When your brother calls from a thousand miles away the morning of your daughter’s first birthday to announce your father’s stroke, you stand in a pile of party favours meant for babies too young to know what parties and favours even mean. You listen to your brother use words like ‘damage’ and ‘paralysis’ while staring at an Elmo birthday cake and mentally calculating how much pizza to order that afternoon. You try not to consider your father’s terrible timing, his always fucking way with timing, while you wonder whether you’ll be made to fly out there for this.
You’ll be made to fly out there for this.
Resist feeling guilty once you see him, small and fragile, in a hospital gown too big. In a hospital bed too big. In a room too small. Do not wonder if this is the room, all fluorescent and linoleum, where your father will die.
Instead, sit with him and watch westerns—Gun Smoke and Bonanza—and basketball games, finding interest in all his interests the way you wish he had done with you. Don’t consider all the cartoons you had wanted him to watch, instead of world news and Watergate hearings, all those documentaries about Vietnam you endured just to be near him.
When he makes overt sexual comments about a young nurse, laugh as you always have at how he’s always been.
When your father falls asleep, remember the time when you were five, still sucking your thumb, how he warned you after you handled chlorine tablets from the swimming pool against putting your thumb in your mouth. Remember how you knew, no matter how many times you washed your hands, that eventually your thumb would find its way into your mouth and some residue of chlorine would work its way into your bloodstream. Remember how certain you were, despite his many reassurances, you wouldn’t wake up in the morning. And remember how he laid with you all night, sucking your thumb for you, telling you, ‘No matter what happens now, we’ll stay together.’ Resist the urge to crawl into his bed and promise the same thing.
When he cries, as he does, and he will, because your father is neither afraid to show his emotions nor use pity to get his way, try to invoke humour to make him laugh, distract him, as he did with you when you were young. Tell him to remember the time your hamsters got loose and chewed your mother’s lace tablecloths and defecated in his open suitcase. Tell him to remember how the female returned pregnant and the house was soon filled with thirteen mewling rodents. He will not remember.
Encourage your father, as he once encouraged you, to make friends. On your last morning with him, before you fly home, wheel him into the cafeteria, steering him around to look at the other residents and ask who he wishes to sit with. Think about the first day of first grade when he did this for you. He will stay silent, just as you had done. Remember how you’d hoped he’d take you home if you refused to make friends. Sit with him at a table for two, secluded off to the side, and rest your hand on his arm while his eyes grow damp behind his glasses.
Such a great story – nothing beats pathos disguised as humor. Well done!!