The ghosts that haunt me

My dad has been in the ER several times over the last few years. I've been away from my family for those years, so I’ve gotten equally as many sudden calls reporting that news, and each time I wonder if “this is it.” He’s fallen. He has some kind of internal bleeding. There’s blood in his stool, which is such a formal way of describing it that the juvenile in me would rather laugh and just say there’s blood when he takes a dump.

Each time it’s always serious. Each time, it’s never the end. I don’t think this time is the end either. I’m trying to practice accepting things as they are and considering maybe one or two steps ahead, and not worrying about the worst possible outcome. I’ve never had to rush to the airport, jump on the phone just to say my last words, or do anything that’s a race against time.

There are ghosts that ask if that somehow disappoints me.

At the ER, I feel like I’m in one of those movie montages, sitting next to my mom with the camera panning around us in slow-motion as nurses, technicians, doctors, they blaze around like lightning. Tubes. Beeps. Some numbers. Something’s really high. He has something in his liver. Or maybe it’s his gall bladder.

I’ve already forgotten.

“Excuse me,” a nurse says to us, “I’m going to ask you to sit outside for a moment. I don’t think you’re going to want to be here for this.”

We don’t argue. I lean against the glass window outside, the window covered with a curtain. I can hear my dad yell in pain and doing his Chinese cowboy growl like his life depends on it. I know it’s temporary, and that they’re hooking something up to him. He’ll be fine, I know it. But “what if he’s not” does cross my mind.

“He’s more sick than he looks,” a doctor stops by to give us a debrief, continuing to describe my dad’s situation. My dad’s white blood cell count is extraordinarily high. He has a 104 degree fever. It looks like he might have several infections.

I keep waiting for the doctor to say ‘you should prepare yourselves’ without including the parenthetical ‘for this to be the end’ but he doesn’t.

Instead, he stays extra calm and simply states, “He’ll probably be here for at least a few days.”

“Thank you,” I mumble.

I text my brother, telling him that our dad is both in the ER and that he’s probably fine. I’ve been in and heard of enough situations where the status of “they’re fine” is saved for the last minute when everyone just wants it at the beginning.

“Hi—” a woman interrupts my streaming thoughts at some point. Is she a doctor? Have I already spoken with her? I’ve already met like a dozen people and I can’t— “I’m the case manager and I’m here to discuss your plans for your dad.”

Case manager? Aren’t those usually involved in social work? Is this because my dad is dying?

“Can you tell me about what his current situation is like? Does he live at home, with other people, or do you have plans to move him into an assisted care facility of some kind?”

Oh. That kind of ‘plan.’

“Uh…” I mutter. I’ve definitely thought about it. That’s why I moved back in the first place. He lives at home with my mom, just the two of them, but that’s just not sustainable. As for the ‘plan,’ my brother and I have had a number of conversations about nursing homes versus staying home versus a combination of alternatives. But in the moment, all I say is, “I don’t know.”

She tells me that my dad will most definitely be in the hospital for at least a few days, maybe a full week, and that after that it’s up to us where he goes, but that she really recommends a care center or a temporary nursing home. And that of course, I should probably be thinking about more long-term prospects. She promises to follow up with a phone call and more information.

And then she’s gone.

The ER is a great place to test your mental will and ability to do nothing other than sit. Unless you’re a health professional of any kind, there’s nothing for you to do, and also no way to easily pass the time. I can’t write, read, and the music playing through my headphones is drowned out by my own thoughts. The best thing I can do is tap my foot and watch the hospital staff dart back and forth.

One person enters my dad’s room, and it takes me a second to realize that I recognize them; it’s the pastor from my mom’s church. Guess word spreads fast.

He takes a seat and asks my mom if she would like to pray, which she does. I know it brings her peace, so I’m thankful for the offer. It also brings me war. There’s a ghost of me that feels comfort in the pastor’s kindness, that understands what this gesture means. But there’s also a part of me now that just doesn’t understand how any of the pastor’s prayer fits life anymore.

Yes, we know that Jesus is the ‘Great Physician,’ and yes, I know that that’s an analogy, and that all analogies are there to help you understand one aspect of something otherwise unexplainable. But once again, the analogy just doesn’t work for me anymore. Because what do physicians, even great ones, do when you’re not supposed to make things better? How do physicians help you move from one thing to the next? I don’t know if physicians know how to deal with death and grief and what’s next. I don’t know if anyone does.

At some point, there’s nothing left for us to do. Nothing to say, pray, or even watch. And so my mom and I go home.

The house feels eerily quiet. It’s different. My dad isn’t on the couch, or in his room, nor off wandering to the library.

It’s just my mom, and me.

The next morning a doctor calls me to ask for permission to perform some sort of procedure. I grant it. I’ve never had this level of authority and part of me thinks that it’s weird having this choice be up to me, but I also feel like it’s not really my choice. Why would I tell the doctor ‘no’ when I don’t know better than he does?

I get up and move around the house. The dining room is extra empty not because my dad’s not there, but because his coffee table is gone too. He puked all over it, and over the floor it was resting on. The coffee table has those little soft cushion pads on the bottom, which is good for sliding without scratching the floor, bad for soaking up liquids, vomit included. I thought it was gross and moved it outside.

“I’m gonna throw it away,” I tell my mom.

“How?” she asks.

“There are places you can take stuff like it.”

“No, that’s so much trouble.” I can sense her anxiety of another problem that she doesn’t know how to resolve.

“I’ll take care of it,” I say with an extra dose of firmness.

