Daddy Lessons
My dad is in the hospital. Yeah, he’s been in the hospital before. He’s 77, so he practically gets loyalty stamps. After the 10th time, you get a pillow upgrade. Just kidding. He hates their pillows. And their gowns. And the sheets. Or so I hear. He’s been there for 8 days, today was the first time I visited him. Because I just assumed he was coming home. POST HASTE. Also, I don’t like hospitals. I like to understand everything that’s going on in my surroundings, and in hospitals there’s a whole lot of beeping blinking pumping numbering tubes and tape and EQUIPMENT (that looks outdated, btw). I don’t feel useful. I don’t feel helpful.
I don’t know what to feel.
If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you know there’s a certain level of detachment when it comes to my relationship with my Dad. Because he’s been “dying” since I was 10 or so. Every trip, his plane might crash. Every health hiccup, he doesn’t “have much time left.” When you’re a kid, you don’t know what to give weight and what to take lightly. I threw all my energy into a visceral sense of my Dad’s mortality. I mourned him long before he was gone.
And then at some point in my late twenties, I just checked out. It’d been more than a decade and he’d survived flights, boat rides, pneumonia, a bad root canal from some questionable island doctor. I couldn’t keep holding imaginary vigils in my head. That shit is exhausting.
I’m very decisive and pragmatic about who and what I give my energy to. The last few months I have been giving my energy to this marriage business, renovating my dad’s house for the wedding, HIIT training (in the very literal sense), changing both our names legally, work and my ever-changing team, and more of the wedding. And, since I’ve seen my Dad almost every weekend since February, sometimes his health.
But now it’s less than a week to my wedding, and my Dad is in the ICU. Inititally it was for surgery on a blockage in his stomach but now its his lungs. He has CPOD. And diabetes. After 20 minutes of chatting with my stepmom about our progress and decor and blah blah blah, she asked me how I felt about seeing my Dad there.
FEELINGS? IS IT TIME FOR FEELINGS? I observed that he had no forehead wrinkles. NO FOREHEAD WRINKLES! At 77! I said, “He looks very calm and hydrated.” (He did, tho)
Then I thought about mortality and it’s less than a fucking week ’til I get married HOW DO I FIX THIS. I felt hungry and dizzy and weird but Tim’s hand was on my back. I am supported.
I didn’t cry because I was looking at Bodegacatsofinstagram. I did cry in the car when Paramore’s “Fake Happy” came on.
I AM HAPPY. But also fucking stressed. We are about to manifest the most magical evening with lights and music and vintage furniture and tacos and cake and he HAS to be there. He has to.
This was just a thoughts/feelings dump. Hoping to leave some things behind.