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Well Dad’s been home since Friday, for six days now, after 19 days in the hospital for three kinds of Pneumonia, Sepsis and Staph infection. It’s been interesting. That’s putting it mildly. My mom and I moved his room, switching it from the tiny room he liked—which had always been his room—to her master bedroom, which is much bigger, more open, and has several windows, including one exposing a nice view of the backyard lawn and garden, blooming and lovely.
We’d moved everything: His small bed into the master bedroom, and her king-sized bed into the small room. We shifted all his gear and medical equipment into the master in preparation for his return. We got oxygen tanks and a “concentrator” and a ventilator machine which can breathe for him in an emergency. He’s still on 3%-5% oxygen assistance at all times and will almost certainly never come off.
When he came home—I stayed with him on discharge day, driving him home, him wide-eyed being outside for the first time in almost three weeks, windows down in the Leaf, the bright hot spring sunshine bearing down on his thin, bruised, ragged arms—a neighbor and I carried him up the steep stone steps in a wheelchair we borrowed, to the master bedroom.
Since then he’s been up and down, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. He tries to sleep a lot. There’s a whole lot of coughing. (We don’t know if this is due to the aggressive lung tumor or the Myasthenia Gravis from the latest immunotherapy treatment.) Some vomiting, at night before bed and in the wee hours. He uses these big purple hospital vomit bags to hurl into; they look like giant oversized condoms. His legs and arms are so thin it’s remarkable. The other day I showed my fiancée some photos of my father from May, 2021, just two months before his cancer diagnosis, two months before the first physical symptoms announced themselves. He stands erect, proud, with my mother, arm around her shoulder, looking his full 6’0 height, thick and muscular, in shape minus a small, slightly bulbous belly. He was still playing Pickleball back then, still walking the dogs each morning with my mom.
The first 48 hours back home from the hospital were rough: Dad, suddenly having to shit, would struggle to get up out of bed, I’d walk with him (using his walker) to the bathroom, sometimes with poop emitting from the sides of his adult diaper, plopping onto the shiny hardwood floor. He’d sit on the toilet, exhausted, breathing deeply, and shit. I’d put the oxygenator around his finger and test his levels. Sometimes they dipped to the low-mid 80s but he’d recover within a minute or two.
You might be asking: Why don’t we get hospice care or full-time nurses’ aids, etc. You’d have to ask my mother on that one. My father doesn’t want strangers in the house. Neither does my mom. They are a dyad, the two of them; intensely connected to one another, very private, insular, and they feel they can do this on their own. I’d been helping, staying there for over a week straight…until a few days ago.
My family. I just don’t know what to say. Alcoholism. Clinical depression. Narcissism. Denial. Such is the nature of family trauma. Generational trauma.
Soon after my father returned home, my mother started drinking. Historically, she’s always been a big drinker. She’s been both supportive and highly judgmental of my sobriety; eternally thankful and grateful that I found recovery and put down the bottle (I was seriously and obviously out of control), but also hyper-sensitive about her own drinking. Such is the nature of the beast when it comes to active-alcoholics seeing sober ones: Active-drunks do not like to have their issues thrown in their faces, even if non-verbally and unintentionally. (And I admit I am not innocent here: Over the years I’ve judged my mother’s drinking both non-verbally and, on occasion, verbally.)
Anyway, she started drinking. White wine. Britney, my fiancée, stayed two nights when my father first got out. First my mom started doing what she does best when she has too much to drink: Getting overly sentimental and nostalgic, repeating herself, locating drama, gossiping, telling Britney I was “selfish,” poking and prodding my father to move this or that way on the bed for seemingly no rational reason, etc.
But then she started making serious mistakes. She lowered my father’s oxygen assistance level from 4% to 3% for no good reason. She made us wait 45 minutes to eat dinner after telling us it’d be ready in 3 minutes; when we ate the food was cold. When I woke at 3am to my father coughing grotesquely and vomiting, my mother, upstairs literally in the room next to his, didn’t wake, passed out cold.
The next evening I very gently suggested to my mother that maybe, just maybe, she not drink. I didn’t lecture her about her drinking. I didn’t roam off the reservation or split off my own lane. I stated the simple, lean truth: Dad needs us; you were passed out; had an emergency occurred last night you wouldn’t have been able to solve the problem.
Did my mom understand? Yes. At first. Supposedly.
I left and went downstairs. I was eating a bowl of Vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce (“emotional eating”) when I heard, an hour later, my mother crying very gaudily and dramatically upstairs in my father’s room. I walked up there. She was whining and complaining to my father of all people that I was a “Nazi” about her drinking. I confronted her right then and there. I said I wasn’t a “Nazi” but that we simply had to focus on Dad and not make things about her drinking, or about her in general, or about us. Some insults were hurled. Our voices rose. Dad remained silent in the semi-darkness of his room.
