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On the Side of the Road

Riley Winchester

    My dad frequently used the side of the road as a bathroom during my childhood. It was a calculated and very illegal process. His hands tightened their grip on the wheel, his back became rigid and pushed into the seat, he scanned for other cars and a spot to pull over to with the fastidiousness of a forensics detective at the scene of a murder, he mashed the breaks, sometimes heads lurched forward, he pulled the car over; without saying anything, my mom opened the front passenger door and I opened the rear passenger door, forming a barricade; my dad ran around the front end of the car, hip fastened to it as he took a sharp turn to the passenger side, he squatted with his tailbone propped against the bottom trim of the front passenger door; he quickly did his business, my mom handed him napkins to clean up with, he picked up the waste with three, sometimes four, plastic grocery bags, cinched it shut, placed that in two more plastic grocery bags, and put the package in the trunk to discard at a restroom later. Then we got back on the road and continued whatever conversation we were having before, never missing a beat.
    None of this was done to satisfy some sick scatological fetish. My dad used the side of the road as a bathroom because he had Chron’s disease. Chron’s disease is an inflammatory bowel disease that throws a laxative-coated monkey wrench into the gastrointestinal tract. Those with Chron’s disease capitulate control over their bowels to the disease. This meant when my dad had to go, he had to go. His body didn’t care where he was or what he was doing. And we in the car—my mom, two sisters, and me—had no choice but to accept this.
    One of my dad’s most memorable roadside incidents happened when my family was driving north through Tennessee. We were in standstill traffic and a brief tornado moratorium. A tornado had just trundled through Tennessee and ripped apart the town we were driving through. I remember seeing a Waffle House with no roof, front windows shattered, and the letters to the sign scattered in the parking lot like errant Scrabble pieces. On the radio the local weatherman was warning Tennesseans about a second tornado on its way.
    I saw the tension in my dad and his back get sucked into the seat. I knew what was happening. He merged into the farthest right lane—cutting people off and receiving a salvo of honks—found a spot, pulled over, and rushed over to the passenger side. A tornado-wrecked Walmart sat across from him off the highway. I looked through the window behind me for a tornado, waiting for it to roar through and swallow us. The sky was wolf-gray and looked angry. I thought for sure this would be how we died. But my dad finished up and we drove away safely. We later learned the tornado hit that area an hour after we drove through.

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    There was one person who was always stoic through every roadside stop: my mom. And she had the worst of it. When my dad pulled over, we used the passenger doors to cordon him off from the view of other drivers. He leaned up against, and defecated under, right next to where my mom sat, patient in the front seat, prepared to hand him wipes when asked. She was unflappable. She took shit better than anybody.
    When I say my mom took shit the last thing I mean is in the metaphoric sense. She took my dad’s shit, but never his shit. I remember a handful of instances when I was younger where angers flared at dinner and my mom stormed up from the table and left with the car. She was never gone longer than half an hour, and whenever we asked her where she’d went, she curtly replied, “Around town.” It was her method of destressing, yet she never returned pacified.
    My mom didn’t simply leave and forget about it; my dad was going to get his comeuppance. She never hesitated to call out my dad on his antics and overreactions, tell him when he was being a jackass. And she was always justified, deliberately and dexterously telling him what he was wrong about and why he was wrong. She never sat in silent resignation, not with my dad or with anybody else. I had never seen someone speak to my dad, or anybody, with such cutting candor.
    My mom is a small person. She stands half an inch over five feet tall and is svelte enough to be a gymnast. But she has a way of growing in size, like those toys you throw in water and watch grow—sometimes it seemed like she hulked over my dad’s six-feet-tall frame. She can cut into you like a Gatling gun, each wound forcing you to realize you are in fact in the wrong. This isn’t her only side, however, and truthfully it’s her less prominent side. She’s kind and caring. She’s a pretty little hummingbird with the suppressed dominion of a drill sergeant that comes out only when she deems necessary. Her green eyes are warming, and the way she cocks her head when she smiles lets you know when you’re with her, in this moment, the world is indeed a beautiful place to be. She’s loving enough to take shit but strong enough to never take shit.

#

    My dad eventually stopped using the side of the road as a bathroom. One day he came home from a doctor’s appointment with tears in his eyes and told me he had been diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer. I’ve yet to meet someone with worse luck in one region of their body. He underwent rounds of chemotherapy to attenuate the cancer enough until his body was ready for surgery. He underwent a total colectomy, and the cancer and his colon were removed.
    Without a colon the body can’t release excrement the natural way, so my dad had a colostomy bag fixed into his stomach, on the left side of his belly button. He couldn’t control when he went—so some things remained the same. Excrement is released into the colostomy bag without warning once it’s been digested thoroughly, and that’s why it’s imperative to always have the bag hooked into the port unless it’s being changed. My mom was always the one who changed the bag, which is no small act. The smell of colostomy discharge and colostomy bags is something I struggle to accurately put into words. All I can say is, it smells bad and I wish it upon no one.
    But this never stopped my mom. She was always there, ready and willing to change my dad’s colostomy bag for him. The smell didn’t deter her, the circumstances didn’t dampen her. She was resilient. She endured a lot of shit—roadside, illness in the family, putrid bag-filled—and she always came out golden and serene.
    A couple of years after the total colectomy, the cancer came back in my dad. But this time it wasn’t going to accept defeat. The cancer took hold of his body from the inside out and his health deteriorated. He was admitted into hospice care when it was evident there was no hope.
    At hospice the nurses changed his colostomy bag and administered his medications. Whenever a nurse came in to tend my dad, my mom watched with an attentive gaze. She didn’t watch the nurses to catch an error or tell them they were doing their job wrong. My mom watched, I think, because it reminded her of what had now ended. She had played the role of mother, wife, and home nurse for so long, and now she was losing the latter two roles. She watched so she wouldn’t forget.
    My dad died five days after he was admitted into hospice. My mom, my sisters, and I finally left hospice so his body could be taken care of by the nurses. The car ride home was silent in the beginning. My head was leaned against the front passenger window, eyes set on the side of the road, ruminating. I broke the silence and asked the car if they remembered all of the roadside incidents. “Oh my god, do you remember Tennessee?” my mom answered first. “Shitting in the middle of a tornado!” We laughed and then we started sharing our favorite roadside stories. My mom was at the wheel.

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