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So, two days and a decade ago, on Tuesday, May 2nd, while I was in the middle of writing a very long and very detailed editorial letter about a memoir I’d just edited—about surviving the cultural revolution in China, 1966-1976—I got a text from my mother saying, simply, Come.
I knew what this meant. Dad. Dad with Stage 4 Melanoma, an hour south in Santa Barbara. Soon, before I had a chance to respond, Mom texted again: ER. Peg Tube.
My father, who’s been terminally ill since July, 2021, had to have a “peg” feeding tube surgically inserted into his stomach in October of that year due to the rare neuromuscular disorder he attained, called Myasthenia Gravis, from the doses of highly toxic immunotherapy we had to blast him with because of the aggressively expanding cancer in his lungs. Apparently, and not for the first time, this tube was made totally useless due to a dumb, annoying medication which helps him urinate because, since we have to open up capsules and pour the contents into a syringe and inject that with fluid into his peg tube (no food or water by mouth), and since this one particular med had little teeny-weeny white balls of the medication which lumped together in the tube and blocked off any movement of either fluid or food, he therefore had to get the tube removed from his stomach and a new one inserted, either surgically or non-surgically.
Either way, it meant taking dad to the ER.
Now, let me explain: This is not an easy thing to do. Dad, for starters, is bed-bound. His entire life now takes place between the confines of a 15 by 15 foot room, and the bathroom next door to this room. His legs are withered and slow. He moves at a snail’s pace. He needs help getting to and fro. We worry constantly about a potential fall. He has bad diarrhea often. And he can only walk briefly, with a lot of exertion, with a two-hand walker. When he came back from the hospital after his 19 day stay, almost two weeks ago now, two neighbors and I carried him up the steep stone steps in a wheelchair a fellow neighbor down the road loaned us. (Why my parents bought a house with steep stone stairs up on a hill in 2020, at ages 70/75 is beyond me.)
After receiving the frantic text from mom—every hour they didn’t do anything was more time he had no meds and no water or food—I frustratingly shut my laptop down, gathered some clothes and snacks, made sure the cats had food and water, considered cleaning out the cat litter boxes, nixed the idea, chugged a glass of cold filtered water, sighed, and got into my all-electric 2018 Nissan Leaf. I soon realized the battery charge was only at 56%. This meant I’d be very low by the time I reached Santa Barbara, roughly 40 miles south. (The battery is fading.)
Meanwhile Mom texted that they’d—the neighbors—walked him very slowly, step by step, down to the car, gotten him into my mom’s SUV, and she’d taken him to the ER. They were waiting.
I headed out, praying first—this is a return to my AA Higher Power early sober days, circa 2010-2012—and then listening to the latest 5th Column podcast, which got my mind off things. (My absolute favorite political podcast, on Substack, btw.)
By the time I reached S.B. I was at 4% battery charge. I used Siri to text my mom while driving, telling her I needed to charge. I went to my usual spot in La Cumbre Plaza and plugged in. As always, both charging spots were open; most people were at their usual, conventional 9-5 jobs. There are benefits to being a freelance writer and developmental book editor.
While I waited I went to the Starbucks in the plaza and got my usual: A large hot chai tea latte. I went back to the car and messed around on Substack Notes and waited. Twenty-five minutes later I took off, back at a decent battery-charge level.
The ER parking lot was full. I parked down the block. I ran back. Mom and Dad were still in the waiting room. I said hello and we chatted and then I wheeled dad in his chair into the bathroom, staying inside with him while he did his duty. (I am now used to this, seeing Dad’s nakedness, seeing and smelling his shit and piss. He once had dignity/ego issues around these things, but that time has passed.) Back outside in the waiting room we waited another fifteen minutes and then a nursing medical assistant came out and grabbed us. We followed her down the hall and upstairs to ICU. Then into a room down another long hallway at the end. Dad laid down on the white-sheeted hospital bed. She hooked him up to the large monitor. Checked his vitals. Oxygen was fine. Blood pressure okay. She said the doctor would be in shortly, which we knew meant in a long time.
