On Friday August 21, I got a call from my mom that she’d taken my dad to the hospital. While he wasn’t having a heart attack, doctors were afraid one would happen at any moment. After a major stroke in 1995 and a major heart attack in the early 2000’s, it wasn’t unexpected.
My dad is 76 years old. I’m not ready to lose him. I don’t know I can actually say that anyone is ready to lose a parent.
But I’ve kept him alive.
You know, in the same way that you keep a plane in the air when the turbulence hits at 30,000 feet. You grip the armrests, pray to your gods and goddesses, and exert a sheer force of will that keeps everyone in one piece until the plane is back on the ground safely. All thanks to your white knuckled hands and uttered prayers.
My dad’s father had a heart attack at 39. My grandfather died at 54. As I think about it, my dad must’ve lived with a similar fear that his father would die at any moment.
I tried (we all did) to get my dad to eat better. Exercise more. I got frustrated with him. Fell into being angry with him at times. And, really, it just came out of my own fear that he was killing himself. I probably wouldn’t have used those words at the time, but it felt that dramatic. Watching him stuff onion rings or french fries or inhale hamburgers was painful.
After the stroke, I never shut my phone’s ringer off at night because I knew I’d get a call in the middle of the night from my mom saying he was in the hospital or dead.
It’s funny to me how that little decision to always keep my phone on at night became so much a part of my routine that I didn’t remember why I’d started it. For 20 years, I’ve waited for the phone call that he was going to die.
But it was no way to keep him alive. As if keeping my phone on at night would somehow protect me from the inevitable. As if being angry with my dad for eating poorly and not “caring” for himself in the way I thought he should would actually do anything constructive.
My fear came across as controlling and critical. My white knuckled approach had nothing to do with my dad. It was about me and it was selfish.
Ironically, as I’ve gotten better at keeping my mouth shut in the last year, he started finding ways to get off his medications by eating better. He found his own purpose for being healthy: quality of life.
Fortunately, my relationship with my dad has been more than just about how he eats or cares for himself. Over the last couple of years, I’m incredibly grateful for the time I’ve had with him to get to know him differently.
Last week, he wasn’t sure he even wanted the double bypass heart surgery doctors suggested could prevent a likely major heart attack. There’s something about impending mortality that cuts through all the bullshit to what’s real. All the petty frustrations or disappointments seem so irrelevant because, ultimately, they are.
I got a chance to really see my dad. Not through my fear or my frustration, or the inevitable disappointments of childhood in a parent, but as a good man with faults and fears like the rest of us.
My family’s not big on the “I love you’s” and the warm fuzzies. I told him I wasn’t ready to lose him, anyway. That I loved him. So when that moment came and I was crying and he was crying, he said he wished he could get out of the hospital bed and come over and hug me.
I went to him and put my arms around his aging body and held tight. As I felt the vibrations of his frail voice in my neck saying “I love you” back to me, I realized that it was the first time I kept my dad alive. Not by trying to control what scared me, but by being vulnerable with him.
Now I get to keep my dad alive in me.
And that’s worth more to me than the time I wanted to buy him because I was so afraid of losing him.
I got lucky. He decided to do the surgery and he made it through strongly. Less than a week afterward, he’s cruising around with his walker and getting back to the usual, even if it’s a little slower than usual.
Dad still isn’t used to the new rhythm of his heart beat. It’s too fast for his liking. But I like it just fine.
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Turbulence at 30,000 feet from The Moment podcast by Brian Koppelman interviewing Seth Godin.
Photo credit: Mom
Eva Rubin, MPH/LCSW
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