Shifting Slowly

It all maters, all of it. It matters now that my dad is dying. Eventhough he was dying before, i mean, we’re all dying, but he now has an actual sentence. A diagnoses that tells him, “do this and maybe live. Do that and for sure die.” So there are no guarantees and he knows it but there never were. Except now it’s spelled out for him and so it matters more now than it ever did.

Death is always at our door. From the minute we are born we are born knowing that death is imminent. But we live, most of us do I hope, as if life is never ending. We laugh, we love, we cry, we hate, we hold on to things that don’t matter. We think we have time to forgive and so we hold on to hurts and we hold on to regrets because we think we have time to change our minds or that our hearts will change and we’ll go and forgive when we’re damned ready. 

Then death is spelled out for us and I look at him and see the despair in his face and the childness in his features and how his lower lip pouts out when a kid is told they can’t have ice cream before dinner. Except he’s being told, you can’t go home, in your comforts, until you do XYZ. They’re not even starting at the beginning of the alphabet any longer. It’s the end, the last few letters left to save a life that was barely lived.

My father, he’s lived it up without caution, but he’s also always felt he deserved to because he worked his ass off his whole life. He always provided for his family. Worked until the very end and then some. Retired and still worked. Came home late from a job and worked weekends, side jobs. 

So when he got home and popped a beer or 3 and smoked away his cigarettes and scratched off tickets for the high of potential, he deserved it and looking at him now, he damn well did deserve it.

His every whim and desire was also catered to. My mother did it all for him and looked for validation in how the meal came out, did it taste good, was it what he hoped it would be? Only if she asked would he respond. Otherwise, he ate and asked for more, then she knew, then she got silent validation.

I see him now, laying in that hospital bed and see the child in his eyes, not remembering what he ate that morning, wishing he could just walk himself out of there, hating to ask for help from the professionals walking that hallway, too embaressed and his ego still too big to seek help and truthfully, just confused. He looks like a child confused on their 1st day of school, not knowing which class to go into, who he’ll sit with at lunch and what the answer to the math question is.

He is at a loss as to how he got here. We are all at a loss too. Yes, he lived his life, he should have, we all should. Our wish is that he lived more experiences though. That he traveled more, watched more live shows, sang in a crowd at a concert, danced in the rain underneath the stars, felt the beaches of his home, tasted different cuisines, but he started his adult life too soon. Marrying the woman of his dreams, young and in love, making their way and mistakes into a different world across the ocean from theirs and then having a handful of children to care for. They’re lives were no longer written in the stars but played out in a bad sitcom of two young teenagers flying by the seat of their pants without any real adult supervision.

They made it through or so it seems. They made it to this side. Where my dad is laying in a hospital bed hoping to make it to his home stoop again and my mother sitting right beside him abruptly encouraging him to get his shit together. That this is not up to anyone else but him. No one in that building, on that floor, in that profession, is looking to see him out. He is a number, a finger to prick, a mouth to give medicine to and a guinea pig for a potential article on how a 70 year old man, diagnosed with a rare cancer, with a million other maladies he has as well, will receive regenerated t-cells and live for a little while longer. He will be a success story but the life he’s lived isn’t.

A success story is a life lived not a life of existence. I want a life lived for my father, for my mother, for all of us. We all deserve a life lived.

And receiving a therapy to go back to a small life of everyday happenings is not that. My prayer for him is that he gets better, he makes it back home to his stoop but that he boards a plane back to his home and lets the waves of the beautiful beaches crash on his feet, that he enjoys the cuisine of home and says ‘thank you, this is delicious my love.’ That he looks at my mother and appreciates all the long nights and desperate days she spent praying their way out of this.

I pray that he will go and live a life and not an existence.