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home > on-air > feature documentaries > the ground we lived on > The Ground We Lived On
Dad: Showtime... Showtime.
Adrian Leon LeBlanc, my dad and my namesake. His keen joy in observing people and the world is the reason I became a journalist. D: I'm laying here while the reporter is establishing contact with the patient. My father was born on June 28, 1917. He was a traveler, a knight of the open road as he called it, hopping trains during the Depression, shipping off to Italy during WWII, and, for most of my childhood, canvassing factories as a union organizer. Cancer was a journey that blindsided him.
D: I'm not sure what trip we're on.
My father's propped up in a hospital bed in the living room of the house he built with his own hands. He's tucked in beneath a comforter, his body so slight he barely makes a lump under the down.
D: I wonder what the hell I weigh.
D: Hi, sweetie.
My mom Eve and my dad have been married for 50 years. He made her coffee every morning until he was too weak to stand.
E: I love you.
It's February. My father's been bedridden in the living room for a month now. It's always been his favorite place in the house. Before he got sick, he'd sit here in his armchair everyday. He liked to read the newspaper or stare out the picture window. He'd wave us over to share whatever he was seeing—blue jays, squirrels, the color of the maple leaves. Now his hospital bed is positioned where his armchair once sat.
A: You looked a little squished up to me.
My father is the center of our attention. My mom puts all of her energy into his creature comforts—ironing his sheets and pajamas, finding food that he can eat. In the spaces between, they visit.
E: I was looking at all those pictures last night and I thought our children had a pretty nice childhood.
The house feels a lot like it did in my childhood, though now it's my father we're feeding, bathing, tucking in. But he's still my dad in every way he can be. He agrees to do leg exercises he knows are useless, because I can't accept that he'll never walk again.
A: Then, ready.
One of my dad's few remaining pleasures is having his hair washed. D: Don't be afraid to use your famous scrub. We rig a makeshift drain and use buckets of water to shampoo it in his bed.
D: Is the water running into the buckets or whatever it is?
I need to be near my father constantly. There are moments that caring for him feels spiritual. He's wasting away, but I experience an almost religious reverence at the sight of his flesh. For the first time ever, I want to have a child—a desire that I'm sure comes from wanting, literally, to hold on to the life in him. D: Here we go again talking — and I'm being recorded, I think, I hope I am, by my daughter.
D: Oh, I've got my teeth out and everything. Talk about miscombulated, or whatever the goddamn word...
My father delighted in language. His only rule with us as kids was if we didn't know the meaning of a word, we had to look it up.
D: I wonder what it is that I, I'm so intrigued with words. Oh well.
My dad taught me that language was a powerful tool. He wished he'd gone to college because he felt it would have made him a better communicator and able to do more good in the world. He was a gentle man but he could be fierce whenever he saw anyone mistreated. Certain things always stirred his anger: shopping malls open on Sundays when laborers needed rest; the memory of his mother, who was a tailor, sewing at their kitchen table late into the night. Workers were his people, and he devoted his life to making their lives better.
A: I hope, I hope when I'm an old woman, if I'm lucky enough to get to be a old woman—
Any chance I got, I spoke about my father. My pending loss gave rise to new friendships as some of the older ones gave way. Grief scares people and my pain was so raw I think it was difficult for some of my friends to tolerate. I connected best to others who were wounded—many of them strangers. Serious loss brings you into one of the world's silent fraternities.
D: How long have I been sleeping?
It's March now. My father's sleeping more. He needs more morphine. My mother's attempts to get him to eat subside. The house feels heavy. We slow down.
D: Is your mother sleeping?
It's becoming harder to record, but my father encourages me. Our voices are the ground we've lived on, so we keep talking, even about his leaving me.
A: Daddy, is your chest hurting where I'm hugging you?
Illness transforms the things you most fear into the things you crave and would hold onto if you could, like my father moving to the living room. No one in my family wanted to replace his armchair with the hospital bed, and now no one wants the hospital bed to go.
A: You can go to sleep, I'll watch you go to sleep.
A week passes. He only has the strength to speak in whispers. I absorb every word.
D: (whispering) If you can open my leg.
In his last days, I sit for hours on the rug by his bed and listen to him breathe. My mother sits on a chair by his side and we try to do, what, for me, will never be complete. We say goodbye to my dad.
A: Daddy. It's Adrian Nicole.
My father, Adrian Leon LeBlanc, died in his living room on March 21, 2003.
Writer and Narrator: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc /
Producer: Sarah Kramer /
Executive Producer: Dave Isay /
Executive Producer for All Things Considered: Christopher Turpin /
Special Thanks to The LeBlanc family, Arthur Joseph Giangrande,
Michael Garofalo for tremendous assistance, Katie Simon, Piya
Kochhar, Donna Galeno, Heather Burke, Grant Fuller, Lizzie Jacobs,
Lizzy Cooper Davis, Jonah Engle, Edith Presler, Karen DiMattia,
Dalton Rooney, Kathrina Proscia, Jen Goya, Eliza Bettinger, Brett Myers, and the StoryCorps Senior Team: Kayvon Bahramian, Nora Levine, Matt
Ozug, Tracy Serdjenian, Nick Yulman who all contributed in multiple
and meaningful ways to the project and the process / Major Funding for this radio documentary was provided by
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with additional support
from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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