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The closest comparison I can think of to losing a parent is to imagine what it would be like to come home and find that your house was gone. Not blown up, burnt down, or knocked over (because then at least you would know what had happened to it), but just gone. In its place is a field or a parking lot or something.
And the best part is, when you ask your neighbors what happened to it, they just look at you strangely and insist there was never a house there to begin with.
That's kind of how I'm feeling nowadays as we wait for my father to die in hospice. He's beyond solid food now, so we take turns feeding him ice cream and pudding and other sweet things he won't have to chew. My mother, my brother, myself, my uncles, my cousins, my brother's wife, and my brother's kids... we all take our turn, and I wonder if I'm the only one who finds it somewhat ironic that it's the diabetes that's killing him, and yet now the only things he can eat are things he couldn't before. Meanwhile, my boyfriend the RN checks all the tubes and the piss bag they've hooked my father up to, just to make sure it's all in working order.
I find that it helps to concentrate on the mundane bullshit of life to cope. For instance, the day after we'd settled him in hospice, and while we were waiting to see if he would recover from his dialysis enough to be able to make the decision himself to stop any further dialysis, my boyfriend and I went out to buy a drain snake and some cupcakes. The cupcakes were just for fun but we needed the snake because the bathtub drain is clogged again. He has long hair and I have very long hair, and it just comes with the territory. And as I was pulling out clumps of hair, I wondered why I was bothering with it. My father is lying in a bed just a short drive away, dying. Why am I unclogging the drain? And why, once I've pulled out all that hair, am I thinking we have enough, if we so choose, to dry it out and knit ourselves a cat?
Does it matter if the drain is unclogged? Does anything matter when your father is dying?
He can answer yes-or-no questions, but anything more complicated confuses him. He can still recognize people, for the most part, but sometimes his eyes just roll about in his head. He swats at the air from time to time. Sometimes he'll ask a simple question, like the other day when there were hailstones hammering down on the hospital and he asked if it was cloudy.
We said that it was.
I get online and go to skyscraperpage, another of my favorite forums -- after checking to make sure the drain is flowing smoothly of course -- and engage in an argument in the City Discussions section. It's about Atlanta. Personally, I don't care about Atlanta. I don't care for it -- although you might and that's fine -- and I won't live there. I don't like Atlanta for the same reasons I don't like Charlotte, and this is largely because except for Atlanta's much larger size, they're basically the same place. No, if I were to move to a larger Southern city, I think New Orleans, Memphis or Richmond would be more my style. Possibly the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area. Charleston or Savannah perhaps, but they're not all that much larger than Asheville, so it would be a lateral move.
Nevertheless, I commit the sin of saying that Atlanta's suburbs fought against the expansion of MARTA because the suburbanites feared that all those black Atlantans they moved out to the suburbs to get away from in the first place might come find them and have their way with them. I'm sure I read of this controversy somewhere, but I can't find where and I don't have the energy to look. Then I compound the sin by saying that there is and was racial tension in Atlanta, particularly in the late 70's and early 80's when some monster was killing the black children of Atlanta.
This upsets a fellow forumer, just as it upsets this forumer whenever anyone does anything but sing hosannas to the great city of Atlanta. I'm called out on this. Obviously I know nothing of Atlanta, he says.
Obviously. Never mind that I've been there many times, never mind that I've researched the place, set portions of a novel that I'm writing there, and had to research the city, it's history, it's racial climate, and everything else that got snared in the Atlanta Child Murders back then.
Murders... people losing their children. It can't be unlike losing your father, and so the wheel rolls back around again and my distraction fades.
I did appreciate the distraction, though, and I thank that forumer for taking great offense and thus giving me something else to think about for a while. From time to time I find myself obsessing over it, because it's much better to consider a petty argument on the Internet -- Someone is wrong on the Internet and they must be corrected!! -- than it is to think about the fact that you're wiping your father's drool from his face, and you're having your boyfriend the RN check your father's tongue because you suspect he's been chewing it.
Some of the drool came away red, you see.
