*Appreciate my writing? Go paid for only $30/year, aka $2.50/mo.
This is hard, my friends. Hard. With a sharp, serrated knife edge; that kinda hard. It’s filled with uncertain relief, too. Oh, Mother Irony. My dad is so sick. So close to the edge. I see it in his eyes; see him looking far-off, as if through my mother and me into some other dimension, some other place…beyond. This makes perfect sense, of course. He’s transitioning spiritually, if he hasn’t done so already. Not religiously, mind you; the man is a total, absolute atheist. But in terms of his mind, his being, his mental and emotional landscape, whatever form that exists in, literally or symbolically.
Now we’re simply waiting, waiting for his physical form to catch up with his spirit. He’s coughing a lot more now; he sounds like a broken garbage-disposal. I can only imagine what inner chaos is occurring inside his body right now. The cancer has probably bloomed out wildly at this point. The last lung scan we did was six weeks-plus ago, when he first landed in Cottage Hospital for pneumonia/Sepsis/Staph/Parainfluenza. I mentioned getting another one multiple times but neither the oncologist, our doctor, my mother nor my father seemed to care. Oh well. What can you say? I suppose it doesn’t matter, especially now. Clearly the cancer spread. It’s a losing battle.
No more books or podcasts. No more smiling or laughing. Dad is exhausted, ready to sign off. It’s so bizarre, this process: Waiting to die. Waiting for my father to die, to be specific. What do you do when you’re waiting for a man to die? Sit with my mother in the room with him, silently, staring at Dad, or at the ground, or at our dumb iPhones. There are so many “profound” things I want to ask my father about, things I want to say to him. But I can’t. I can’t seem to get the words out and I don’t even know if I should. My father has never been a deep man, at least not linguistically, not verbally. (Not with me.) If he’s always been stoic and superficial and centered, that’s always played against my rebellious nature of oppositional truths: I’ve always been emotional and off-balance and deep and intense and real and sincere. I’ve always wanted to know everything. I guess that’s what makes me the writer and he the computer engineer.