Jobim Santos (2:35)

Oh, boy.

Kevin Allison (2:36)

I remember how moved I was that night. It was 2016, a live show in Boston where this story was recorded. It's a story we call Two Of.

Jobim Santos (3:00)

It's a very, very dark night. The sky is overcast. There are no stars. There's no moon. A car is moving down the highway. There are no street lamps. Just about the only light that's perceptible are the headlights of the car and a distant glow on the horizon. Coming from the city of San Antonio. The Car is a 1994 Jaguar XJ6 with British Racing green paint, tan leather interior and wood veneer accents. The driver is Linda. The passenger is Justin. Justin is anxious. He hasn't seen Linda in a long time. He wants to connect with her. He can't really see her face, though. But she's wearing a dark hooded robe. So he leans towards her. She pulls on the cowl, obscuring her face, and pushes on the gas a little bit harder. He wants so desperately to see her. Each time he leans a little bit closer, she just keeps pulling on that cowl and keeps pushing on the gas. And they're going faster and faster and it's only a matter of time before they completely lose control. He wants to see her. She's not even speaking to him. This is about the moment that Justin wakes up. In 1997, Linda tripped and twisted her ankle. It happens to everyone. It's not a big deal. But then it happens again a couple weeks later, and it happens a third time and a fourth time. So she starts to be a little bit concerned. She goes to her doctor to find out what's causing this. A couple of months later, she and her husband Jose call their kids to the kitchen table. Their daughter Lydia is seven and their son me. I'm 10. They sit us down and they tell us that there's something very serious that they need to talk about. They say that mom has Lou Gehrig's disease. I've heard of Lou Gehrig. I know that he was a very brave man. And I know that he died of a mysterious illness. I don't really know what to think of this situation because mom is fine. She just has kind of a sprained ankle that won't get better because she keeps fucking it up. My parents tell me that this means that mom is going to die a lot sooner than anyone might have expected. I say, okay. I understand. It seems okay then. But very soon we start to see her decline. She starts to walk around with a Cane. It's not a hooked cane like you might see an elderly man walking down the street with. It's a hiker's cane. It kind of looks like a ski pole. Her voice starts to slur just a little bit. Then she moves from one cane to two canes and two canes to a walker. She's still driving her car that she loves so much, that green Jaguar. She can't hit the pedals though anymore. So she has this device installed, a lever mechanism that you can use one hand to do the gas or the brake and you can use your other hand to steer the car. She gets a suicide knob to help her do that very easily with just one hand. She moves from the walker to the wheelchair, the push chair, and eventually she's in a motorized chair. She's slurring her speech more and more now. It's becoming very difficult to understand what she says when she needs to speak to you. So there's a tutor that comes to our house once a week and teaches us some very basic sign language so that she can at least get her needs taken care of. She also gets a laptop so that she can use a text to speech program just the way that Stephen Hawking does. While this decline is happening, and while we're all so completely aware of her impending death, her personality is changing too. She in her Jaguar, has a 6 CD changer and she buys six copies of Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon. So it's always on repeat whenever we're driving around with her. I must have heard that album a thousand times. Her personality is also getting to a point where she has very few fucks to give. We go on a trip one day, me, my mom and Justin. My mom teaches me about the River Rule, which is what happens on this side of the river stays on this side of the river. And I'm about to break this rule for the first time tonight. On this day, we're spending time together in a Texas state park. It's a very nice day. She's still got her two canes so she can get around very slowly. We get to relate to one another on such a personal level. She's my mother, but she knows that she doesn't have that much time. She's not going to reach that point where I'm a full grown adult and we can have that real relationship that adults can have with one another. So I'm starting to get very comfortable with the way that I feel about my mom. And I start to kind of tease her a little Bit in a very playful way, but just enough that I'm kind of being a dick. And that was the first time I ever saw my mom flip the middle finger. She flipped it at me around 1999. She was diagnosed about two years before this. She hits a plateau. She's still in her motorized wheelchair, but she's been in that chair for months now. And it doesn't seem like that much is changing. Maybe the drug tests that she's been enrolled in are starting to have an effect and we start to feel pretty good about our situation. So we're at church every single week now. We've moved past that point where it's okay to miss church. Everybody is pretty much staring death in the face and you don't have a choice anymore. So we're there every single Sunday. For those who aren't Catholic, there's a point in the Mass where the intentions are offered and there's a list that a lector goes over saying, today we're praying about this. We're praying for Mrs. So and so, who is in the hospital right now, a member of our parish. And at the end of the defined list, there's a point where the deacon stands up and he says that everyone should offer their own personal intentions, whether they decide to say it aloud or silently. Hold this prayer. And everyone is praying together for this Mass of prayers. And I have