Beta testing
“Here are my plans,” I tell my mom.
I’m going to go travel for a couple months. I need to unplug. I need to get back into a right state of mind before deciding what happens next, whether I move out but stay closeby, whether I move somewhere and take up a full-time job again, or something else entirely.
I write down these plans on her calendar so she’ll know where I am, and when to expect me to be home.
“So, it’s in October.”
“Yes, but I’m going to be gone for a week in September.” Because two months is a long time, and I’d like to test whether or not all the work I’ve done setting up support structures for my parents—bringing the nursing home to them, is actually going to work. Testing this now also gives me some time to make some adjustments once I get home before I actually go travel.
“Where are you going to go?”
I’ve picked a place that’s far away enough where I can’t run back, but close enough where if something urgent happened I could fly back within a couple hours. Some place where I know enough people to keep me company, and also a place I also want to know if I ever could want to go back to.
“Seattle.”
My nerves kick in the moment I step onto BART and its doors close, and it’s not the weight of my large backpack hanging from my shoulders. I begin to wonder if my parents will really be fine without me. When I used to take vacations from work, I always spent the first week worrying everyday about my work that wasn’t getting done and all the emails I wasn’t responding to. What would happen without me? Who will push along those projects? Who? Who? This reminds me of that.
Like work, I imagine that I will have to let certain things fall through the cracks. That it’s okay to not have perfection. I’ve done what I can, and as a wise woman told me:
A second feeling washes over me, and I realize I’m also testing myself. I’ve told myself that I need to move out of my parents’ place, that I need a place of my own. But can I actually do that? Can I move out? Do I actually want to? I wonder if this is what it’s like to send your kid off to college. You know it’s a relationship that you need to let evolve, which means letting go. But the moment you get the chance—even if it’s a fake chance—it’s so easy to back off and hang on because you’re never really sure it’s the right thing to do.
The train passes through a tunnel and then exits, the sun blasting my face with light and warmth. The past few days have been a little cloudy and hazy, but it’s clear, blue skies today. I don’t know if most of my fellow passengers are just in a cheery mood today, or if it’s just my anticipation of temporary freedom, or if it’s just the cover of ‘What a Wonderful World’ playing in my ears—but for a moment, everything feels like it will be alright.
The world is full of hurt, pain and injustice. And strange things like loved ones getting old and losing their minds. But it is not mutually exclusive to also acknowledge the good in the world, to have gratitude and see the beautiful.
Because it can be a wonderful world still. It can be, still.
I literally sleep the whole flight to Seattle. I barely even notice we ever left the ground. You only realize how tired you really are when you’re forced to pause and notice it.
There’s something weird about Seattle the moment I step off the plane and head into the city. Everything is familiar, but something is off. I can’t put my finger on it and I shrug it off.
Before I left, I set up some cameras around the two places my dad spends his life (the bed, the couch). I call into the one next to the couch to spy on my dad and see how he’s doing. It feels a little creepy, but it serves my purposes pretty well. He’s watching the news, as expected, but then I see my mom walk over. She’s noticed my call and answers.
“Hi, Daniel,” my mom says. “How are—”
“Where’s the car!?” my dad yells from his couch.
“Roger has it,” I say.
“Why!?”
I suddenly recognize our first problem. Between the call and a quick text exchange with my brother, we piece together that my dad is upset that I left the car with my brother, and that he seemingly wasn’t involved in the decision. Forget that not only can he not drive now, or that he hasn’t even tried in the past few months, he still needs to feel like he could drive and go out if he wanted to. And when he realizes he has no car, he freaks out develops a sense of anxiety that’s only rivaled by my mom.
I really should have noticed this before. I remember once, my mom had a friend come cut her hair, and because they wanted to use the garage, I took the car and left it on the street. My dad freaked out.
I find it funny that my dad has long agreed to leave his own home and move to an assisted-living center, but refuses to even live with the possibility of not having a car, that somehow a driver’s license and car are a bigger sense of freedom.
I stock two solutions in my head: Take my mom’s penchant for writing shower contracts and write one where my dad agrees to give my brother the car. Or, leave the car in the garage and permanently give my brother the key.
Which means if I move out, I’d need to buy another car. We’re acting out a real-life charade and are using expensive, realistic props. Awesome.
“Nobody has any communication,” my dad yells.
Even a thousand miles away, even through a video camera, my dad’s yelling still carries the same sting. My dad may have lost his ability to truly be articulate, to talk, but he definitely has not lost his ability to attack. I wish he couldn’t communicate using a language I understood. It’d be great if he were a baby and just making random sounds. You can ignore what you don’t understand. But he uses words I know and so I’m constantly being fooled.
I continue to check in on my folks every once in awhile through the week. I check in with them, with people who visit them, with my brother. For the most part, they’re doing fine. Things are working as planned.
I also check in with my Seattle friends, who all say some combination of the following after spending a few minutes with me: You seem tired. More grounded. Worn out. Subdued.
