When the phone rang and the caller ID said that it was my father's number, I picked up right away. He almost never calls me and it seems whenever he does, there's something wrong.
"Hey Dad," I said.
He said my name and my heart picked up its pace. The tension in his voice was obvious. It sounded like it did the time he called to tell me that my mother was in the ICU on dialysis.
"What's going on?" I asked, "How are you?"
"Not too good," he responded, "I had a mini-stroke."
The words took a second to sink in and so, because he'd continued to talk, I was trying to get the pieces of the story to fit together, like some kind of three dimensional, floating in mid-air, puzzle.
Two days ago, he'd woken up to find his vision blurred.
Did he say two days ago? Two? DAYS ago?
He was seeing double of everything. When he went to the mall to walk, the floor looked slanted.
He went to the mall to walk when he couldn't see right?
He called the doctor and they sent him to Dr. S and he diagnosed a mini-stroke and said that there wasn't much they could do.
Isn't it important to see if he has blockages? Aren't there tests that have to be done? Why did they send him to an Opthamologist?
"How did you get to the doctor's dad? Did you drive yourself?"
"Yeah. And it was hard to get there, too. It was hard to drive."
Oh my god. Oh my god. I'm not ready for this.
Eventually, from what I could gather, my dad's doctor is going to do a complete physical work up, but there is little in the way of treatment for the mild stroke. It should get better on its own and in the meantime, he's talking about getting a patch to cover one eye, as that fixes the blurred vision.
It is hard to separate how I feel about my dad's health complications from how I feel, generally, about our situation as a family. And that is hard to separate from how I feel about my family without my mother in it.
My mother was the glue that stuck my father to the world, socially speaking. My father went to work and worked hard and came home and worked around the house and that was basically it, until he retired and started to make wine for a hobby. My dad never socialized with his coworkers. He doesn't have any buddies. He has no pastimes and nowhere to be or go, in a social sense. He owns apartments, for which he does all the maintenance and upkeep and that functions, now, as his work. And his hobby. Right after my mother died, he joined an Over-50 Singles Group. He had a couple girlfriends and, I think, became somewhat disenchanted. I don't know. We don't really discuss much.
He is a remarkable man, my father. He has done remarkable things. Truly remarkable. I may have written all about this somewhere else, but I can't find it. My dad grew up in Italy, where he lived through World War II and watching his friend get blown up by an old landmine. Where he tended sheep and found his father, a master carpenter, dead in the wood shop when he was only three years old. He was 16 when he came to this country. He spoke no English. He had $50 in his pocket. He lived with his aunt in a two room apartment that had no furniture. He took two jobs and went to high school and made his own luck and mine too. He worked as a builder, a bowling alley manager, a steel worker. He built the house in which I grew up and the apartments that remain a source of income for him now. He planted and grew and tended and cleaned and organized and fixed and built and and and and.
But he is shy and socially anxious. He feels out of place and inferior and undereducated, sometimes, I think. He is closed and difficult to read. He worked and worked and worked and saved and saved and sacrificed to make a better life for my sister and I and for that I am deeply and utterly and completely grateful.
One of the things I dreaded after my mom died, was that my father wouldn't be able to care for himself. To my knowledge he'd never, ever stood in front of a stove (unless he was fixing it,) or went grocery shopping, or clothes shopping or made his own doctor's appointments or gotten his own medicine from the pharmacy, or used a computer or a credit card or a cell phone. You get the idea? Much to my surprise, he did well. He made his own appointments. He learned to use my mother's cell phone and how to order his meds online. He learned how to cook things and figured out the need to carefully read packages, lest you come home with tuna in OIL vs. tuna in water. He's been doing all right. Nevertheless, the little sister and I want him, need him, to move closer. We've talked, cajoled, pressured, persisted, and haunted to no avail.
He is as stubborn as an Old-Country Goat.
Which has been more or less fine with me. Truthfully, I haven't been in any hurry to sell the family home or uproot him. I know that he's afraid and that letting go of the house and his apartments, somewhere in his mind, is tantamount to being dependent and giving up all that he worked for (my father is financially solvent and will probably die with a vast sum left over--amazing if you think about that measly 50 bucks.)
But with this latest? Ahhh, shit.
I'm a goer. A doer. A fixer. An I'll-be-right-there-even-if-I-have-to-drive-all-night-helper. Knowing that the roots that I've laid down here are so deep and right this minute, don't have any give, knowing that I can't just go when he needs me...it's so, so hard. I can't adequately express how helpless, how hamstrung, how stuck I feel.
I know, though, that he's an adult. He's living the life that he wants to live. I respect that. But also knowing how much easier his life could be, here with us, surrounded by grandchildren and willing, hardworking, sons-in-law, and the smell of food cooking for him, made with love by someone else, well, that makes me want to shake the shit out of him.
And then there's this: I read that up to 20% of people who have mini-strokes go on to have a major stroke within 90 days.
To me, it feels as if somewhere, a silent, invisible, count-down clock just started.
