he used to love now tasted foul to him, for some reason. He lost weight and had to rely on thick, gooey, sickly-sweet high-calorie dietary supplements to keep up his weight. They didn’t work very well, all told.
He had for many, many years kept his very slowly-thinning, yet full head of hair combed in a "Fonzie" Duck’s Ass; a tribute, I suppose to the days of his youth as a street hood.
Once, this was in the 1970s or early 80s, a friend of his watched him comb it, and counted every direction the comb moved. My dad was laughingly informed that he combed his hair 11 different directions.
Well, the chemo and radiation soon took care of any necessity for such devoted attention to hair care. I’m bald on top, and have been for many years, but once on a visit, I joked that this was the first time in a long time that I actually had more hair than he did. He laughed and replied that at least they were saving money on shampoo.
The cancer was, for the most part, successfully fought in his lungs, and the treatments were cut back somewhat. A few months later, though, it showed up again, then somewhere else, then somewhere else, and so on, eventually appearing in the frontal lobe of his brain.
From then on, it was ‘Katie, bar the door’. There was nothing they could really do for him then, just fill him with painkillers and keep him comfortable until the Angel came for him.
I called him one evening, just to say hi, and could barely understand the weak, wheezing voice on the other end.
He felt the necessity to make it very clear, during that conversation, that he loved me, and was proud of me. I’m not a cryer, but I sobbed like a lost child after I hung up from that call. His decline was swift after that.
He quickly, over a period of perhaps two or three weeks, went from the sharp-witted, humorous dad I knew, to something resembling an Alzheimer’s patient in the later stages.
Hallucinations started, strange ideas would come into his head, or he’d ramble about nothing for several minutes, then stop as his mind cleared. He’d then shake his head and ask, annoyed with himself, "what the hell am I talkin’ about"?
He had an interesting hobby; he built things out of matchsticks. Boats, houses, trains, all sorts of things. He had a wonderful, natural eye for proportion and detail, and the work he did was outstanding (back when I was a kid, he even built a real houseboat, which we kept for several years on Piedmont Lake in Ohio. He designed and built the whole thing himself, in my grandparent’s basement, using no actual blueprints or instructions).
He built me a huge, very detailed riverboat for my 30th birthday. It used over 7300 matches and took him 9 months. He once tried to build me a matchstick replica of the Starship Enterprise, but wasn’t able to work it out.
It was sad to see him sitting there at his worktable, time running out, getting weaker, trying build something for everyone in the family. Trying to build a memory. He wasn’t able to do it. All he got finished was the hull of a coal barge, which he had intended to give to his sister, my Aunt Sharon. He got too weak to continue. She has it, at least.
He wanted to come home to die, and was indeed brought home, but his needs by that time were so that it simply wasn’t possible. He needed professional care. So, heartsick, I signed the papers to have him placed in a nursing home. My stepmom couldn’t do it.
I sat down next to him on the sofa, where he was drowsing, and slowly pulling into the fetal position, and told him to look at me.
Typically, he said "what the hell do I wanna look at you, for?" A joke. I told him that I needed to talk to him about something important, and I wanted to be sure he understood me. He turned his eyes to me, cloudy with pain medication and sleep, and said "what?"
I told him the way it was, just like I knew he’d have wanted. He understood, and told me to do what I had to. We called the ambulance, and they took him to the Heartland Nursing Home, where he died some 32 hours later.
He’d started refusing food, water and all medications but painkillers a couple of days before. He spent his last hours in kind of a blurry twilight of thin consciousness and deep sleep.
My stepsister, Dorenia, and I got him to eat a few bites of some meat, fruit and pudding once he was at the home, but not much else. He knew what was coming, and didn’t want the family to have to see him that way, so he more or less shut himself down.
The one thing he did take, not long before he died, was the sustenance of Communion.
Their pastor, Reverend Alice (her last name escapes me) told me that, in all her years as a pastor, he was the only person who had ever thought to request Communion before dying. She considered, as a result, that she might offer or suggest it herself, from then on.
My dad was a talented, dedicated man who, over time, conquered his darker aspects (he used to drink….a lot. A WHOLE lot. When he drank, he had a temper, too. A BAD one. He stopped drinking several years before he died.), and appreciated and took care of his family and friends. He is missed.
A true smoker to the end, though, he lit one up when Dorenia took him outside in a wheelchair a few days before he died. All he really did was hold it, though. He insisted, right to the end, that it wasn’t the 50-odd years of smoking, or all those years spent hanging out in smoke-filled bars, that killed him.
No, it was the 4 or 5 years he spent working in a brake shop where they cut asbestos to be made into brake shoes. Yeah, that was it. Sure it was.
This, even though there was no indication of Asbestosis in the brown-black tar pot that were his lungs. Smoker’s denial.
Fags are stupid.
They cost an ever-increasing, already preposterous sum of money these days, and do nothing but cause harm and death. Now, I’m not one of those anti-smoking zealots. I’m not a nut who’s going to yell at you to "put that thing out". Anti-smoking laws are getting ridiculous.
You want to spend an untold sum of money just to kill yourself in slow motion, go ahead and light up.
A gun barrel in the mouth or handful of sleeping pills with half a bottle of vodka would be quicker, cheaper, and easier, overall, on your family, but whatever you want. It’s your right and I won’t stop you. But I do think smoking is idiocy.
When you’re sitting around a campfire or bonfire and the wind changes, blowing the smoke into your face, what do you do? You cough and you move. But then, so many of you will stand there, facing away from the wind, and light up a cigarette. You then draw smoke directly into your lungs. Smart.
Cigarettes do kill. I’ve seen it for myself.
Larry Eugene Denham
August 30, 1940 - April 17, 2002