Eric, who I never will see again, is lying in a private family-viewing room in the bowels of a funeral home in the middle of Nashville.
Dead four days, Eric is dressed as he would if he was
alive. His wife, Ann, had chosen a pair of sweatpants and his favorite,
dressiest T-shirt for him to wear at this viewing.
Standing by that beautiful man’s body, I think of our
last phone conversation, the night before he died, when he was still conscious
in the ICU. He complained about the food they’d given him and then whispered,
incomprehensibly, through his pain. “I love you, Brother,” I answered. “Get
some rest. Love you.”
Upstairs in the funeral parlor, people are beginning to gather
for the visitation that begins at 10 and runs until the High Noon service time.
I uppercase High Noon because it is appropriate for Eric, an enthusiast of
classic black-and-white movie Westerns and technicolor war tales. “Do not forsake me, o my darling,” as Tex
Ritter sang to preface Gary Cooper’s showdown.
Eric enjoyed talking about those cowboy and war films,
the actors’ other work, hidden meanings, the reality versus the fiction of a
movie “based on fact.” That, even during his mortal, four-week hospital stint,
invariably led to a history lesson for those of us lucky enough to visit or
even phone him.
One topic we addressed thoroughly was the streaming WWII
Spielberg miniseries, “Masters of the Air.”
It is a great, based-on-fact tale of B-17 bomber crews
delivering payloads from their base in Britain and gradually deeper into the
heart of Hitler’s Europe.
“I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the last two
episodes are grim and moving at the same time,” I told him, since the series
was not available on hospital TV.
“No, don’t tell me,” Eric said, correctly guessing that
the Tuskegee Airmen would become involved.
“I’ll watch the
rest of it when I get home. I’m going to be in rehab for a while, I imagine.
Maybe I’ll go straight home. I hope I can get out of here soon.”
During rehab or recovery, my brother would be, as he
would say “sitting here taking up space,” so he’d have plenty of time to watch
television.
I wish now he’d allowed me to tell him the ending of the
series. Who knows, maybe they’ve got streaming media at St. Pete’s place. Though
he had expressed, at times, doubts that such existed, he also had his Methodist
deacon’s bright beliefs that it did. I’m hoping the old deacon’s right now
getting the Flying Fortress pilots to tell him the straight truth.
Eric loved to tell stories, make pun-filled "dad jokes" and sing commercial jingles to whoever would listen. Daughters Maria and Ana were his favorite audience.
“What do you think about heaven and that stuff, Tim?”
“I’ll find out, and somehow I’ll get word back to you,” I
told him, sure that – because of my earlier decades of running like I was
running out of time – I’d be the first of these two siblings to tag up in the
angels’ infield.
Now, Eric’s gone ahead of me in line. He’s, as he’d say, “taking
up space” with the spirit in the sky.
“What’s new in the world of high adventure?” he’d always
inquire when phone conversations began.
“I’ve been writing
a lot, but don’t know if I’m working on another book or just writing to keep my
brain un-fogged,” I’d say. “I write every day and see where my fingers take me.”
Then I’d ask: “What have you been up to?”
“Oh, just sitting here, taking up space,” he’d say. He
would follow it with that booming laughter that he has shared with me for the
72½ years he was my big brother.
Big, indeed. Eric
was a big, big man, so I’d gently joke him “Taking up space is something you
are really good at.”
He’d laugh, and for likely an hour, we would be on the
telephone, discussing everything that came into his mind, likely when he was
toiling away on his beloved yard and garden, storing up things to talk about,
while singing commercial jingles in his head. He liked cereal, especially
Cheerios, but he was “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” and believed “Trix are for kids.”
He’d also tell you “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your
teeth with Pepsodent” and say “Mabel, Black Label” or whatever other commercial
jingles he could fish from his big, big brain. “When you’ve said Bud, you’ve
said it all.”
Eric, our Dad, Em J., and I were a close trio of Ghiannis for many years. I am now The Godfather or Don Ghianni, likely the last Ghianni of my generation in America.
The most common recipients of his commercial jingle songs were his true love, Ann, and daughters, Maria and Ana. Their husbands, Michael and Joshua, heard them too.As did Josh and Ana’s boys, Sabatino and Emilio – named
for our grandfather and father. Eric was
a great father. He was a fine husband, according to Ann who said “Eric’s my
Superman” as she prayed in vain for his survival. “I guess that sounds silly,”
she added. She was embarrassed by her Man of Steel analogy. But I was the only
one who heard it. And she was right. (And
if there’s a Superwoman in this tale, it is Ann, who was sitting at her
husband’s bedside even when drained from chemo for her breast cancer.)