I feel sorry for my mother most of all. She doesn't have a computer, let alone Internet access, and can't argue with people about Atlanta when she needs to think of something else. She's coping with the Investigation Discovery channel, though, and seems to be doing a good job at it. She went home the first night after he was placed in hospice, saying to my brother and I that she was going to be alone soon and would just need to get used to it.
The next day she began cleaning out her soon-to-be-dead husband's bedroom.
Tough woman, she. She's blind, deaf in one ear, has no balance and walks with a noticeable limp, and she's on dialysis herself. And yet she wanted to get a jump on being alone, and wanted to go ahead and get that room cleaned out. When she needs to fall apart she frets about what to bury him in, and if we should bury his prosthetic legs with him or keep them. He covered a lot of ground with those legs.
The wheel turns round and round, and even if I free myself from considering my father's death, either by feeding my fish or brushing my teeth, unclogging the drain or arguing about Atlanta, the wheel always comes rolling back around and suddenly I'm spoon-feeding my father the ice cream he couldn't eat before and wondering how I'm able to do this and not scream my head off. How can I do this and not beat my fists against the wall until I've broken all my fingers?
He doesn't deserve this. He didn't deserve most of what happened to him in life. He was a simple man who went to Vietnam and came back damaged. He did the best he could and the best he knew how to do. It wasn't the best and it certainly wasn't that kind of "play catch in the backyard" sort of relationship, but he gave what he knew to give. I can't fault him for doing his best, and I have forgiven him for not giving me the kind of relationship that I wished he had. It felt good to give up that bitterness.
I drove around in the fog the other night, after the storms and the hail had stopped. I went to Denny's and found many more drag queens there than you would ordinarily expect for a Thursday night. They distracted me. The drive back home in the fog was peaceful. I opened the windows in the living room and took a nap on the couch. My boyfriend texted from work periodically to check on me. The same boyfriend who held my hand as I stood by my father's bed and tried to tell him all the important things.
And after that, when I was telling my dad the important things, my boyfriend and I went home, where the plants need to be watered and the dishes are piling up and need to be washed, and we need to eat the cupcakes and I need to argue about Atlanta.
Anything to keep the feeling at bay. That feeling that I'll go home and it won't be there anymore.
And the best part is, when you ask your neighbors what happened to it, they just look at you strangely and insist there was never a house there to begin with.
That's kind of how I'm feeling nowadays as we wait for my father to die in hospice. He's beyond solid food now, so we take turns feeding him ice cream and pudding and other sweet things he won't have to chew. My mother, my brother, myself, my uncles, my cousins, my brother's wife, and my brother's kids... we all take our turn, and I wonder if I'm the only one who finds it somewhat ironic that it's the diabetes that's killing him, and yet now the only things he can eat are things he couldn't before. Meanwhile, my boyfriend the RN checks all the tubes and the piss bag they've hooked my father up to, just to make sure it's all in working order.
I find that it helps to concentrate on the mundane bullshit of life to cope. For instance, the day after we'd settled him in hospice, and while we were waiting to see if he would recover from his dialysis enough to be able to make the decision himself to stop any further dialysis, my boyfriend and I went out to buy a drain snake and some cupcakes. The cupcakes were just for fun but we needed the snake because the bathtub drain is clogged again. He has long hair and I have very long hair, and it just comes with the territory. And as I was pulling out clumps of hair, I wondered why I was bothering with it. My father is lying in a bed just a short drive away, dying. Why am I unclogging the drain? And why, once I've pulled out all that hair, am I thinking we have enough, if we so choose, to dry it out and knit ourselves a cat?
Does it matter if the drain is unclogged? Does anything matter when your father is dying?
He can answer yes-or-no questions, but anything more complicated confuses him. He can still recognize people, for the most part, but sometimes his eyes just roll about in his head. He swats at the air from time to time. Sometimes he'll ask a simple question, like the other day when there were hailstones hammering down on the hospital and he asked if it was cloudy.
We said that it was.
