I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but I’ve noticed, that I haven’t been posting.
Lord knows I’ve wanted to.
Blogging serves many purposes for me, as I’m sure it does for you: catharsis, self-expression, connection, community, dialogue, intellectual challenge, exercise and sharpening of one’s writers’ craft teeth, etc.
But: things around here have been less than peachy.
Dad had another stroke a week ago, was in a coma for a couple of days. Then he began his struggle back into This World. He’s not quite as “with it” as he was before–and he wasn’t too “with it” then either–but sometimes he knows where he is. Thankfully he still knows who I am.
While we thought he was dying or about to die, there was a certain amount of drama (really?!) on the part of my mother, who actually hugged me and wept on my shoulder for an uncomfortable while. I do feel sorry for her, but not that sorry. But it’s not as if I would push my mother away while she’s having a dramatic sad moment, or a sadly dramatic moment, being about to lose her husband of sixty-six years.
Life is now a patchwork of caregivers and nurses coming in and out of the house. That’s good, because I cannot help with physical needs other than the food-related ones. I can prepare food, and help him eat it; and if he’s too “out of it” to get his food into his mouth, I can feed him. Some days he’s able to feed himself, and some days he’s just too exhausted. He’s hungry, but he just can’t manage the eating part. I never realized how complex the act of eating is, until this experience of watching Dad’s stepwise loss of the mechanical ability to manipulate food, even with his hands, let alone utensils.
Once it’s in his mouth he can usually chew it up and swallow, but sometimes he needs his food “blenderized” and sometimes he just can’t eat at all. I know that’s part of dying. And sometimes he absolutely refuses to eat, and that’s part of dying too.
We try to keep him hydrated, at least. He’s on a medicine that decreases the fluid in his blood, taking some stress off his heart, which does make him feel better but causes increased urination, so getting the fluids into him is important. I know, it seems paradoxical: on one hand, taking the fluids out, on the other, shoving them in.
The other day we were sitting alone together, watching the afternoon coming in through the brilliant greens of the forest canopy, and he said: “You and I need to go up into the woods and talk shop.”
I know what he meant.
We have always been best buddies, even when times weren’t so good, even though he served as my own private “Flying Monkey” who tried to explain away my mother’s evil ways. I always came back, for my dad. Here I am!
Just about every night, starting from…when? Maybe after I got back off the road, when I was seventeen–every night when I was visiting and would be staying over, my dad and I would sit up late drinking whiskey and “talking shop.” We would solve the world’s problems, solve problems for worlds that were entirely theoretical at the time but in fact exist now, and dig deep into authors, poetry, philosophical genres, the nature of human existence, art (of course), artists (same), relationships of all sorts….and now and then my mother would stick her head down the stairway to ask us to please “keep it down.”
I do salute her for allowing us those times together and not throwing a monkey-wrench into things, which she is quite capable of doing. She knew that those late-night rap sessions were sacred.
The only time my dad and I ever got into a shouting match was oh, around 3 am when we were both three sheets to the wind, and somehow or other we fell into the topic: “Does God have a sense of humor?”
He staunchly and solidly maintained that God does NOT have a sense of humor. The Holocaust.
I equally stubbornly held that God DOES have a sense of humor, because WE exist and that is the ridiculous proof!
Neither of us would budge, and having put a good dent in a fifth of Bourbon whiskey, the volume worked its way up until we were actually shouting at each other in earnest. Luckily my mother yelled down the stairs for us to “knock it off down there.” We sheepishly toasted “to Life” and stumbled off to our respective beds. We never did resolve that point.
So, we need to go up into the woods and talk shop. Some more. Soon.