Couch potato

My dad is a sit on your ass all day kind of dad. I mean this literally, and kindly, because my dad is now old and not exactly mobile anymore.

His nest is an off-white leather couch in this weird corner of the house that’s between the dining room and living room, but not quite in either. I imagine my parents put the couch there because they couldn’t find a better place to put it when they first moved in, and have been too lazy to move it since. It doesn’t even face the TV, which you have to view at more than a forty-five degree angle if you’re sitting down.

Which is what my dad does: just sits there. Usually, he’s facing forward, legs equally spaced with his shoulders, hands resting at his hips. It’s almost like he’s meditating, if not for his eyes being wide open, staring into the nothingness that is the whiteness of the opposing wall.

Sometimes, he plops his feet on a mini coffee table that’s in front of him. This pose normally exudes a relaxed demeanor, suited for someone who thinks too highly of themselves. My dad just looks like a giant baby; obviously very comfortable, kind of cute, but really just clearly old.

The couch is his home throughout the day. Sitting. Feet on the coffee table. Occasionally he lies down with his feet on resting where your arms are supposed to go. He’ll periodically get up to make himself some coffee or go to the bathroom. But then he’s back. Until nighttime, when he retreats to his real bedroom.

I laughed the first time I visited and picked up on this routine. My first response was to be a bit cocky and mildly condescending, perhaps to exert some power over my former authority figure.

“Do you just sit here all day?” I asked, smirking at how he sat there like a frozen statue.

“Huh!?” he practically yelled, slowly turning his head towards the sound of my voice.

“What do you do all day?”

“I can’t hear you,” his voice boomed. “You need to speak louder when you are talking to people.”

I sighed. Whenever he can’t hear the other person, my dad has always had a tendency to raise his own voice, as if this somehow solves the problem.

“What, are, you, doing!?” I repeated, slightly slower, and a lot louder.

“Oh. Oh! Just sitting here,” he perked up and looked at me with this mischievous, ‘I’m up to something but trust me, I’m so innocent’ smile that I’ve unfortunately inherited. “I am contemplating life,” he said in a slow robotic voice at about half someone’s normal speed.

My dad has had trouble hearing for some time now, but deterioration is the name of the Old Age game, and patience is a survival skill you learn just to stay sane. Combine hard of hearing with a failing memory and the loss of whatever wires keep our brains lucid, and my dad becomes kind of an abrasive human being. Truth be told though, he’s always been that way, and old age seems to have stripped him of any desire, or capability, of softening those rough edges.

“You should be more gentle with me,” he scolded me once.

“Huh?” I raised my eyebrows.

“You raised your voice with me just now.”

“Dad,” I scoffed back with a punch of air leaving my lungs, “I was trying to make sure you heard me.” Which was true.

“Well, I have made my point. You can take it or leave it.”

I nearly exploded. I was not about to take his emotional manipulation and justice needed to be dealt.

In sixty seconds…, I muttered under my breath, instead. I repeated it again, and again, and again. Until sixty seconds had passed. Because I knew how this game works: I’m right to get angry, but the reality is in sixty seconds my dad won’t remember that this happened anymore, and I’ll be the one left with the emotional scar for the rest of the day.

Over several years and many visits, I realized that if I wanted to spend any serious time with my dad, I was going to have to learn a few tricks. Some for me, some for him, a few that were for both.

One of the next times I saw him, just sitting there on the couch, I decided to a pull one of those tricks out of my pocket.

I walked over next to him. He didn’t move. But then I gently laid my hand on his shoulder. And then he turned to look at me.

“How are you!?” I said louder than I normally do, but without yelling.

“Oh, oh! Good. I am good. Thank you.”

I had nothing else to say, so I left him to sit and do what he does. But eventually I had to come back for a glass of water or something, saw him, and placed my hand on his shoulder again.

“Are you contemplating life?”

“Eeeeehhhhh...yeeehhhhh...uummmmmm…” he made this long sound that I can only describe as thoughtful screeching. “Yes. It is good to reflect, every once in a while, you know?

It’s become my signal to him that I want his attention. Sometimes I touch his arm, or his knee, anything to let his body know that I’m about to tell him something. It’s also served another purpose: If I don’t touch him first, he knows I’m not talking to him. Because that has happened and then I get yelled at again, for not being clear with what I’m saying, even though I’m not talking to him in the first place and he just happens to be at the same table.

This trick, unfortunately, doesn’t help with his own memory.

“Have you been going to many conferences?” he asked me suddenly before I could leave him again.

“Dad, I don’t work anymore.” I hadn’t been working, nor traveling and going to conferences, for a while.

“Oh.” He paused for a few seconds. “You don’t?”

I opened my mouth to tell him that this is a question from another era, and that we’ve talked about this several times. But then I stopped myself. “No. No conferences lately.”

“I see…” he drifted off.

