Dad's Body

Watching your parents age is not for the weak

When the light from the window in the dining room hits at the right angle I can see the way his jowls are starting to droop. I can see the already deep lines between his eyebrows are sinking further. The gray portions of his beard are white now, and when he’s wearing his glasses and his beard needs a trim he starts to morph into a stocky mall Santa tinkering with his toys. As he puts the finishing touches on the cross necklace he is working on, I can see the way he looks now, and, at the same time, the way he’ll look in twenty years.

My dad has always shown love through actions. He loves to make me wacky dinners and experimental desserts fueled by Facebook inspiration and nearly-expired leftovers. He drives me to every doctor’s appointment and flight. He’s built me bookshelves by hand and helped me move every year of college, but the last time he could only hold the door.

My senior year, he had open heart surgery. For months he couldn’t do anything other than clutch his chest in pain every time he coughed. He couldn’t make it up the stairs to help me pack my things.

It was around that time I started repeating the Buddhist five remembrances daily:

I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health. I cannot escape ill health.

I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love is of the nature to change. I cannot escape separation from them.

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

I was trying to accept his frailty, which I had begun to really understand for the first time, and now I can’t unsee.

We have a running joke about how I need to get a better job so I can afford to put him in a good nursing home, and how he’ll undoubtedly critique the way the chefs cook their potatoes (his specialty). What we don’t say is what a privilege it would be to argue with him about which nursing home he should go to. We laugh about how he falls asleep the minute he sits down and finds entertainment in the birds in our yard — old man things — because the only way we can face the issue is sideways.

Last time he picked me up from the airport, he dropped me at home and then went straight to the emergency room. I scolded him for coming to get me even when he was in pain. I could have asked someone else to get me. But he insisted he had to be there. I imagine he thinks he is protecting me by hiding his pain, but it makes me worry about him more. He doesn’t ask for help until he’s writhing on the floor in pain and up until that moment I never really know how bad he feels.

I’ve been called a pull-myself-up-by-my-bootstraps type and I resent how hard it is for me to ask for help sometimes, and that when I do no one can seem to read me, so any emotional distress is brushed off as nothing of concern. Part of the reason I resent it is because I’m exactly and unavoidably like my father.

I am turning into him much faster than I expected. We’ve started shouting the same corny jokes, quoting our favorite 80s movies, classic rock lyrics, and paranormal facts. My closet is stuffed with more of his dress pants and band t-shirt hand-me-downs than any clothes I picked out myself and whenever I travel, I wear the St. Michael necklace he gifted me even though I’m an atheist. He has a matching St. Michael tattoo taking up a third of his back and shoulder blade that he fell asleep getting a few years ago.

There’s a white crescent scar on his nose from the surgery where they strapped his oxygen mask too tight for weeks. He also has a scar at the top of his ankle, where they took the vein out to rebuild his heart artery. His left vocal cord is paralyzed from where they intubated him again after he came off the ventilator but still wasn’t getting enough oxygen on his own, so he loses his voice easier if he’s been speaking all day. His memory has never been quite as good as it was before the surgery. I didn’t give his face and voice, the ones that have been there my whole life, permission to change like that.

When I talk about watching my dad age the sentences come out simple and stark because death is the great uncomplicator. When I was next to his hospital bed, all the memories I didn’t realize I expected to have surfaced, weddings and graduations he might not be there for, and I began the process of letting go of things that hadn’t yet happened.

I feel far too young for all this letting go. Parents are supposed to be there in your twenties as you establish yourself. Aging parents are a problem of your thirties and forties. The process wasn’t immediate though, every time emotions came up, they were short circuited by the beeping monitor at his bedside and the nurses shuffling outside the door. I don’t think my body processed any of it until months later, when his violent coughed stopped wracking me.

Recently, two separate commentators I follow announced they would be fathers soon, both at age 62. Most people left congratulatory comments, but it did not seem a happy occasion to me. All I could think about is that they would be dead before their kid hits 25 and that their kid would still need them then. I thought about how they wouldn’t be able to help their kid move into their first dorm room; they might not even see them learn to drive. There’s a gradual devastation in watching your parents become more frail and concurrently more stubborn in front of your eyes, and I cannot imagine going through that at 16 or even 18.

My dad isn’t particularly old in his late fifties and looks great for his age. He has a full head of mossy brown and silver hair any man would be jealous of, and he’s not slim, but he doesn’t have much of a belly either. For an ultramarathoner, he’s thick and slow, but his persistence almost always wins out. He never fit in with the predominantly elderly overweight men in the cardiac wing of the hospital and the doctors seemed confused as to how he ended up there with tubes a foot deep into his chest.

After he almost died, but didn’t, he was the same person but also different, how could you not be? I’m different too. I’ve started tearing up at cliches about life being temporary. I fold myself into his forehead creases because I’m too embarrassed to ask for a bear hug or maybe too worried I won’t fit into his arms the way I used to, that they won’t feel as secure.

It’s been two years since his heart surgery. He’s recovered now, and color has returned to his face. He won’t break. Somewhat ironically, he often wears this grey t-shirt that says, “strong is hard to kill.” But as the Buddhist story goes, for me this glass is already broken. I can enjoy it and I drink out of it. It holds water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious. I cannot escape separation from him, and everyone I love. Although I cannot escape it, it is only human to try. They say suffering comes from attachment, but trying to force yourself to detach is merely another kind of craving.

Most Saturdays, I walk two or three miles beside him. I eat the brunch he loves preparing and I make him a frothed chai latte to go with it. We eat across from each other at the kitchen island. I drink my own tea or decaf coffee in a mug I’ve had for a decade with the handle superglued back on. Then he washes the dishes and I dry them, including my favorite cracked cup.