one prayer that I'm holding onto every single week. I'm not asking God for a miracle. I know that ALS is a terminal illness. I know that there's no cure. I know that except with very few notable exceptions, basically everyone dies of this disease in a matter of a handful of years. I'm asking God for my mother to live long enough to see me turn 13. I'm 12 years old. I've been having this prayer at church every single week, just holding on for dear life in my 12 year old brain. If you just hold onto a prayer very tightly and if your heart is pure and if you are a good person, God can make anything happen. I tell my mom one day about the prayer that I've been offering and she can't show it and she can't tell me, but she is completely crushed. All the time that I've been praying that she will linger on a little bit longer. She's been praying for nature to run its course. She doesn't want this disease to make her into a vegetable that sits around and makes everyone need to take care of her. She wants things to just run their course and be over. She's ready to die. Somehow she makes it to New Year's 2000. The whole family is together. Friends, we're all joyful. It's been a beautiful, beautiful holiday season. Just after this new year, the weather in San Antonio gets a little bit better. It should be cold, it should be in the 40s, dreary and rainy outside. But it's beautiful. It's Sunny. It's like 74 degrees. My mom at this point, has made it to where she can't move her hands enough to use sign language anymore. She can't type on her keyboard anymore. She can't even wrap her wedding ring on the railing of her hospice bed that she now sleeps in in her bedroom. Every morning my dad and my grandpa lift my mom out of her bed and they lay down a folding mattress on the back porch. They set her down on that bed and she gets to spend her daytime feeling that warm sun on her skin and watching the clouds go by and hearing the birds chirp and seeing her garden that she had planted years before, that she devoted her time to for so long. One day after school, it was a Friday, my sister and I are playing across the street with some of the kids that lived there, the Palkos. My grandfather opens up the door to our house and he calls out to us that it's time to come inside. Somehow I don't know how, we just look at each other and we know that it's not just time for dinner. We know something's just a little bit off. So we go inside and our grandfather leads us upstairs to my parents bedroom. My mom is there in her hospice bed and the hospice doctor has been keeping an eye on her heart rate and her breathing. She can tell us that from what she knows and from her experience, she probably has hours left to live. Everyone takes their turn to walk over to the bedside and to say a goodbye. To kiss her on the forehead, to give her hand a little squeeze. I go over and I kneel down next to the bedside. I hold onto her hand and I whisper into her ear so that no one else can hear me. I tell her that it's okay. I tell her that I'm going to be okay. That we're all going to be okay, Knowing full well that it's a lie. I tell her that if she needs to let go, then she should. In less than 10 minutes, she's dead. In the months that follow, my grades go to hell. I no longer find Texas history important. I don't give a fuck about English grammar. I've Lost all my friends. I don't know how to relate to people my own age. I spend my free time during lunch sitting under a tree. And the kids come over the first week that I'm sitting under that tree to ask me what's going on. And I say, I kind of like it here. It's quiet. And they walk away. And after that first week, nobody bothers me anymore. I sat there probably for months. It's hard to say now. My faith went to hell, too. Mom died 19 days before my 13th birthday. Friends and family at this time have been telling me that they're having dreams where Linda appears to them as if it's a visitation by her ghost. There's a running theme in a lot of these dreams that she's driving her old Jaguar that she loves so much, and the dreamer is riding shotgun and having one last little Sunday drive to say Goodbye. And I'm 13 now, and I want so desperately to have the dream like everyone else. I want to have a posthumous interaction with mom so that she can see me. I'm 13 now. I'm a pseudo adult. She succeeded in raising me to this point, but I don't get to have that dream, not for another 13 years. I'm 26 years old now, and I'm riding shotgun in a car, and my mom is driving. We're in the neighborhood where I grew up in San Antonio, the neighborhood where she died. We take a left turn off of the main road onto a road that's the scenic way towards our old house. She used to love going down this road. It had a lot of beautiful, beautiful gardens in the front lawns. And it's springtime, and everything's in bloom and beautiful. And everyone has the sprinklers on in their front yard, so it's creating a mist all around the car. And I'm seeing rainbows everywhere I look. I can just see my mom there, and she sees me, and we're smiling at each other. The radio is on and the Beatles, two of us is playing. It wasn't an important song to us when she was living. She was always a Pink Floyd person. But the song is about two people who are the best of friends and they're headed home, but they don't really care too much about how they're getting there. It is the most beautiful fucking dream. I wish I could have it every night. I think that it took me 13 years to finally process my grief, to understand the loss of Linda, to. To really absorb that she was gone. And God damn it, if I wasn't happy to have that dream and to have even more music now that will remind me of her. This story has an epilogue. Yesterday, one of Linda's best friends died. Deweese. She was a beautiful person who helped me get through that dark hard time and she will be sorely missed and this story is dedicated to her.