No matter how many different people I see and how many times I tell the stories of how the past few months have been, I can’t quite find the right way to articulate it and it frustrates me to be unable to communicate whatever’s in my head. I just end up being mysterious.
“I feel like I saw something,” is what I tell them.
I always try to explain more than that. That I saw something that colors the way I see the rest of the world, like the first time you concretely understand that death exists and comes for all of us. Like the first time you realize the world is not all fun and games and you have to earn money to buy food. Like the first time you realize how precious your mind is, and how terrible it is for everyone for you to lose it.
But even that doesn’t quite cut it. If there’s language to communicate the thought, I haven’t found it yet. But I also wonder if the reason I don’t quite understand what’s truly happening with my parents is precisely because we don’t have the language for it. Language—counterintuitively—often creates reality.
It doesn’t help that that weird feeling about Seattle has stuck with me, that feeling I felt the moment I landed. As I see one friend after another, I figure out what it is. I’ve changed a lot in the past six months, but Seattle, too, has changed. The former chapter of my life in Seattle is closed and a new one has started without me. New buildings have opened. Former ones have closed. South Lake Union feels more like San Francisco than South Lake Union. There are these rentable Lime Bikes everywhere. The mayor resigned.
The Seattle I knew is also gone. If I were to ever come back, it’d have to be to build a brand new life. Maybe I’d get to use some of the same building blocks as before, some of the same friends, but it’d still have to be something new.
On my last night, after I’ve seen the last of friends I need to see, I plop down on the couch at my friend’s place, my body sinking into where the seat and back cushions meet.
Meow, my friend’s cat, Ozzie, sneaks out of his cave and leaps next to me. I reach out my hand and he sniffs it momentarily, before stepping onto my leg, placing his front paws on my chest and starts kneading my abs. It tickles and hurts and I struggle not to laugh because I don’t want to startle him.
There’s a theory about cats kneading: It’s a learned behavior from pawing at a cat’s mother, and a cat will continue to do it if it was separated from its mother or abandoned as a kitten. But it’s also just a theory. It does make me think of my dad though. Are there behaviors about my dad that are connected to his childhood that I don’t know about? I know he was given the opportunity to come to the United States as a young child, at the cost of being separated from his mother and potentially leaving her to die a lonely death. I will never know what it’s like to make a move like that. Never.
Ozzie eventually crawls off and cuddles up to me against my leg, and my arm wraps itself around him. We sit for a few minutes and suddenly I realize I’m experiencing a feeling I haven’t felt in I don’t know how long.
I’m bored.
It’s not like I don’t have dead time with my parents. I’m not sitting and watching every moment. But I am standing on guard, which means that any dead time I have isn’t doing nothing, it’s spent waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Something always could happen.
But not now. I’m just with Ozzie, listening to him purr, hearing the tick tock of my watch. A car flies by and its headlights passing through the window. You know, things that don’t matter much but are somehow beautiful in their own right if you sit and think about them.
I have not been bored for a long time. I have not had nothing to do and nothing to think about. I can’t explain how good this feels.
If there was doubt about my needing to move out, it’s now gone. I need to reclaim my own space in my life, and I now have proof that my folks will be okay without me living with them. There will be gaps, sure. I have to accept that. I cannot plan for everything. But they are set up to be okay, and have the right people available to help support even if my mom doesn’t view it that way. I do love my parents, and do accept them, but I also have to love and accept myself.
I think about all this on the bus ride back to the airport, but I’m interrupted when my mom calls me.
“Do you have the car keys?” my mom asks me.
I immediately run through my wheel of possible answers, trying to decide which one is best. I could say ‘no.’ But then I worry that then my dad will think my brother has them and that he’s somehow responsible for this missing car phenomenon and I don’t want my dad mad at him. I’m also not quite sure who’s really asking. I could say ‘yes…’
“Yeah, I have them,” I say.
It was the wrong choice.
“Daniel has them,” I hear my mom say off to someone, and who else could it be, other than my dad.
“Why does he have them!?” I hear my dad yell. “He’s gone. What good is the car key to him!?”
“Do you need to go somewhere? He’s coming back tonight,” my mom asks, which is the exact question I would’ve asked.
"That's not the point!" he retorts.
I can hear him yell about the principle of the matter, that I really shouldn’t have a car key if I’m not going to be driving the car. I mean, there’s some amount of truth to the statement, but I also know that it’s ultimately a strawman to hide that he feels his freedom is being threatened. If you don’t have anywhere to go, then you not having a key doesn’t matter.
But that’s an argument that you can only make when the other party is capable of accepting facts and logic.
Which is exactly the world I’m leaving, and not the one I’m returning to.
I laugh to myself as I hear my parents talking on and on. My mom has a habit of forgetting to hang up the phone. I laugh, because what else can I do? This is the world I belong in right now. At least, for the next four weeks.
That’s what I tell myself. Four weeks.
I can do it.