Chapter 2: Letting Go
"The Fall"
My father and I left the hospital appointment, three long hours later, after a battery of different tests, but with no new information. We never did – get new information. The truth was that it was only my father that believed there was a cure for him; although at first, as was our history, I had believed in him as well, that there would be chemotherapy, or radiation, or some new drug. But there is no cure for old age, and because my father did not accept that he was old, we had spent these past months together stumbling around, from appointment to appointment, seeking to find the root of my father’s ailments.
When I dropped him off at home that afternoon, our words were brief, nothing of importance. I did not hug him, with the Covid restrictions in place, nor had I been able to hug my father since I had arrived in Canada back in March, at the beginning of the pandemic.
“Goodbye, dad. Have a good rest. Enjoy your dinner. Are you going to watch something on tv tonight?”
“Just more CNN or CTV; there is nothing else. No baseball, no hockey, no basketball.” This was one of the chief concerns I had for my father: the paralyzing boredom.
I had been studying Spanish in Mexico as part of my Bachelor's degree when the pandemic hit the globe. I had been on one of the last flights out of the country before thousands were stranded in foreign cities across the world. I had gone straight to my father; although at the time, I could not understand the instinct that had brought me to Calgary, a city I had not lived in for twenty years and had only visited a few times a year on my sojourns to my father.
It was that very night, after our good-byes, after the last hopeful appointment at the hospital, that my father took his final, catastrophic fall. My sister had checked-in on him around dinner, and he had been taking a nap. Then, the next morning, she had checked in on him again at ten am before she left for work. I had calculated the equation too many times: for somewhere between ten and fourteen hours, my father had been lying on his bathroom floor, cold, alone, naked, shivering.
How he was naked, we don’t know. His diaper was lying beside him, dirty; maybe he had been trying to clean himself up and had listed to the side and cracked his head. Or perhaps he had tripped, fainted, or had a stroke – a thousand different ways for a life to end.
At some point, during the long night on the floor, he had soiled himself, and then again. With his herculean efforts to get himself up off the floor, which to him would have been the weight of the world, the bathroom had ended up a scene from a horror movie.
My sister later told me she had nearly vomited. There was shit and urine everywhere: on the toilet, the floor, the walls, and mottled across my father’s naked body with all his blades and jutting ribs. And the blood, too. His paper-thin skin had torn itself to shreds while he flailed, and the blood was smeared across his protruding bones, spattered onto the walls, and streaked across the hard tiled floors. His body screamed blues and greens, hues of avocado and pine, like he was already a part of the earth. My sister could not even get to him to comfort him.
The sturdy ambulance drivers were horrified and, even though already masked up from the pandemic, had put on booties and extra coverings just to lift my father and take him up the stairs. My sister tells me my father was crying and pleading, “I am OK, don’t take me. I will clean myself up. I will clean up the bathroom, after a rest. Please, just put me back in my bed.”
But they did not put him back in his bed.
The ambulance took my father away, and at the hospital, my sister tells me that the ICU doctors thought they had received a crash victim or some kind of catastrophic event victim.
I finally got to speak to my father on the morning that he was moved to a general ward on day twelve of his hospital stay. None of us had been allowed in to see him, and my days were spent waiting to finally hear his voice. Only one person had been allowed to communicate with the hospital staff, and my sister was his primary care giver.
There was no hello, no preamble, and his first words to me were, “Are you coming to take me home today?”
“Dad, no, not yet. But hopefully, soon.”
I didn’t want to lie, and my stomach recoiled at my deceit.
There was silence, then: “But just one more day though, right? One more day, and then I can come home?”
“I am not sure, Dad, but I think so. Yes, maybe just one more day.”
The next day, day thirteen, I finally spoke to the doctor, and he told me that my father was not walking, eating, or even able to leave his bed. A social worker was coming by each day to talk to him, to watch for any sign of progression, but it wasn’t happening.
That was right around the time I started waking up in the middle of the night, around three or four am, and I would sit up in bed, freezing, and I would be crying.
And because the nights were so quiet, the darkness so deep, and I could feel my heart more clearly than at other times, I could perceive that I was finally mourning. And when I would allow myself to sit there, with the blackness all around me, without movement or distraction, I could see that it was thoughts of my father that were making my head pound and my chest tighten. Bile would come to my throat, and I would feel nauseous, clammy, and it was just out of my reach why my heart felt like it was breaking.
After nights in a row of these early morning wake-ups, pictures of my father started crystalizing and gaining clarity. I could see that I wasn’t mourning the loss of my father’s strengths, which had been invisible to me anyway, but that I was mourning the loss of his deficiencies.