But the little boys, nicknamed Tony and Leo, both just
toddlers, were really what this Superman lived for.
“Eric was a kind man, but even he surprised himself and
his family by how quickly and completely his grandsons captured his heart and
filled his soul,” I wrote in the obit I composed for the Woodlawn-Roesch-Patton
funeral home website.
The boys – I believe they wore “I Love My Papa” sweaters
-- were still looking for him on the Saturday of the service. Of course, they
weren’t at the viewing in the quiet room in the basement at Woodlawn. They were clutching onto their father, Josh,
upstairs. Their last visions of their
Papa forever will be of him playing with them just days before he was rushed to
the hospital. He’ll always be the giant-of-heart-and-body fellow who loved
being with them more than anything ever in his life.
“I hope Papa gets better so he can play with us,”
Sabatino told his Nonna in the weeks my brother fought for his life at Saint
Thomas Midtown.
Eric spared no expense when it came to time and money
spent to keep his grandsons happy. When
they climb behind the wheel of the battery-operated Gator truck Papa and Nonna
gave them for Christmas, they’ll think of him. Perhaps the most-expensive gift
he’d ever purchased, the money didn’t matter when weighed against the giggling
delight of his grandsons.
The little boys were like fragile dolls in the hands of
my brother. He would melt on contact
with them. All 5-foot-10, 350 pounds of
the muscular and massive body that made him a great football player -- the
sport that tore his body apart and even, perhaps, killed him – suddenly would
become a cuddly, big Teddy Bear.
I’ve jumped around here, but since I’ve raised the
football damage and its part in a surprising mortal ending, Eric (who used to
be just 250-260 during playing days), began having to have knees and hips
replaced shortly after his collegiate football days at Iowa State University.
Hands, arms, discs, knees, hips, ankles, feet, elbows all required repair and,
when needed, artificial replacement in his post-football life. He’d joke he was
a bionic man, kind of like Lee Majors in the old, pre-inflation
“Six-Million-Dollar Man” TV series.
Early in his monthlong hospital stay, they removed one of
his artificial knees, because it and the calf below it were badly
infected. They were going to wait until
that infection went away before putting a new knee in. During that wait, more infections, organ
failures, heart issues, ulcers and a host of other woes turned up on an almost
every-other-day basis.
“I’m really pissed at myself,” he’d tell me, admitting to
being discouraged by the almost constant “downgrades” in his conditions. He
added perhaps he’d overlooked his own health’s diminishing. Life simply got in the way. “I’m never going
to go through this again. I can’t. I need to do better when I get out of here.”
“Don’t be mad at yourself,” I’d say. “Just get better.
Let the doctors fix you and get that new artificial knee.
“Then make sure you always get to the doctor if you feel this
sick. I need you around. It’s just you and me, Brother.” I generally addressed
him simply as “Brother,” a habit I began probably in the 1960s. He called me
“Tim” or sometimes even “Timmy,” the name our parents taught him when they brought
me home from Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Pontiac, Michigan, and told their
26-month-old son that I was there for the duration, his only-child-existence
crashing around him.
“I’m thinking that Ann and I should move down near where
Josh and Ana and the boys live,” Eric said. “I don’t think I’m healthy enough
to take care of my yard anymore.”
We likely threw in a few expletives, but you get the
idea.
An avid landscaper, he knew he no longer could be toting
bags of concrete and rocks, large root balls, gravel and the like. He had spent
the last four or five summers building an oasis of fountain-waterfall, plants,
grass, outdoor furniture and a firepit beneath his deck and across the crown of
his hilly backyard.
He realized he no longer could build fences and sink
fenceposts or topple giant trees. The produce garden he and Ann had farmed each
summer for the last 38 years no longer, suddenly, was a possibility. He’d have to get the tomatoes, peppers,
onions and garlic for his stew-like spaghetti sauce at the store, or more
likely from Ana.
“I bought all sorts of special seeds for this spring,” he
said of the varieties of okra, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, peppers and melons
he’d been planning. “I’ll see if Ana wants them.”
His annual sweet-corn harvest was suddenly no more.
My brother loved his family more than anything. From left, Michael and Maria, Ann and Eric and Ana and Josh with Eric's grandsons.
