Well, fuck me: It’s 4/20. Not a very important day for me, but, hey, it is what it is. I’m tired, Jack. Tired. It’s 4:15pm. Thursday, April 20th, 2023. Tomorrow is The Big Day, assuming all goes well tonight: Dad’s Triumphant Return Home. I say ‘triumphant’ mostly with an edge of sarcasm, since he’s coming home still on 3% oxygen assistance and incredibly weak and exhausted. Poor motherfucker. I love the man. I do. He’s been in Cottage Hospital for 17 days today.
He's scheduled to get out tomorrow late morning, which really means a discharge of more like late afternoon/early evening after all is said and done. Bureaucracy. But he’s coming home, that’s the main thing, by a long shot. Home.
We don’t know how long he has left but he’s coming home to die; we know that. Weeks, perhaps months. Weeks or a month are more likely. Maybe six weeks. We’ll see. That tumor has fucked him up. In his lung. Expanding like the Nazis circa 1939 in Western Europe; Poland and France watch out. The doctor is certain his oxygen needs are due to the tumor, not the pneumonia etc, which she says at this point he’s fully recovered from. Whack-a-mole. Good from the infection, but now sick again from the cancer. Life is a bitch, isn’t it.
Man, it is so beautiful here in SB. I’m writing outside, up at the outdoor patio above the jacuzzi. The blue calm sea in the distance. All the red Spanish-style roofs down below in town. The high school football field. Highway 101, sunshine glazing off moving cars’ and trucks’ shiny metal bodies. The local sounds of birds and the distant sounds of neighbors speaking softly, and the low thrum of traffic on 101 a mile away. The pristine verdant backyard, my little heavy stone table, laptop on it, my water and Irish Breakfast tea (two bags, a squish of half-n-half). Me, sitting in the deep shade, writing.
Good Lord I am tired, Jack. Tired. Whipped. Socially. Spiritually. Emotionally. Nothing, of course, compared to my withered, beleaguered father. But not completely, not totally nothing. Something monumental, in fact, only miniscule compared to Dad. To Him. And oh, that fucking hole waiting for me, the black abyss he’s going to leave. It’s hard to honestly, fairly fathom it. All my life he’s been a house, a foundation, a brick wall which I could hurl my rage against, then hold and cling to, try to climb, punch, run my palm along, cry against. All of it. Everything.
I am privileged. This is boring news. It’s not because of my skin pigmentation, though yes, I am white. (Shocking, I know.) I am privileged because of the class I was born into, definitely; upper middle-class. And because I had two loving, caring parents, however confused and often neglectful and unstable they may have sometimes been. (Would I have been any better? Probably not. Maybe.) I don’t have any anger towards my father; not anymore. I still fear him in certain ways; that’s true. I fear his lack of approval. Even now, four decades into this Thing Called Life, I can’t say for sure what he thinks of me really, whether he thinks I’m genuinely intelligent, genuinely interesting, genuinely a man according to his rubric.
I know, I know, I know: It doesn’t matter. Or it “shouldn’t” matter. But it does. To me. He is my father. I am his son. He is leaving me with something, with many things, actually. Mainly he is leaving me with love. Honor. Self-respect. His cancer—oh, King Irony—has given me the chance to show to him (and really to myself) that I am the man I always hoped to one day be. Finally. I was able to set aside my dreams: Living in New York City, which I was doing in 2021, caring for my father fulltime, and giving up the last 1.9 years to care for him, a man I did not understand and did not feel understood by.
And yet I do on some fundamental level understand him. He is a dying man. We’re all dying men, Camus told us that. And he’s right. It’s just a matter of when and how. Dad is close to 78. He’s led a long, healthy, safe, warm existence on this planet. He’s had a wife for almost half a century, a wife who loves him profoundly. He’s had a step-daughter and a son. My old man is nothing if not consistent: He’s always done what he does: Work, finances, horse-betting, political discussions, sometimes trips. As recently as 2017 he and my mother walked two weeks of El Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain, inspired by my one-month walk there in 2016.
*
Last night I took a long, gratifying walk. I “pumped” uphill for miles and miles. My folks live in the Riviera, already up on a hill. I walked up to Alameda Padre Serra, trudging along the busy narrow road, and then crossed to Medio, where there’s a lookout spot and always a young couple, sitting on the stone wall, smiling and pointing out to the downtown of Santa Barbara below. Then I walked up and up into Las Alturas, steep as Hell. I called my fiancée and we chatted for an hour. She was tremendously excited about her 17-year-old son’s new girlfriend, his first ever. He just recently started driving, too, and has his father’s old Toyota Tacoma.