Perhaps an hour and a half later the doctor came in. Tall, thick, bald, late 40s. Nice guy. He said No Big Deal, they’d simply deflate the balloon in the inside of Dad’s stomach of the old/current peg tube, yank it out, and insert a new one, inflating that balloon. Mom had wanted to hear just this. Last time, six months prior, they’d had to do surgery to remove the old one. Mom thanked the doc and took off to go home and eat, feed the dogs, rest, etc. She’d been dealing with Dad’s issues since 4:30am, starting with bad coughing and diarrhea and ending with this moment right now.
She left and the doctor left saying he’d return with the new tube. Dad and I waited. We talked. Looked at and then away from each other. We’d always been awkward around one another. As a kid and into my early twenties our most mutually cherished adventure together had been backpacking in the mountains of Ojai. We mostly remained silent. It didn’t require language. We hiked, crossing rivers and streams, through valleys and up mountains and through canyons and through knee-deep snow and through desert landscapes and fields of deep green. No talking. Just that wind rushing through the trees which sounded like light, heavenly, distant traffic. At night we’d eat in silence. Occasionally—though less and less as I grew older—Dad would talk about the stars at night, using his background of chemistry, physics and math.
So, too, here and now; we didn’t talk, just remained uncomfortably silent, gazing at and then away from each other. Different generations; different values; different moral compasses; different understandings of the world and how it worked. What we shared was a deep respect for one another, a challenging sense of intellect and love for one another as father and son. Especially since he’d always been my rock, at least financially. And I’d always been the prick who pushed against him. And now, I’d become the son who pulled through, leaving New York City to care for a dying man.
Eventually the doc returned with the new fresh tube. He showed me how to do it, explaining that it was incredibly easy. Only he couldn’t deflate the balloon inside Dad’s stomach, the old tube. He became more and more flustered and annoyed. He tried everything. He said in all his years as an ER doc he’d never once seen this happen. Eventually, he gave up and admitted he couldn’t do it. He said he’d have to call downstairs, the “specialists.” He did, and we heard the entire conversation down the hall. He came back and said they’d send him downstairs and get this taken care of.
While we waited for dad to go “downstairs” we decided to listen to the latest Sam Harris podcast interview with a physicist-philosopher discussing the space-time continuum and “actual versus non-actual” reality, etc. It was actually quite fascinating. Over the past couple years I’d successfully hooked both my parents on The 5th Column and Sam Harris. They are, like me, deeply rational people who see the errors in both political sides, so these podcasts make sense. And they’re highly entertaining as well as performed by highly educated experts at the top of their fields working in places like Stanford, Yale, Harvard, etc.
Finally, two hours later it seemed, they took him downstairs. I sat there, looking outside at the street and at the tree with yellow flowers blooming right outside the window. How many times, I wondered, had I been in ER rooms during my turbulent, nefarious drinking days in my teens and twenties? I remembered the car crash my buddy and I’d been in in 2007, age 24, in Ventura. We’d all been wasted. Met a girl at an Irish dive bar. Got into her car. Crashed. The car rolled multiple times and ended on its side. My buddy pulled me out. I collapsed in the street and woke up in the ER. They had to pull her out with the Jaws of Life; she’d been pinned in the driver’s seat against the road. I remembered awakening being stitched up, and then again in a room divided by a curtain. On the other side of that curtain was a man who’d just been shot three times in the torso by gang members in Oxnard. A priest came in and prayed over him. A police detective entered and asked him a series of questions. A doctor walked in and told him the news: He had a 50% chance of survival. His mother called him on his phone, weeping. He was from Boston, I remember that. All of this I experienced that first night and early the next day, still wired and drunk. We chatted several times during my days in ICU.
When I got out of the hospital the first thing I did was drink again. Sobriety was still three years away. I wrote about this car crash HERE.