Amy B. Brooks (20:23)

Thank you. Folks.

Kevin Allison (20:39)

If you love Risk, please help elevate the profile of the show and shout down the haters by writing us reviews and giving us five star ratings on Apple Podcast, Spotify or podchaser. And if you have anything to say about the stories themselves, we might even quote you on a future episode. Amazon presents Jeff vs. Taco Truck Salsa. Whether it's verde roja or the orange one, for Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea and milk. Habanero. More like habanero. Yes, save the everyday with Amazon.

Amy B. Brooks (21:41)

So I was born to two of the most optimistic people you've ever met, which is sometimes code for stupid. But she's here so we won't talk about it. So I was kind of bathed in this big soup of eternal optimism from birth. And my parents were kind of like the JFK and Jackie of the little trailer park we lived in in the middle of nowhere, Missouri. They saw everything as adventure and they were just excited about everything. And they were kind of like the king and queen of their little Camelot. Unfortunately, like that original Camelot story, ours kind of has a sketchy ending. Although our Lee Harvey oswald was an 18 wheeler that went over the side of an overpass. So this would be where most people panic and the worry sets in. But not my mother. No way. My mother is a confirmed believer in her motto, which is this, you gotta start from where you are. So we did. It was me and Jackie and my new little baby brother, and we'll call him John John. And we jumped in our 1974 Chevy Monte Carlo, white, and we threw Helen Reddy's you and Me against the world into our eight track cassette player. And we marched on. And I was a true believer in everything she was saying. You just gotta start from where you are. So a couple years pass and my mom decides to remarry. And when my mom decides to do something, she does it. And she married a man with six kids who had buried two wives. And so we were this big sort of redneck fiesta of a family. I went from being the oldest of two to number seven of eight. Which is a difficult transition. My stepdad, my new stepdad was not from the school of you gotta start from where you are. He is from the school of life sucks and then you die. Which he was entitled to. My mom didn't notice that at all. She was not dissuaded from her little philosophy. And we marched on. And so when the sole breadwinner of the family of 10 loses his job, that's no big deal. You just pack up the kids and the pregnant cocker spaniel and you move 100 miles from everyone you know and start from where you are. And when the oldest of the stepchildren decides the best place to shoot himself would be on the interstate during rush hour, you just kind of manage that situation and marshal on. And when one of the stepsisters is killed in a robbery at the place she works, you pick yourself up and you just go from there. So this is what I've been doing my entire life, is just marching forward and not worrying. And start from where you are, and it's all going to work out. So I grow up and I get married, and we have all the problems that young married people have. Intermittent poverty, job changes, his mother. It's a different story. I don't think we even noticed the whole infertility thing for a little while. We were like, weren't getting it, but we weren't upset about it. I don't remember a big conversation or this being a big deal. We just kind of, you know, you start from where you are. And so where we were was adoption land. So, okay, we can live in adoption land. So we start that whole process. And that whole process is like a cross between being a Supreme Court nominee and a Miss America contestant. So you fill out all these forms and they check your taxes, and they do a background check, and you have to have physicals. And then comes the talent portion, which is where you make a scrapbook so that your life is precious to whatever unwed pregnant teenager may have your baby. And then is the interview portion of the show, which is where they sent, in my case, this super uptight social worker to my house. Her name was Tonya. Not Tonya. Tonya. And they ask you super riveting questions like, so what makes you think you'd be a good parent? Well, I'm popular and fun and my kids friends love me. And do you think your marriage is ready for children? Yeah, aren't they all? And