Purple paint coats bathroom walls.
The color takes its cue from children’s character Barney, but it was meant to lift the spirits of a 60-something woman. Charlotte “Susie” Sprinkle’s grandson, Lenny, liked the plush, purple dinosaur, and Susie loved her grandchildren.
Now 5, Lenny is getting into Power Rangers, his interest in Barney dwindling. But the purple walls remain frozen in time – their color hearkens to a time when Greg Sprinkle’s wife still lived with him in their modest New Haven home. That was before she succumbed to lung cancer, a disease that affects many in the 46803 ZIP code.
Everything about that bathroom reminds Greg of her. It was there that he spent untold hours caring for Susie after she’d gotten ill. He remembers putting her on the stool in the shower, bathing her when it became more than she could manage herself.
Gutted to the bare walls in the summer of 2006, the bathroom was renovated with Susie’s preferences and needs in mind – new vanities, a new bathtub and shower unit and the purple paint. The shower was equipped with a detachable sprayer Greg Sprinkle could hold; two handrails were installed in the bathtub and one near the toilet that Susie could use, along with her husband’s help, to stabilize herself, to hoist her body upward.
When Greg thinks of Susie, his mind usually drifts back to the years and months just before her death last May. He remembers her beautiful face swollen by prescribed steroids, the ravages of cancer and treatment on her slender body. He has to push past those memories to recall the woman who loved vacations and family, who was normally introverted but outgoing at family gatherings, who cooked a turkey dressing on the holidays that always got rave reviews.
After her diagnosis in August 2004, Susie underwent surgery which took a third of her right lung. She quit smoking. For a time she felt better. But the cancer didn’t relent.
Not long before Christmas in 2005, the couple had family over and Susie was looking through some pictures at the house. Greg was in the other room when he heard a yell. He scrambled in to find his wife having a seizure. At the hospital, they learned the cancer had advanced to her brain.
In her absence, rooms at his house remind Greg of his wife. Not just the bathroom, but also a back bedroom where he cared for her; the room where at 63 Susie took her last breath.
Most days, the kitchen sink sits empty. A good cook, Greg can’t rationalize dirtying the dishes for himself alone. He spends a lot of time eating out. But even that reminds him of her.
“Life is pretty empty for me; that’s why I have to hit the road.”
The 61-year-old retiree travels to see his grown kids in North Port, Fla., near Sarasota, and Rockwall, Texas, outside Dallas. Traveling reminds him of his late wife, too, but being with family helps him cope. The extended visits with kids and grandkids last several weeks at a time.
Back in New Haven, he visits with his daughter, Rhonda Sprinkle, who lives in town with her boyfriend, Leonard Hudson, and their son, Lenny.
Greg prioritizes family, just as Susie did.
“She loved her family … She’d do anything for anybody,” Rhonda said. Echoed Greg: if anything defined her, it was her love for her grandchildren.
The pain of losing her is compounded by deaths and struggles of other family members with cancer. The couple’s son, Dennis Fischer, died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2001. Susie’s sister, Theresa Walker, died in the fall; like Susie, she had lung cancer, which had advanced to her brain, though heart problems actually caused her death, Greg said. Now, his sister, Susan Brock, is locked in her own battle with lung cancer.
Greg’s mind spins with ideas about what exactly caused his wife’s cancer. An ex-smoker himself, he doesn’t overlook cigarettes. But he wonders about the role of things as varied as food, environmental contaminants and area landfills. Rhonda wonders about the affect of factory work on her mother’s health, though she doesn’t think smoking helped. She’s made a New Year’s resolution to quit smoking and says she has cut back to half a pack per day, down from a pack. She wants to quit for her son and for her mom.
“It’s been rough without her especially over the Christmas holidays.”
Pictures, furniture, the back bedroom and kitchen, the whole house on Medford Drive, reminds Rhonda of her mom. The same link between place and Susie’s memory is seared in her father’s mind. Try as Greg might to get out of the house, all roads eventually lead him back there.
“I don’t want to forget my wife. I love the memories, but the memories hurt.”
mschroeder@jg.net