I get online and go to skyscraperpage, another of my favorite forums -- after checking to make sure the drain is flowing smoothly of course -- and engage in an argument in the City Discussions section. It's about Atlanta. Personally, I don't care about Atlanta. I don't care for it -- although you might and that's fine -- and I won't live there. I don't like Atlanta for the same reasons I don't like Charlotte, and this is largely because except for Atlanta's much larger size, they're basically the same place. No, if I were to move to a larger Southern city, I think New Orleans, Memphis or Richmond would be more my style. Possibly the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area. Charleston or Savannah perhaps, but they're not all that much larger than Asheville, so it would be a lateral move.
Nevertheless, I commit the sin of saying that Atlanta's suburbs fought against the expansion of MARTA because the suburbanites feared that all those black Atlantans they moved out to the suburbs to get away from in the first place might come find them and have their way with them. I'm sure I read of this controversy somewhere, but I can't find where and I don't have the energy to look. Then I compound the sin by saying that there is and was racial tension in Atlanta, particularly in the late 70's and early 80's when some monster was killing the black children of Atlanta.
This upsets a fellow forumer, just as it upsets this forumer whenever anyone does anything but sing hosannas to the great city of Atlanta. I'm called out on this. Obviously I know nothing of Atlanta, he says.
Obviously. Never mind that I've been there many times, never mind that I've researched the place, set portions of a novel that I'm writing there, and had to research the city, it's history, it's racial climate, and everything else that got snared in the Atlanta Child Murders back then.
Murders... people losing their children. It can't be unlike losing your father, and so the wheel rolls back around again and my distraction fades.
I did appreciate the distraction, though, and I thank that forumer for taking great offense and thus giving me something else to think about for a while. From time to time I find myself obsessing over it, because it's much better to consider a petty argument on the Internet -- Someone is wrong on the Internet and they must be corrected!! -- than it is to think about the fact that you're wiping your father's drool from his face, and you're having your boyfriend the RN check your father's tongue because you suspect he's been chewing it.
Some of the drool came away red, you see.
I feel sorry for my mother most of all. She doesn't have a computer, let alone Internet access, and can't argue with people about Atlanta when she needs to think of something else. She's coping with the Investigation Discovery channel, though, and seems to be doing a good job at it. She went home the first night after he was placed in hospice, saying to my brother and I that she was going to be alone soon and would just need to get used to it.
The next day she began cleaning out her soon-to-be-dead husband's bedroom.
Tough woman, she. She's blind, deaf in one ear, has no balance and walks with a noticeable limp, and she's on dialysis herself. And yet she wanted to get a jump on being alone, and wanted to go ahead and get that room cleaned out. When she needs to fall apart she frets about what to bury him in, and if we should bury his prosthetic legs with him or keep them. He covered a lot of ground with those legs.
The wheel turns round and round, and even if I free myself from considering my father's death, either by feeding my fish or brushing my teeth, unclogging the drain or arguing about Atlanta, the wheel always comes rolling back around and suddenly I'm spoon-feeding my father the ice cream he couldn't eat before and wondering how I'm able to do this and not scream my head off. How can I do this and not beat my fists against the wall until I've broken all my fingers?
He doesn't deserve this. He didn't deserve most of what happened to him in life. He was a simple man who went to Vietnam and came back damaged. He did the best he could and the best he knew how to do. It wasn't the best and it certainly wasn't that kind of "play catch in the backyard" sort of relationship, but he gave what he knew to give. I can't fault him for doing his best, and I have forgiven him for not giving me the kind of relationship that I wished he had. It felt good to give up that bitterness.
I drove around in the fog the other night, after the storms and the hail had stopped. I went to Denny's and found many more drag queens there than you would ordinarily expect for a Thursday night. They distracted me. The drive back home in the fog was peaceful. I opened the windows in the living room and took a nap on the couch. My boyfriend texted from work periodically to check on me. The same boyfriend who held my hand as I stood by my father's bed and tried to tell him all the important things.
And after that, when I was telling my dad the important things, my boyfriend and I went home, where the plants need to be watered and the dishes are piling up and need to be washed, and we need to eat the cupcakes and I need to argue about Atlanta.
Anything to keep the feeling at bay. That feeling that I'll go home and it won't be there anymore.
Your post was beautifully written.
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