Ana and Josh have a small farm out in Rutherford County,
a beautiful place for the boys to grow up. And Eric was thinking of the joy he
could get if he and Ann would live within walking distance rather than three-quarters
of an hour away. Eric loved his time out there with the boys, but also with Ana
and Josh. He always helped with Ana’s garden-planning and execution, though I
don’t think he ever cleaned out the stalls for the three horses. (That was a
talent he and I acquired in the stalls at Dudley Dewey’s Day Camp, a sizeable
farm surrounded by Chicago suburbia, where we worked successive summers. Eric,
as you’d expect, referred to the camp owner as “Dudley Do-Right,” for the
cartoon Mountie on “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.”)
Maria and Ana pose with their mom and pop, Ann and Eric. Eric was an artist, and that's one of his works on the wall.
The travel camper he bought over the winter, a deluxe job
big enough even for him, is parked down at Josh and Ana’s. All sorts of
adventures were planned for the warmer weather. Land Between the Lakes was the
planned shakedown adventure. But he
wanted to get back up to Traverse City, Michigan, his favorite place in the
state where we both were born. He loved to stand at the edge of Lake Michigan
and belch. He loved the local wineries and breweries. That day’s catch from the
Lake. Laughing into the night with his wife.
His dreams were to go West, as well. To places I’d
described to him from my own bouncing and bounding across America: Monument
Valley, Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, Great Salt Lake and – as Boomers
might accidentally call it, “Jellystone Park.”
Maybe, just maybe, he and his Tacoma pickup, camper on the hitch, would
bounce all the way to California, so he and Ann could visit my daughter’s
family. He only met Emily’s children once – last Christmas – and he wanted to see
them more.
That unused camper is still destined for the road. “We’re going to take Mommy to all the places
you talked about going,” Ana told him, as she stood at his deathbed. During the
memorial service, she said plans are now to take his ashes along for those
journeys.
I should note here that he also loved, without
boundaries, Maria and her husband, Michael, who work in the clergy and social
services fields in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
They are wonderful young people, and they FaceTimed him
often, even as he lay dying.
Eric and Ann took their first-ever trans-Atlantic flight
last summer to visit them. Typically, Eric launched into preparing the soil and
planting, generally landscaping Maria’s weed-and-dirt yard.
They also went down “into the Republic” to see sights. He
had, highlighted in his travel itinerary, a few days in south County Mayo and
in Galway. He knew the bridges, farms,
buildings, pubs and the like he wanted to see.
His favorite movie, fittingly, was the John Wayne-Maureen O’Hara film “The
Quiet Man,” about a boxer, shaken by ring tragedy, who retires to his homeland,
replacing a life of violence for love of the soil and pubs and peace.
Eric called me from Ireland last August to describe what
he had seen each day. So much enthusiasm in his voice propelled me and Suzanne
to watch the film and look for what he was seeing.
“He was at that bridge today,” I’d say, smiling at the
thought of my big brother getting to see that as well as other things: Ancient
forts, the remains of an apparent Roman-built bridge to Scotland, miniature
Stonehenge-type mysteries, ancient castles and pubs. Man, did he love the pubs.
He may have sang to me that “Budweiser is the best reason in the world to drink
beer,” but the fresh Guinness at the pubs was something he never
got over.
He and Ann were planning a return trip in a couple of
summers. He needed to get a knee replacement (again) and make sure his general
maladies and diabetes were under control. He wore his Irish paddy cap – a
flattop tweed with a stiff brim – wherever he went. Unlike his baby brother, he
was not gifted with a full head of hair as he aged, so the paddy cap warmed his
head and heart.
I have promised Maria and Michael that Suzanne and I will
make that trek sometime, not much consolation, but I am now the last Ghianni of
my generation I know of, at least on this side of the Atlantic. My wife told me
I am now the Don, The Godfather. True enough. Mostly, right now, I’m still
Eric’s baby brother. I cannot yet visualize him dead.
As noted earlier, I always was sure he would be the one
to precede me. I had told him so. As a young man, I lived life hard and fast,
slowing down when I married Suzanne and we adopted Emily, then Joe.
Up until then were newspaper nights and days, fueled by
nicotine and caffeine and put to bed with alcohol. The newspaperman’s life of
B-movies and real-life, until the lifestyle died with industry.
It only made sense to both of us that he’d be there for
my eulogy. He could tell people about his “crazy” younger brother’s dances on
the razor’s edge of life, how he loved to write. And lived for his family.
