It's never bothered me that a smile doesn't come easily from Dustin. Sure, his eyes grow warm, and he gets into winking phases that go on for days at a time. He laughs with his whole belly when the occasion merits, but in general, he isn't the grinning type.
Gloria Gaynor was singing in a hotel ballroom when Dustin finally let out a cheesy smile and kept it on his face through a dozen disco tunes. I have to hand it to that dancing trombone player, and to the dozen or so cocktails Dustin uncharacteristically downed that night. His inhibitions lowered, felicity burst through.
"Nothing bad has happened to me," Dustin told me once in passing, and I took him at his word. This California kid has coasted, I thought, assuming that what he meant was that he had never known hardship. I judged him for it, though I kept that to myself, and I shushed my intuition, which understood from the gravity of his face and the subtle slump in his posture that his life could not have been soft through the center.
The Dodgers almost made it to the World Series last season. Dustin's hometown team, and his dad's. Father and son were calling each other constantly during the division championship games. "I love you, man," Dustin would always say before hanging up. One night, while I watched over a pot on the stove, Dustin revealed, again rather casually, that his dad had chronic lung disease caused by emphysema. For decades, Dustin's dad had refused to quit his three-packs-a-day habit, standing his ground until he had no choice but to trade in his Marlboro Reds for the oxygen tubing he would need in order to breathe.
Dustin put together the puzzle for me piece by piece. The lung disease kicked in eight years ago, but before that it was diabetes, and a decade before that, unemployment that led to an eviction. Oh. I see. Dustin had lied. Tough breaks had been his longtime companions. I had cast judgement in error.
I was doing the thing where I writhe in mental agony over some aspect of our relationship when Dustin emailed me a photo of his dad, the first one I'd seen. He was wearing a shirt Dustin had given him as a gift. His eyes were closed, his mouth was turned down, his beard looked a bit shaggy. I saw Dustin in his dad somewhere — or was it the other way around?
Then, Dustin's dad broke his leg and ended up in a long-term care facility to rehabilitate. Dustin kept me posted on the progress as though he were updating me on the status of his tax return. His dad had done so many tours of the local hospital system that a ride in an ambulance had become routine.
It wasn't until the health insurance provider informed the patient in an impersonal and incomprehensible letter that — paraphrasing here — he had to pay up or get out, that Dustin showed some distress. From nowhere near home, Dustin was having to comfort his mother, placate his father, request appeals from the insurance company, and get an overnight education in what long-term health care options were available to his family.
We had planned to spend the weekend exploring, and instead sat in a room for hours making phone calls to advocacy groups and researching Medicare coverage. What had made me anxious about him in the past became trivial, just as he had assured me it would. Dustin forgets dates and half the things I say not because he couldn't care to remember but because he doesn't have the extra space in his brain to manage it. And so what I said to myself was this: Cut the crap, cut the fat. He is there, and that's the most of it.
Read Helin's earlier "I'm With Him" columns: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, and Part 9.
Photo credit: Getty images
Helin Jung is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. She was formerly the executive lifestyle editor of Cosmopolitan.com.
