I know I said I probably wouldn't write about this again here on the blog, but I've had a change of heart. I wrote this piece today as a request for a submission (details at another time); I also realized once I started writing that I
needed to write this piece today because it's what I do - keep stories, and some of these memories already feel as if they are fading. I'm even doing something I never thought I'd do. I'm sharing a photograph of my dad, taken this past November. I don't know if he would like me sharing it or not, but I do know that if it were between just us, he'd smile. And he'd laugh that I look like shit in it! Also, a reminder that I am one of four children. This is only my part. This is also very loosely edited {meaning: not edited at all}, so please cut me some slack.
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Many years ago, me being middle school aged, my dad left our family of six. I would tell you the bulk of that story here, however, 2000 characters maximum would float by much like the seasons, quickly and full in their own way. Instead, I will lurch forward a bit to the more recent, my dad's winter, but first I will start here.
For a handful of years, my dad came and went from my life. It was not unusual to hear from him for a few months, and then two or three years would go by before contact was made again.
Life went on, as it seems to do, hurt and sadness an unforgettable layer masked only by the sweetness of days spent with my own children, a new work {photography} that I'm deeply passionate about, and a depth-less, visceral love for my entire family and friends.
Two years ago I was at Home Depot with my little ones, Theo and Sully. My husband called and said I should come home. Instantly panicked, he said it was about my dad. I rushed out of the store, shaking, scared, was this it? The call I always thought I'd get? The one where he's dead?
In the confines of our dark, cold basement on a January day, I returned the call to a social worker who called looking for me, his estranged daughter. He had been found in a Walmart parking lot - Sioux City, Iowa, below zero temps - disoriented and cold. He'd already been in the intensive care unit for three days with hypothermia, one of the worst the critical care unit had ever seen. His core body temp 90 degrees, severely malnourished, septic. By the third day in intensive care his voice had come back, weak and soft just like his memory. He thought he remembered having a daughter, he'd told the nurses. He even thought he knew where my contact information was back in his apartment. This is how I was found again and brought back into his life.
I felt ambivalent once I'd made contact with the medical team. They said they did not think he'd pull through. They said I could call him. His bitter cold moved through my fingers as I dialed the numbers for his hospital room, stinging and pain. His voice was weak and, ironically, warm unlike his physical body. He told me he'd really gotten himself into a bind this time. His skin was bad, he had two sores on his back with a prescription cream from his dermatologist but if I know my dad, he took the cream, smiled kindly, and walked away knowing no one would be able to apply that salve to his pain. Over the course of weeks and months, those wounds ground down to bone. He stopped eating, he became septic. He spent 19 hours outside somewhere in the bitter cold. His clothes that he'd been brought to the ER in were clean - that was one of the first things I asked to see when I arrived by his side. He told me he doesn't recall what he'd been doing or where he'd been. I told him he went to Walmart - bought root beer and grapefruit juice, peanuts and a bag of Nestle Crunch Bars. He laughed a little bit about that like a child who has gotten away with sneaking an extra piece of Halloween candy.
He looked so thin and grey yet slivers of sunlight cascaded through the window and projected off of him. I took his bony hand in mine and held him like a broken bird. I did not know what I was doing there. I said I'd come because he asked me, and he asks for nothing. It will haunt me forever, but I thought he'd die and I thought it would be easy to help him briefly while he made his final exit from my life.
My dad never did make a full recovery. While being treated for sepsis and weighing only 100 pounds, he fell in the hospital and broke his hip. Since then, he never gained back the strength he'd need in order to survive. I've made many trips from my home in Colorado to his home in Sioux City since that first phone call that left me abandoning my cart at Home Depot. Although, I don't suspect he'd ever really been "home" since he left ours all those years ago.
I became his everything - medical advocate, financial advocate, figuring out which nursing home would rehab him, finding an assisted living that felt vibrant, he was only 66 years old after all. Most importantly, I became his daughter again. I did not, by this point, see this as his blessing as many might believe it to be. I saw it as my own.
Over the course of the past two years, I've visited him many times. I called him every night at 6:30pm. We talked about the weather and what he ate that day. I actually grew to love my trips to Iowa, the slow scene of farmland and rolling hills of corn. I found answers on those long drives across Middle America. I'd bring him his favorites, Taco Bell and chocolate malts, McDonald's coffee, black. Just this past November, he started calling me at random. He wanted to talk about my boys - what they loved and wanted to know more about what they were like. He told me he loved reading my blog and looking at the photos I'd taken. Out of the bottom of the brown barrel, we grew something promising.
Yesterday my dad died. Today I wrote his obituary. I stand corrected about my original thought, the one where I'd go help him out because he was going to die. What I know now is that if he'd died two years ago when I got that call, life for me would never be easy. Who was I kidding? Having someone you love come and go from your life is heart-shattering no matter what. I lived it long enough to know. Proven wrong, I got to know him in a different way, at a different time in life. Last week I went to Iowa. I sat by his side and watched in silence as he gave up on tacos and chocolate malts. I watched him sleep and felt a calm wash over me, those same slivers of sunlight warming us both this time. "He is still a fragile bird", I thought, and so am I, and aren't we all? His wounds go deeper than I'll ever know, I can see that and, oddly, I find comfort in knowing that I can't fix everything. I can't help but notice that even though he's now paper thin, he still has a beautiful smile, and through him I began to see pieces of myself. He is my calm side, my non-gossiping side, my mischievous side and if I hadn't had this chance to know him again, I don't think I would ever fully have been able to know myself.
When it was time to leave, I held his hands in mine. His eyes, blue like the sea, met mine. I told him I loved him so much. I said I'd see him again. He did not speak but he squeezed my hand. I walked away and did not look back. Confident in my heart, I heard the melody of a whisper in my mind that I will carry forever in my soul, "I am proud of you, Dad."