I mourned all that I had once hated: that my father would never go to the pub again or see his old cronies; have another cigarette or eat one of his gigantic steaks. He would never go to Vegas or Phoenix on a gambling trip, and he would never find another woman to hold him, touch him, and love him for even just a few hours of the night. He would never again lie down in his bed. He would never again climb the stairs out of my sister's basement, that was, to him, a home. Family.
I had been so convinced that my father was the encapsulation of all that it was to be a man, I had not noticed that he also encapsulated all that it was to be a human. And now, here, in the cold of the night, I could see my fear staring back at me, through the bedroom window, shining down on me, weightless, from frozen stars.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
While my father lay in his hospital bed, and my own witching hour continued to awake me, old memories started surfacing, without my bidding, which was frustratingly ironic, considering I had spent much of my thirties and forties in therapy vying for this outcome.
Most recently, it had come to me, quite abruptly, a memory of the day my father had called me at work, asking me to send a friend of his in America some money for him.
I was in my mid-thirties and still quite vulnerable to the biddings of my father. I had asked him for who and for why, but he wouldn’t tell me, and his secrecy set off alarm bells. I was very uncomfortable with the whole mission, especially considering the amount of five thousand dollars. My father was not poor, but he was not rich, and I had worried for him.
Eventually, I asked him for an email address, even though I wasn’t certain I would really do his errand. Without a pause or a stutter, he read out to me: JennyJustForYou22@hotmail.com.
“Dad,” I carefully said to him. “That email seems a bit strange. Maybe we should be careful.”
“Please just do this,” he answered. “Jenny and I started dating this past winter, in Mesa, while I was staying at the motel. She worked there. She has three young children, and right now, she is in dire straits and needs this money urgently.”
“Three young children, Dad?” And I had thought to myself, how old is this woman?
I hung up the phone, shell-shocked, trying to determine what to do. I decided to email the woman first, introduce myself, and see what she had to say.
She seemed quite normal, and I started to think that maybe I was overreacting and assuming the worst about my father. I had an idea: I asked her to send me a family picture and a list of items for which she needed the money; maybe I could send some necessary items instead of the entire amount.
I never heard from her again, and Dad never heard from her either. He asked me if the money had gone through, and I lied, and I said that she had never accepted the transfer.
My dad was inconsolable, and for months he kept on thinking that any day she would call. He tried to contact her himself, repeatedly, but her phone was disconnected, and he was convinced it was his fault. He contemplated driving to Phoenix to find her, hand her the cash in person, take her out for dinner, and just spend time with her, he said. He was forlorn that she might be homeless, her children might not have enough food, she might have lost her job, and all kinds of much worse things to boot.
He eventually stopped talking about her, although it had taken nearly a year. And now, here, at the end, my father lying alone in his hospital bed, I felt sorry for him losing that woman and for my part in the process. For the first time, it didn’t matter to me with which woman my father chose to spend his nights, and I wished he had had more time with her, to hold her and be held, to feel comforted and warmed by her.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I got to speak to my father again today, on day eighteen. I was on a walk; it was bitterly cold, already dark with the early winter evening, when he called. But I could not understand him, his medicated words, or his collapsed voice. I strained to catch even a word of how he was; was he sad, worried, or scared. All I could eventually say, before hanging up in defeat, was, “Dad, I love you. I love you, and I am praying for you.” And then I screamed one more time into the empty, howling wind, “Dad, I love you.”
And I was, praying for him. But not that he would go home, I was starting to realize that this may never happen, but that he could accept his circumstances with grace, a tiny grain of what it meant, to not just be a man, but to be a human being.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One night, deep in the arms of my three am witching hour I have finally surrendered to, my father comes to me, once again, right on schedule. As I struggle to bring his face into focus, it morphs into the face of my first real love, whom I haven’t thought of in years, decades. And even though I had laughed him off at the time, I now see him as the kindest man I have known; the most giving, accommodating, attentive. We dated for two years, and we got along like best friends, almost like a brother and sister would, enjoying the same activities, laughing at the same silly things. Yet, we still had a passion and chemistry I had never experienced before, and only now I can see that I would never experience again.
It was like we had the best of all the possible worlds available to us.
And then, about a year and a half into our relationship, just when things were starting to get a little more serious, and we started talking about a future together, everything started unraveling. I started noticing how weak he was, how easily I could bowl him over, and how unattractive it was to watch him be so attentive to me. Every time he looked at me with his adoring eyes, I thought how helpless he looked, how needy and feeble.
Even our lovemaking turned sour. He was so concerned with me, so selfless, so ready to meet my needs; I had no concept of this being any kind of a man. I broke up with him six months later. I was only thirty years old at the time, and twenty years later, I am only now starting to realize the significance, the enormity, of all that I have, in the name of my father, so casually tossed to the sidelines of my life.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------