what form of discipline do you think you'll use for your child? Clearly waterboarding. That's a no Brainer. So she chose to approve us for some reason. And we settled in to wait. And they had prepared us to wait years. So we waited and we waited and we waited like two whole weeks. And we get this phone call at 7:00'. Clock. That should have been a clue, by the way. So we get this phone call at 7 o' clock on a Monday morning. I'm not generally up at 7 o' clock on a Monday morning. So we get this phone call and it's the adoption agency. Mrs. Brooks, would you be interested in like a three year old, blond hair, blue eyed boy available now? My brain exploded. Visions of crafts and play dates and pony rides and birthday parties were dancing through my head while the woman was saying to me vaguely I recall this, yeah, his dad killed his mom. And he might have witnessed that a little bit. And then his dad killed himself. And so then he went to live with an aunt and uncle. And he's had two failed placements in the 10 months since this whole thing happened. Did not discourage me at all because I was mentally redecorating my spare room the whole time she was talking. So we drive over to meet him, which is like this really weird blind date with 3 year old. So we drive over, got lost, he, he's in Illinois, we're in Missouri. We get there and he opens the door. It was like a Disney movie. The music swelled in the background, woodland creatures danced and sewed things. It was perfect. And he looks at me and he's got these blue football footy pajamas on. And he sticks his hands on his hips and he says, I've been waiting for you. You're my new mom and dad. This kid could have had both my kidneys right there on that front floor. I was hooked. So we go in the house and he shows us his hat wheels. And they're like the greatest hat wheels I've ever seen in my entire life. And then he wants to know if I'll read him a book. And so we sit on the couch and he plays with my hair while I read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. And I'm thinking, this is the greatest book I've ever read. Dr. Seuss is a literary genius. And that night, so the grownups can talk, we tucked him into bed. And when he hugged me, it was like two puzzle pieces that were meant to fit together. And he smelled that little boy smell of like baby powder and dirt. And I was intoxicated by this child. So two weeks later we had him home. Our church threw us this big Toddler shower with like 100 people. And okay, in the middle of that, he did throw himself on the floor and scream, I hate this stupid party. Why can't we just go home? Well, I know that now, but thank you. Where were you, like, 18 years ago? So we. We had family pictures taken. We went to Disney World, and we did all of that in the first six weeks. We were excited. So things are going along kind of smooth. We're all nestled in our little ranch house with our little race car bed and our Thomas the Tank Engine wallpaper. And we go out of town for a few days, and we have the neighbor pick up our mail. So we get back, I walk over to the neighbor's house, and I get our mail, and there's a certified letter. Now, I don't know if you know this or not, but good news never, ever arrives in a certified letter. So what's important to know is that my son has a half brother who's 10 years older. They have different dads. So when this whole thing happened with their mom, Brian immediately went to Iowa to live with his dad. And his dad's Doug and his girlfriend Tammy had a long history of, like, drugs and drinking and divorce and DUIs and just kind of sketchy. And this letter was telling us that they were suing to block our adoption and that they wanted guardianship. They didn't want to adopt him. They just wanted custody of him and his Social Security check. It was like falling off a cliff. So I completely panicked. I couldn't speak, I couldn't breathe. And my husband takes the letter, and now he can't speak and he can't breathe. And somebody's got to raise this kid. And so we do what we always do in a crisis. We drove to my mother's house because she knows where to start from, right? You're going to start from where you are. So we walk in her house, we hand her this letter to Ms. Start from where you are. She reads it, and all the color drains out of her face and she begins to cry. What? This is the person who knows what to