And then, in the middle of her ranting about me being a “Nazi” re her drinking, again, I suddenly snapped and said, very loudly, You’re acting like an asshole. Before she had a chance to respond I said it a second time, louder still: You’re acting like an asshole.
I fled. I raced downstairs, the bowl of ice cream, now finished, still in my hands. My heart thumped against my chest madly. I couldn’t think straight. Thoughts rose up and whirled and crashed into themselves. Adrenaline was high, pulsating against my brain like a wild, frenetic hammer smashing a nail that was totally bent, unable to go down properly.
I walked outside and did “the loop,” a 25-minute walk in my parents’ Santa Barbara Riviera neighborhood down, down down, and then back up, sweating, angry, confused, sighing a lot, half-crazed, talking to myself softly in the semi-moon night.
Upon my return, entering my side door downstairs in the room I was staying in, I heard my mother crying. She was in her room now, next to my father’s. I had never heard crying like this before; it wasn’t crying, in fact, but wild, lurid, insane, hyena-like uncontrollable, theatrical weeping. Look: I know she’s losing her lover of 50 years. Her man. Her husband. The crown jewel of her life. But no one cries like this. It felt too planned; too perfect; far too loud. It made me feel like I was suddenly transported to the 1990s TV teledrama my mother loved back then: All My Children. It seemed she was crying not about my father, but about my “Naziism” around her drinking. She wanted me to hear it; she wanted my father to hear it; she wanted the whole fucking neighborhood to hear it.
My ears hot with rage, laughing darkly now, shaking my head, I snatched some of my clothes, my laptop, a few books, stuffed them into my bag, walked outside again, down the stone steps to the driveway, got into the Leaf, and took off. I drove north to Lompoc, to Britney, to home.
*
I wish I could say over the next 48 hours my mother apologized, owned her bullshit, understood where I’d been coming from…but that’s not really the truth. She copped to some of it, but she never apologized. She doubled down, which is what she always does, claiming she hadn’t lowered his oxygen to 3%, that her tears had been real, that I was, in fact, a “Nazi” about her and others’ drinking, that she hadn’t had alcohol in years (not true), etc. I sighed, used to this narcissistic gaslighting of hers. We carried on for another day like this until she finally said she wanted me gone. I agreed.
And yet I felt angry and frustrated, not to mention ashamed. What about my poor father? He has to sit there and listen to us bicker, which he’s been doing all my life. Since I was a kid my mother and I’d have screaming, knockdown fights; Dad was always the peacemaker. My father is the most conflict-avoidant human being I’ve ever known. And he has a wicked powerful selective hearing mechanism. My mother is similar in her way: She conveniently picks and chooses what to hear, what to agree with, what to apologize for.
I know I share many, many traits with my parents. Of course I do: I inherited their DNA. I was raised by them. I hold their familial generational trauma within me. This is one major reason I don’t have kids. I don’t want to fuck them up. I see my own narcissism, my own arrogance, my own selective listening/hearing. The difference between me and them is that I got sober, started doing therapy, meditation, that I am “out there” in the world, with friends who call me on my bullshit, people I trust, people I tell the truth to and get feedback from.
Neither of my parents has that. They’ve spent too many decades alone, just them two, isolated, depending only on themselves, with no feedback loop, no professional advice when it comes to their emotional landscapes, no pushback. I have many, many issues. I have made a stupid amount of mistakes in my life. I’ve hurt myself and many others brutally. Yet I have a very high self-awareness. That is crucial. Self-awareness and self-honesty.
By now my mother and I have cooled things down. We texted each other that we love each other, that everyone’s stress level is high right now. My mom emailed my older half-sister an angry, Fuck You email two weeks ago about my sister and brother-in-law not being involved in any of this the past 18 months with my dad. So my mom and my sister have their issues now. Me and my mom do. There’s dad. Me and my sister have our issues with one another. Now we just yesterday had a second suicide attempt in the family. (Not me or my mom or dad.) It’s just exhausting, all of this.
Between all of it, I just want to be with my fiancée, to travel (desperately), to write, to read, to be reasonably content. After several years of Covid and NYC madness and being in debt and having no work and the loneliness and sadness and depression: Here I am, with a lover, a woman I’m going to marry; out of debt and in fact doing well financially at the moment; plane tickets to Morocco; etc. But my father is dying.
Such is the nature of this life, this existence. Lately I’ve been reading Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, which centers around the notion of the meaning or lack thereof of life and the moral merits of suicide. This book is keeping me strangely sane. As is exercise. And writing. And my fiancée. And our three cats and dog.
Out of chaos: order. I suppose the order I find is not actually found but rather created. Created, that is, by putting it down on paper, for the record.
Oh my goodness, I'm sorry for all the hardships you've endured together. It's hard to stay collected, but you both must, for your father. I know he wouldn't want any strangers, but I would advocate to consider some help, especially at the end. You both need rest and respite from this too.