Eric loved to visit the shores of Lake Michigan, especially in the wine and beer and cherry-tree area in and around Traverse City. This photo was used with his obituary and on the funeral program. He's wearing a stocking cap demonstrating his love for Iowa State University, where he played football and I chased the dawn.
I wouldn’t lecture Eric about his own health, other than
to remind him to take his medicines and listen to the doctors. I would remind
him he was too big. But, in truth, his
girth was hidden behind hard shields of muscle and strength. His mammoth hands
had a lumberman’s grip, the biceps rippling at his too-thick exterior layer.
Like our father, Eric planned on living to 110. I really
didn’t doubt him.
He was my big brother, after all. He never disappointed
me … until he died.
Eric always told me he got “A’s” from his doctors at his
annual physicals. I didn’t believe him. If he was telling the truth, I am angry
with his doctors for not insisting he lose weight and for telling him his heart
and body were great.
That heart was the last thing to fail. Liver, kidneys,
lungs, stomach, bladder already were faltering –as I think back to that day, as
we all circled his bed, urging him to keep that heart beating. Three times he
flatlined. Only twice did he return.
The death haunts me.
I’ve got no one to call or hang out with who remembers our youth as the
sons of parents who helped create the Beaver Cleaver middle-class after Dad and
his comrades stood on the throats of Hitler and Hirohito. During those years,
women made massive forays into the domestic workforce. My mother began as a
cops and courts newspaper reporter on Chicago’s Southside while her husband was
cleaning up the Philippines.
I’ve got no one who remembers our not-so-chummy young
years, in which he violently demonstrated his distaste for the baby brother his
parents brought home.
I spoke a lot about those years in the eulogy I delivered
at the funeral home while his body awaited cremation one floor below.
Basically, my brother took every opportunity to bruise me
and humiliate me up until I was in my mid-teens, and one day I challenged him
to a fistfight. It was a long and bloody, spit-filled battle on the front lawn
of our home in the Chicago suburbs.
I beat him into submission. “Uncle!” he cried. Then he laughed as he
climbed to his feet. Instead of angering him by finally whipping him, he became
my biggest advocate.
Eric was my best friend regardless of the mess I left in
my wake in the years before I married Suzanne. She became my best friend then,
but Eric was always there to talk about life, regrets, admire my writing, love
me, my wife and my kids.
Eric truly was my best man. And I’m so proud I was his.
Eric thought I was crazy for the way I lived in my
single, party-from-presstime-till-dawn newspaperman days. But he loved me
always. He loved our memories. He loved talking about history and educating me
on battles and heroes as opposed to the myths and legends. He liked my tales of
blood and gore news stories, interviews with Muhammad Ali and O.J. And he even
accompanied me and serious journalist pals to see The Lone Ranger when I was
“on assignment” 40-some years ago.
I thought about a lot of this while I stood in the
viewing room, where my brother’s mammoth, though stilled, body lay, a blanket
covering his sweatpants and favorite “dress” T-shirt.
I knew this would be the last time I’d see him. Ashes
replace the body. But Eric’s large life goes on in memories, mine and those of
the many who loved him.
“I love you, Eric,” I said.
In a few minutes, I would be upstairs at the podium, eulogizing
him, raising laughter when describing the old Super 8 movie footage that Dad
was taking of my first steps when Eric pushed me to the sidewalk.
I had told that story to Eric as he prepared for his
final battle in the ICU. I also told him I loved him, as I ended all
conversations over the years.
We all took our time with the big man on the table in the
family-viewing room.
It was time to leave him, to take one long, last look at
the earthly remains of a wonderfully sweet man.
Before we all went upstairs, I turned to kiss the
forehead I’d never see again.
“Goodbye, Brother. I love you.”
Today, a week-plus after that service, I was sorting
through my phone. There was a voice message from Eric.
“Hi. It’s Eric. I’ll just call you later or tomorrow.”
It was an old message. But I’m waiting for that call. Just
in case.
Eric adopted all varieties of cats over the decades. Here, one of them helps him compose some artwork on his computer.
Eric was and always will be my Best Man. Here he and the Rev. Phil Ross and I share some funny comments before I wed Suzanne.
Eric here takes time to teach Maria how to be goofy. He always was just a huge little kid when around those he loved. This isn't a great picture, but he'd hate I got so serious here, so this is one he'd like me to close with.
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