do. I've seen her throw funerals together. I've watched her navigate weeping children, and she's got nothing. And I panicked. So this was in court for two and a half years, but we had to live our lives like nothing was going on. So my husband would get up and go to work every day, and I would get up and be a stay at home, not sure what I am because the jury's literally still out on whether or Not. I'm going to be this kid's mother. In the meantime, Josh relaxes and he gets real comfortable with us. And when he got comfortable, all hell broke loose. This kid could go from sweet and cuddly and adoring me to incredible Hulk time. Raging, rampaging, destroying our house in like 2 seconds flat with no indication of what it could be. Anything. I handed him a pair of socks, which he put on himself. And he started screaming, I hate you, I hate you. You're so stupid. These socks hurt my feet and the line is on my toes. Okay, I can fix that, but not this kid. He could tear down mini blinds. He hated mini blinds. He could knock holes in the walls and he could destroy a room faster than you could figure out what to do about it. If anybody needs mini blinds put up, I'm pro. I can spackle with the best of them and I can hang a door back on a hinge that's been ripped off by a really irate four year old. So this just kept going on. But other times things were great and we played with Legos and we went to the park and he spent six months dressed in a Batman costume. How many of you have seen us in Chinooks in St. Charles? Totally. We were there. So time passed and our toddler turned into a preschooler, and then our preschooler turned into a kindergartner and we're still in court. And our lawyer was sort of an idiot savant. She looked completely homeless, but she was like a legal genius. And she didn't get disbarred until two weeks after our case was done. So she is actually in prison at this moment. I kid you not. So I'm spending my days wondering what's gonna happen. I've got this angry open wound of a kid who's calling me bitch half the time and then clinging to me and begging me not to leave him. I couldn't drop him off at school without making a phone call and saying, we're going to need the extraction tape. They would come, peel him out of the car. So the whole time this was going on, I started getting sick. I started having high blood pressure and I had chest palpitations and I had this tumor, like tennis ball shaped tumor in the middle of my neck that I couldn't figure out why everybody else couldn't feel it because it was so obvious to me. Went to the doctor, he couldn't feel it. Went to, had an mri, had a CT scan, nothing. Could not figure this out. It drove me crazy. It was like a Rock in your shoe like you couldn't ever really, like let go of this feeling. And I walked around like this all the time. And I would slog through my days like somebody had filled my hip boots with wet cement. And then I'd lay down at night and I would kind of plan our life on the run because I was totally going to skip town with them if it ever went south. In the meantime, I'm trying to find help for a really upset five year old, which is almost impossible to find. Everybody has an idea of what you should do and none of them work except just holding him and kind of letting him scream. And it was something. We keep going back and forth to court. The other team never really does what they're supposed to do to fulfill their end of the bargain. And finally the judge in Illinois has enough of it after two and a half years, decides that their petition is not valid and they move us to Missouri, which is where we needed to be to begin with. So we get this family court date scheduled. And family court, they do like to do adoptions all on one day. So you're kind of there with everybody else who's all excited and happy. And we had like 15 of our friends and it was kind of like an atmosphere of like a real quiet circus. And you kind of wait for them. They tell everybody to show up at 9 and then you wait for them to call you. So I'm waiting and the whole time everybody's kind of laughing and talking around me. I'm watching the door because I think this other couple is going to show up and they're just going to blow up our day because I can't believe we finally got to this point that we're going to get this over with. But they didn't. And we called us into the court and Judge