Once, I tried just sitting down with him. He didn’t respond. So it was just the two of us sitting there. Eventually I couldn’t handle it so I tapped him on the arm, because I wanted to try striking up conversation.

“Do you like this couch?” I didn’t know what else to say. It was like being on a first date. And about as exciting as other first date questions.

He nodded.

I’ve always wanted to have a real conversation with my dad. As a kid, he was always off being philosophical which I never understood, or telling jokes that I never found funny, or always rambled on to the point where I stopped paying attention. I don’t think I ever really saw him hold a coherent thought, and now he couldn’t do that if he tried.

So it was just the two of us, sitting there on the couch. I hated it; it was so awkward, and I have never been good at dealing with awkwardness. I find it kind of suffocating.

Eventually I got some blueberries just to do something. I picked up one and plopped it into my mouth, just slowly chewing and trying to enjoy the moment. He was just sitting and breathing. Truly, a father and son moment for the ages.

Over time, this is how I learned to spend time with my dad. I’d join him on the couch and do something else. Sometimes I’d check my phone, sometimes read a book, sometimes play videogames.

It took me a long time to learn to just sit and do nothing; to do nothing else except sit there and be with him. When I did, I started noticing a lot of the smaller things in the room, like a lot of the photos hung up on the walls. I’d seen them before, but never really looked intently at each one, nor knew the story behind each picture.

There’s the one with me and my mom when she demanded we not only do a tourist boat tour, but also buy the accompanying overpriced photo of us on the boat. There’s one of me and my brother as kids on a cruise to Alaska. There’s a few of my dad and my brother, before I was born.

“Do you remember this?” I asked my dad, pointing at one of the photos.

“No, not really.”

“Oh,” I said, obviously disappointed.

But there were a lot of photos, and so I didn’t give up, wondering if maybe one of them would unearth something in my dad’s memory. Sometimes, I got lucky.

“Who’s this?” I asked, looking at a picture of a man in military uniform, who didn’t look like anyone I knew.

“Oh!” he brimmed with excitement. “That is my uncle. He served in the US military during World War Two!”

“Really?” my eyes widened, probably the most genuine reaction I’ve had with him in forever. I didn’t know that my family’s American story began before my parents, let alone that any of them had served in the armed forces.

“Yes! I am very proud of him, you know?”

I figured this just meant I had to ask the right questions or poke at the right impulses in the long term memory banks of his brain, so periodically I kept trying. There’s one picture of my mom and dad that’s always stuck out to me. I don’t know where it’s from or when it was taken—possibly at their wedding. How my mom and dad met is something I’ve always wanted to know, but could never really find out. So I tapped him on the leg.

“Mmmm….it was on a double date,” he said. He droned on for a while, about someone named Fannie. Then about how he was an accountant. And then how he lived in a studio apartment somewhere in Manhattan. “Do you know what a studio is?”

I hung my head. “Yes, dad.” I wanted to tell him that he helped me move into one when I moved to Seattle, but I said no more.

There were nuggets of other memories. Someone whose name sounded like, but wasn’t ‘Russell.’ Something about my mom studying in school. Something about Rockefeller. But the gaps were too big and it was hard watching him struggle to piece together the story.

“Hey mom?” I yelled out, asking her to come over.

“No, Fannie was your girlfriend,” my mom said in Chinese. “She dumped you. And then you came to me.”

“No…” my dad disputed.

They started arguing a little bit, but you could tell it was them both trying to remember exactly what happened some forty or so years ago.

I started laughing, because of course my parents also don’t agree on exactly how they met, and I’m sure both of their stories are actually wrong.

“I don’t remember,” she sighed, “I don’t remember a lot of things now.” It’s one of the first times I’ve heard her admit to the limitations of her memory.

For a few minutes silence took a hold of the room. My dad continued to just stare at the wall. My mom hunched over, looking at her feet. I glanced at the various photos on the wall. There are quite a few pictures of my parents together. They’re smiling, and I imagine what the two of them were like back then.

“I wonder why I moved to California,” my mom suddenly blurted out, still looking down at her feet. I wondered what she was actually contemplating in her mind.

And then she got up and left, taking the conversation with her.

Which left us back to where we started: just me and my dad. Just sitting there together. Not bothering to get anything out of it. Just, there.

I noticed his heavy breathing more than before, which seemed to take an incredible amount of effort. I heard the clock ticking. My own quieter breaths. I focused on those things, those little things you notice when you sit and let yourself accept all of the surroundings as they are instead of what you’d rather them to be. My dad’s eyes opened, blinked once or twice, staring off into space. And I wondered if each blink, each breath, if each one might be his last.

In the distance I heard John Legend serenade us with his silky voice. I forgot I left my music on in the other room.

Eventually some time passed and I stood to leave the room. And so it was just my dad, sitting on the couch. And when I turned to look back at him, weirdly, I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to let him go.