We talked as I huffed and puffed up the steep hills, eyeing the gorgeous houses on stilts, looking back sometimes at the stupendous, rollicking views of the city down below, down “there.” It felt like I was Zeus up on Mount Olympus, observing the mere ant-sized mortals below. I felt safe and hot and alive, my breathing rapid and coming out in harsh snatches. All the breaths my father couldn’t take. It’s a funny thing about age: Birth, life and death. I remember those charts showing a child, an adult, and an older person, and finally they sort of fold in on themselves and become like a child again, welcomed into the soothing blackness of death. That’s where my father is now: Close; very near. He is like a child now, as he had been in primal form, in say 1950, 1953. He was born in October, 1945. It’s the same sort of smallness, curled back in on himself. The same sort of childish ineptitude; he needs help even shitting, pissing, standing, moving, etc. He gets cold easily so we cover him in warm blankets. He needs help brushing his teeth, doing anything. Like I said: A return to childhood. It’s odd, isn’t it? Who wrote this screenplay called Life?
Anyway. My fiancée and I talked about finances and our animals back home up there in Lompoc—I miss it and her and them—and about our missed Morocco trip (we’d have been gone two days by now had we not cancelled our trip due to my father’s pneumonia) and about buying property and about the future. We said I love you and hung up. I walked for fifteen minutes in silence, thinking and not thinking, knowing deeply that I crave these nearby mountains and this steep road and this writing life and this woman up north and this man who is my dying father, and then I called another friend.
She—the friend—is going through a rough and tricky (complex) breakup. Calling her always helps. She gets me on a level few do. It’s our vast similarities; the way we both feel misunderstood, freakish, outside of the circle of people. Her breakup made me think of my ex, who I split with in January, 2018. I thought about the strange but nevertheless true connective tissue between rough breakups with people we love and…this death mess I’m entangled in with my father. One is a psychological and literal loss, meaning that you’re losing a relationship but the person is still alive. The other, of course, is a deeper and sadder, permanent loss, one where you are, in fact, losing the person, the human being, the man or woman, the love.
Yet both share one abiding truism: There is a deep cord inside you that is snipped. Something, some emotional umbilical cord, is savagely scissored. A thing internally is cut. And once the line is severed, there is no going back. Even if you eventually get back together with that person you broke up with, it’s never as the same couple in the same way as the same version you were before. Something meaningful has shifted. It’s like turning 25, or 30, or 40, or 50; you might do the same thing you did “back then,” but now you’re doing it at this new age, this new moment in your life journey. It may be “like” the original, but it isn’t the original; it’s a copy. It’s like memory: it isn’t the actual “occurrence” but rather a cognitive copy of the occurrence; and as time goes by it’s really more like a copy of a copy of a copy. Thus self-mythology arises. Self-storytelling. Emotional truth versus actual objective truth.
I feel self-conscious writing this all down, because some part of me knows I’m going to post it on Substack. I both want people to read my deepest, most real, most honest, most raw thoughts, and yet I also know by doing so I open myself up to judgment. But isn’t the simple act of being alive opening up each single one of us to judgment? Whatever you do, there are people around to cast value judgments. Hell: I don’t pretend I’m any better than anyone else: I judge people constantly. I judge myself constantly. We all do. We have judging minds. Discerning minds. Protecting minds. This is evolutionary. This is biological. Based on survival. People who claim they “don’t judge” are probably sociopaths, liars, or terrible virtue-signalers. C’mon. Don’t judge my ass.
Anyway. My view. I see plants and the shed and the house and the stone chimney with green vines rising up it, and the conical roof with old tiles and the myriad windows, mostly all open now in the 72-degree lovely April spring heat, and the brown gate down below. Luke, my parents’ 10-year-old yellow Lab is wandering around like a buffoon, slashing through the jungle of plants nearby. Wind softly rustles through the backyard and it sounds like silence somehow, that lucid silence you experience only in the deep backcountry alone, such as in Yosemite in the off-season.
That blue, blue sea. Santa Cruz Island. Cars back and forth on 101. I think about where Britney and I’ll be in a year from now. The Bay Area? Austin, Texas? Santa Barbara? Still in Lompoc? What will the future be like, and why?
How will I think back on and remember my sweet father? How will I recollect this time right now? How soon will I wake up and be 50, 60, 70, and look back fondly on this period, my Picasso Blue period, and say, I was so young back then?
I take a startling, slow breath and hold it. I look up, seeing the leafless trees, thick gray branches. I see the carefully trimmed back green hedges. The lupine. Purple and green against the pale blue of the sea in the distance. I hear the roaring soft whistle of the Amtrak Train. I see my life flash before my eyes like water entering a carafe, or like white wine being drunk from a goblet, or like a baby’s head, crowning during a birth.
I look out to the town below and I think:
There is such preciousness to it all. And I am alive, witnessing everything. Thank the Lord for my human moment, brief and dumb as it may be in the grand scheme of things.
Brief and sacred.
It is wonderful you are being intentional during this time to discern what your Dad is leaving you with, that knowledge may permeate deep into your soul in the coming years. Going through a similar process with my Dad helped me be able to focus much more clearly on a few things too.