Briscoe read our petition and he says, does anybody have any testimony they'd like to offer? Well, I looked down and my 5 year old's doing this. I almost puked. So Judge Briscoe calls him up to the stand, they swear him in, they turn on the microphone and Judge Briscoe says, what would you like to say? And Josh says, listen, God picked them and God picked me and he made us a family. And my mom says, if you'll sign the stupid papers, we can go eat lunch. So everybody laughed and Judge Briscoe signed the papers and we took a bunch of pictures and we went to eat lunch. And I kid you not, I left my tennis ball tumor in that room that day. But now My worry, because I've learned that while worry can't be wished away, it can be managed. Which is a good thing when you're Joshua's mother, because this was not our last trip to a courtroom. No, no, no. So as he gets bigger, his outbursts get a little bit scarier. And he's about 13. He would vacillate between wanting to know if he could sleep with us and running away in the middle of the night. And then he embraced a life of smoking. So in order to do that, when you're 14, you need money, and I'm not providing that. And he and a couple of his buddies started breaking into cars for cigarettes and money, which, that was fun, middle of night phone calls. So we did that for a while, but then finally, my husband was in the hospital. He's about 15, can't drive. I get a phone call. Mom? Yeah, I need you to come pick me up. Well, that was odd because he was in two bedrooms down the hall from me. I said, where are you? I wrecked dad's car. And I'm thinking to myself, you wrecked it in the driveway. I said, are you hurt? I'm bleeding everywhere. I said, joshua, where are you? I'm on Mexico Road. Now, Mexico Road is huge, and he can't be any more specific than that. So I'm jumping into my clothes and I'm wondering how this happened to me. And I get out of my car and I get a call from the police, because at this point, we're on a first name basis. And they have my cell phone, and they said, Mrs. Brooks, this is Officer Collins from St. Peter's Police Department. And we have your Mercury Mountaineer behind the dollar tree. And no one's with it. Do you have any idea who's driving your car? So I tell them the whole story. They tell me how to get there. I show up, four cop cars, all the lights dearly departed. Mercury Mountaineer wrapped around a tree. No Joshua. So we're all talking about what to do, and it occurs to me that he's whispering. So I think to myself, he's close by. So we turn off all the lights of all the cop cars, and we turn the lights off one last time for the Mercury Mountaineer. Sad. And I dial his cell phone number, and it lights up behind the dumpster at the Dollar tree. So he has a pretty good sense of when it's up. And so he comes over and they said, well, you know, what do you want to do? And I said, well, you know what? He stole a car. And you arrest people that steal cars. And so they put him in the back of this police car, and I watched this cop car drive away, and I thought to myself, we're gonna figure this out, and we're gonna get through it. So now he's 18, and we have way more good days than bad. And he was gonna come tonight. We kind of decided me. That was a great idea. He's doing pretty well, but he doesn't have this spark of optimism that I grew up with. And I hope that someday he can get the magic of that, because you really need that when you realize where you are, and you have to start from there.

Kevin Allison (38:04)

This is Risk. This is Danny Shields behind me now, and we just heard from Amy B. Brooks, a story recorded at a Risk live show in St. Louis in 2016. Now, Amy's story makes me curious. Have you ever gone through a period in your life where you were just waiting for something completely outside your control to be decided? Or in regards to Jobim's story earlier, have you ever wanted something so badly for someone you loved and then found out it was not what they wanted for themselves? Send me a voice recording or just email me@KevinRisk Show.com or leave a comment about the stories on Spotify or on our website. There's a link in the show notes. We're planning on doing a whole episode built around sharing and responding to your responses to Risk stories, and I'd love for your voice to be a part of it. Folks, today's the day. Take a risk.

Amy B. Brooks (39:35)

Sam.