*
They wheeled Dad back to ICU room #6. The new tube had been inserted, the old one removed. Success. Dad laid down again. They re-took his vitals. Normal. Some paperwork was signed. They discussed some things. We got him up and wheeled him out and down the zigzagging hallways and down to the 2nd floor and out the door. I jogged down the block, got the Leaf, returned, put dad inside, adjusted his portable oxygen tank to 4%, and we took off. It reminded me of driving him home from the hospital two weeks ago after his 19 day stay, sunshine and the outdoors for the first time, as if a baby seeing it all right now, that primal visual scream of joy.
The neighbors and I once more lifted him up on the loaned wheelchair into the room and into his bed. He immediately needed to take a shit. We let him sit a few more minutes to raise is oxygen level and then walked him into the bathroom. The neighbors left.
That night the three of us listened to the latest Real Time with Bill Maher (the one with Elon Musk), while Mom and I ate pasta we’d had delivered from Ca Daria downtown. Then we slept.
Or mom slept. That was the point, to give her a break.
I had the baby-monitor with me in my room downstairs. I heard Dad’s every sigh, cough, burp, fart. I tried to sleep but three or four times Dad needed me or I was worried and I’d sling my half-naked ass up the slick, polished dark wooden stairs and down the long hallway to Dad’s room. Sometimes he needed help with something, sometimes he didn’t. Every time I stayed up for 45 minutes, an hour and a half, etc. I couldn’t go back to sleep that quickly or easily. At 3am he needed help going to the bathroom. I went up there. Diarrhea. A thin brown film all over. I stepped in it in my soft bare feet. He did, too. I changed his bed sheet. Helped him. Used sanitary napkins to clean the bottoms of our feet. Got Dad new fresh underwear.
After, I went downstairs and lay wide-awake in bed. I got onto Substack Notes and started perusing, commenting, and creating posts. Notes about my Myth of Sisyphus Camus reading as of late. About my father. What I was thinking about. Etc. Finally, around 5:45am, I was bludgeoned into sleep once more.
I woke around 7am. I got up, read, slugged my Irish Breakfast tea, tried to ignore the sounds upstairs of my mother’s voice, my dad’s movements, etc. They’d yell if they needed me. I was sleep-deprived. I could only imagine how my mom felt; I got to go home for days at a time; my mom was caught like a fly in amber; she couldn’t escape this is she wanted to. And she didn’t want to. After almost 50 years together: She was here for the long haul, to the last bitter moment.
When I did come up, around 8:15—I had a dog-house sit gig (I do dog walking and sitting on the side in Santa Barbara)—somehow my mother and I almost immediately got into a fresh fight about her drinking from a week before. I don’t know who started it or why. Clearly, some embers were still there, burning bright orange and hot. Quickly, those embers burst into new fierce flames. Before we knew it we were accusing and half-yelling at each other, my father only down the hall. Selfish this and narcissism that, drinking this and alcoholic that. Etc. It was dumb, boring and overplayed.
We calmed. I left, rushing down the steep stone steps into the cool 50-degree morning.
*
Fifteen minutes later I pulled up along the curb to my dog house sit gig. I’d been working for this guy for five months. A former doctor and actor who lived in a really lovely part of town up on a hill with a spectacular view of the nearby Pacific Ocean. He has a great eight-month-old Rhodesian Ridgeback. (See photo.) We greeted each other and he took off for his appointment. I hung out with his dog. Kept listening to The 5th Column. Did some Substacking. Walked the dog. Hung out outside and gazed down below at the ocean. Sighed.
Mom texted me and apologized, saying we were both under profound pressure and things were hard and sleep was bad. I agreed. We made up. It reminded me of when, as a kid, my mother and I fought, back in the mid-late 1990s, we’d slam our doors, separate, and then slide lengthy hand-written pages of apology under each other’s door. Then we’d open our doors, meet in the middle between the two, hug and “start over.” All my life we’d been following that protocol in one form or another, whether paper, phone call, in person or via text. Here we were, me age 40, still doing it. It felt comforting. Warm. Safe.
I walked another dog after the Rhodesian. Then put air in my front left tire. Then charged the Leaf again. Then drove home, back to Lompoc.
What a goddamn day.
That is sweet how you and your mom make up. <3