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As an adult, Jimmy had become closer to my father than to my mother. They ate breakfast together, packed their lunches and drove off to the depot every morning. So in 1991 when my father keeled over after a golf game and died shortly thereafter, Jimmy was lost. He couldn't see how Dad could walk out of the house with a cooler of beer and his clubs and not come back. In the weeks following Dad's death, Jimmy was dry-eyed until little cracks in his fragile world began to appear.I hired someone to live with him and drive him to work. But no matter how much I tried to make things stay the same, even Jimmy grasped that the world he'd known was over. I asked, "You miss Dad, don't you?" His chin quivered. "What do you think, Margaret?" he said. "He was my buddy."
My mother died of lung cancer six months later. Every child is sad when a parent dies. I was panicked. I was divorced, my daughter, Courtney, was moving out into her own life, and my younger brother, Edmund, had just gotten married. Now I would be the one who had to look after Jimmy.
What I have learned in the years since then is that my work with Jimmy will never be done -- but there was no need for panic. He didn't adjust to going to work without my father right away, so he came to Washington to live with me for an extended stay. At first, Jimmy, who had never once been left alone, went everywhere I went. One morning he put on his funeral suit and accompanied me to a downtown hotel for a press breakfast with Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. The reporter next to Jimmy asked, "Who are you with?"
"My sister," said Jimmy.
"Who's your sister with?"
"She's with me," Jimmy said quizzically. When the waiter came around with orange juice and coffee, the only things served at these affairs, Jimmy asked for a stack of blueberry pancakes -- and got them.
Eventually I set Jimmy up according to his wishes. He wanted to keep his job at the Navy depot in Mechanicsburg and live in my parents' house. He has done that for 11 years now, with a succession of caretakers. He's become indispensable to the neighborhood. Leaves on your lawn? Jimmy's got the leaf blower. Mail to be picked up, dog needs walking? He's your man.
It took me a long time to realize that my mother was right, of course: that if she didn't make Jimmy a part of our lives, he might have no life at all. And that it was possible to have a household that accommodated both Jimmy's limitations and my ambitions. Jimmy doesn't take away from my household -- he enriches it.
That's what hit home a few days after the disaster at the World Trade Center. Jimmy came to see me in Washington for his 57th birthday on September 16, but because of the chaos after September 11, none of our family could join us. So I called on my friends to help make the day festive, even though most of them were drained and exhausted from working round the clock. Instead of a decorous, "No gifts, please," I shouted, "Gifts! Please!"
Jimmy set the menu: pizza made with Mom's bread dough, German chocolate cake and ice cream. The guests were people he'd met over the years. They brought the ideal presents: microwave popcorn, Turtle Wax, CDs with a mix of country songs, a sweatshirt, and enough cans of pretzels, potato chips and peanuts to give Dr. Atkins a heart attack. Considering the week everyone had just lived through, our crooning "Happy Birthday" felt like singing "America the Beautiful."
At breakfast the next morning, my brother pushed a stack of white envelopes toward me and said, "Why don't you take a look at these?" He'd been so poised the night before that I'd forgotten he didn't know which card went with which gift, except by making conversation with his guests. As I read each card, he nodded, as if the treacly sentiments of Hallmark had been written just for him.
And in a way they were. Jimmy had given my friends an outlet for their best impulses and most generous sentiments after a singularly devastating event. He had reminded all of us that a tightly knit network of family and friends can buoy you, if you ever should need it. Those birthday cards are now lined up on the dresser in his bedroom in the house where we grew up. In a way that I couldn't quite imagine when I was younger, my parents had built a house sturdy enough to shelter us all forever.
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