Any distraction is a good distraction. Kept a date to go with a girlfriend to AC. Won six dollars at the nickel slots but mostly sat outside and read while she played craps. Called my mom, tried to talk to my Grandmother who didn't fuss and only repeated that she was Grandma Margaret twice before the home care person took the phone and told me she had fallen back asleep. Text messaged my dad, wishing him a Happy Father's day and letting him know that I loved him and was thinking about him. I'm dealing by not dealing because I'm not sure what else to do. I'm not very good at this, whatever 'this' is.
My dad told my mom that it was the weirdest Father's Day, he'd ever had. He cleaned his mother up, washed her face, feet, and hands, put something on her lips to keep them from chapping and bought her ice cream. She is emaciated and not often awake but she knows that he is there. She refused a feeding tube because she did not want to be cut and had not seen it substantially improve the condition of her late husband or her own mother, a long living woman who passed only 6 years ago. Everyone knows that my father is her favorite, although he is the only one who left Memphis.
My father is really good at caring for the infirm. He has a deep well of compassion for those who can not do for themselves and a strong intolerance for those who can do and do not. When my mother was in the hospital and not even able to leave her bed to use the bathroom, he cleaned her and did everything he could to make her comfortable and preserve as much of her dignity as could be had. My dad is a complicated man, and he is a hard man to live with. But seeing him with my mom, caring for her in that way, that is why we pair up. Why it is better to have a partner to go through life with. He may joke about his death not being an accident on account of all the Lifetime movies my mom watches and she may never take an interest in any of his hobbies or passions but for reasons that are an absolute mystery to me, they work.
All of this is naturally dredging up a lot of random stuff. Some things are of the cat in the cradle and silver spoon type of thoughts about how easy it is to put off being with family or doing a lot of other things in favor of the fleeting empty obligations of work. My family is HORRIBLE with that. My mother, bless her cotton socks, does dialysis 5-6 times a day and only recently made arrangements to telecommute 2 days a week. My father works all the time. He's even come to Philly for business and only had time for a drive by visit. He could have stayed for dinner but it was less wear and tear to just get back on the road to VA. He said once to me, "I want to live, I just don't know how." And I'm his daughter. The one everyone likes to joke is just like him. And I am. But I fight more to not be like him in that way. I'm not really that good at it but I'm fortunate to have the company of great friends who are nothing at all like me and challenge me in the way they live and love to channel their example from time to time.
I read something long ago in a magazine about a couple dealing with the loss of a parent they were both very close to. The wife asked the husband (it was his father who was dying) what she could do to comfort him. He replied, "Have sex with me every night." When faced with death, he wanted to affirm life. It was handled far more elegantly by the author but as I walked on the near-empty beach this morning in Atlantic City and thought about my mother at home crying for her husband and for her last child leaving the nest, my sister's text message at 5 am this morning asking me to call mom because it was going to be a hard day for her, my father traveling to be with his mother, and a kaleidoscope of other random images and thoughts, it felt like the right place to be. I was affirming life. I was affirming the inevitability of death. I was living. And it was a lovely day.
No comments:
Post a Comment