I like to obsessively watch YouTube videos from time to time. Sometimes it's football games that I missed. Sometimes it's videos about historic battles. Sometimes it's top tens or Looper. My morbid curiosity led me to watch a Top Tenz video about the worst ways to die. Sure, there was the guillotine, medieval torture devices, the electrical chair, etc. Do you know what the worst way to die is? Dying from old age.
When you're old your body begins the slow process of decline. Your joints creak each time you move, old injuries become excruciating and crucial organs start malfunctioning. Your memory starts to fade. Your vision becomes blurred, cataracts develop. Your hearing becomes muffled, like listening to the world while wearing ear plugs. Your bowel movements are no longer under your sway and diapers become a daily reality. High blood pressure. Diabetes. Everyday ailments turn into life or death battles. This slow process can take years, decades even. Your final moments may come while surrounded by strangers, health-care professionals, who may or may not give a shit about their patients. You may die alone. Honestly, that's scarier than any Rob Zombie flick.
Right now, my dad has been passed out for hours, practically since I came. When I first walked into his hospital room on Tuesday it was his appearance that struck me; he looked gaunt, jaundiced, there was a rash over his left cheek, pocks, scratches and sores all over him, his hands were swollen like two fleshy softballs. The feeding tube down his nose was causing him to speak in gargles, like punch-drunk boxer after three knockdowns. When he looked at me I got the sense we were ephemeral figures of his consciousness, this morning my sis told me that he addressed her as the "vieja bola" (in English that means a drunk old woman, "bola" is Salvadoran slang). Yesterday, when I asked him who I was I just got a blank stare and more incoherent gargles. This is his and my reality.
I tell myself that I've been here before. That I've been at his side when he had his first stroke. That I carried him to a taxi on Sutphin and brought him to the emergency room when he had a diabetic attack. That I cleaned him, wiped his ass, when he was incontinent from a case of diarrhea. I tell myself that he's strong, that he's a fighter, that he survived Hell's Kitchen in the 70's and worked long hours to provide food & shelter for my four siblings and I. I tell myself I can handle it, that hopefully he'll pull through. The reality is, I haven't been here before. We haven't. And I can hardly stomach seeing him like this, in so much pain, weak, each breath a lifetime in purgatory.
At times, he'll cough inexplicably, stare off into nothingness only to smile suddenly, laugh at a joke only he heard and groan and grimace with each movement. I think back on dad when I was younger, how we'd play catch with a handball while waiting for mom to get out of work. About watching the Knicks or the Yankees and losing his shit each time they won a game or even just scored, how we'd play catch with a basketball in the living room during commercial breaks. I think about how he'd take me everywhere with him in the yellow Buick station wagon, the one with the wooden panels like the one in Adventures in Babysitting, I would ride shotgun and even give him directions at an early age (I think that's the reason why I'm so good at navigating, I grew up in that car). I think back on my memories of dad, the good ones, and try to reconcile them with the present.
I wonder, is this life? Is this health-care? What is it all for? Is it for us or for him?
My dad; big, strong, powerful with his loud laugh, wide smile and terrifying roar, reduced to bed sores and sponge baths and incoherent spurts of life. I want to cry seeing him suffer like this, I want to cry now as I write this. What my tear glands won't allow me to do I'm hoping my writing will, these are a son's tears.