Later, one of my mom’s church friends comes over with food, which is very kind of her to do, but presents yet another decision for my mom to have to resolve.

“No, it’s too much,” my mom says, surveying at least six tupperware containers worth of food. “We can’t eat all of this.”

“Just take it,” her friend urges, “you don’t have to eat it all now. Leave it in the refrigerator.”

“No,” my mom complains, before turning to me. “What do you think? Should we take it?”

This momentarily pisses me off. I’m way past the point of decision fatigue, particularly at having to help make decisions that aren’t even up to me at the end. But I also remember that if the decision doesn’t matter, goddammit Dan, just pick one.

“Mom,” I take a deep breath and say, “I think you should just take it.”

And that ends it. I wish I had just said that sooner.

“Thanks for the food,” I tell her friend afterwards.

“Take care of yourself, Daniel,” she says back to me.

I take my mom later to go visit my dad, who’s been moved to the ICU. My brother is already there. I wonder if he feels how I do, where the moment I walk in, immediately it’s like my energy’s been sapped away and I’m tired and I want to cry and just tell someone that I don’t know what to fucking do anymore.

But I don't. I just keep myself together, and I don't really know why either.

“Can you get me coffee?” my dad asks me.

“You can’t have coffee, Dad.”

“Sun-Gei,” he turns to my mom, “can you bring me coffee?”

She follows my lead. “You can’t have coffee, John.”

“I want some coffee,” he says again, probably wishing my brother hadn’t left so he could ask him too.

My dad turns back to me to try again, before turning back to my mom, and repeating this process for at least ten minutes and using a ton of weird Chinese I haven’t heard in forever. I don’t budge, and neither does my mom.

“Hey-unh!” my dad growls, “why do you always take his side?”

I know whiskey isn’t allowed in the ICU but I really wish I had a shot of it right now. I laugh, but my dad is so laughably infuriating. When, ever, has my mom taken my side? Please.

I think this is why it’s hard to deal with taking care of people who know you for so many years. An argument, even a stupid one like this, is never just about the argument. It’s about the history, layers of history you don’t even know are being dragged into this. My mom and dad have always argued, about everything, and somehow I’m always used as a bargaining chip when someone wins, and even when they lose.

It turns out my dad can have coffee—at least decaf—but the nurses have to go brew it. I make it a point to tell my dad he’s causing everyone trouble, though I doubt he really cares or comprehends what that means now.

In a weird way, the fact that he’s beginning to return to his grumpy self means that he’s doing fine. Which is what the nurses tell us when we catch up with them later. He’s just on a few antibiotics and probably can leave in a few days. He’s weak as hell, but he’s stable.

My dad, is doing just fine.

Something in me stirs at that thought. I sense a ghost around me, or maybe within me.

This whole ordeal has shocked me out of the few routines I’ve started to build over the last couple of months. I’ve had to reschedule a guitar lesson. I missed a day at the pool or two. A couple days at the gym. I’ve seen less of my friends. Even my contract work is put on hold as I tell folks that there’s been a family emergency.

Even my cooking has been changed. Suddenly I make what is absolutely the easiest thing to make, or just snack on stuff. I’m glad for the people who’ve brought food over.

It’s changed a few things for my mom too. When we eat dinner, it’s just the two of us.

She still says grace before eating, but her prayers are finally different. For a while I would recite them under my breath with her because she said the exact same words every single prayer, in the same order, with the same inflections.

This time though, she veers into unknown territory. She asks for my dad to get better, for him to change. I wonder what she’d pray for, if my dad were gone.

As we eat, we’re very quiet. I imagine one of those old Chinese films where it’s the family eating in silence and sipping on noodles and broth with the fan blowing because it’s hot and humid outside and it’s an old condo with clothes hanging on strings outside. I’ve long wondered what it’d be like if my parents weren’t together for any reason; divorce, death, what not.

I wonder if this is a window into that possibility.

“Daniel,” she says.

“Huh?”

“I want the coffee table back.”

I glance out in the empty space next to my dad’s couch.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just do.”

“It’s gross,” I protest. “I’ll buy a new one.” I’m imagining those cheap, ten dollar tables from IKEA.

“No,” she whines. Actually whines. “I want the old one.”

I look at her. Her eyes are wide. Like a kid who wants their old, beat up teddy bear and not the shiny ten-foot tall one from Costco. My mom’s a sucker for nostalgia. Always has been. Doesn’t want to let things go. And I wonder if she’s not ready to let my dad go.

So I go outside next to the garbage cans which is where I left the coffee table. I grumble, take a deep sigh, and proceed to clean it. I rip off the cushion pads and toss them in the trash, and then wipe down the table. Even before my dad puked all over it, I think it was pretty dirty. I let it sit in the sun for a moment, and then bring it back inside next to my dad’s couch, where I guess it belongs.

“Thank you,” my mom says.

I think I make some sound of acknowledgement. I don’t actually remember.

There are times when I feel that certain things don’t become real until you state them out loud. It sounds dumb, obviously something doesn’t need to be verbalized to be real. But there are plenty of analogous real-world examples: Sure you can sign a marriage license, but no one really considers you ‘married’ until they’ve heard you say the actual words ‘I do.’

I think right now, I’m experiencing one of those moments, a Schroedinger’s Cat moment where I’ve long thought something about me might be real, but I’m afraid to say it because that would be to admit that it isn’t just possibly true, but emphatically, unequivocally, true.

There’s a ghost in me, has been within me. A spectre of desire that’s haunted my wishes since I was a little kid. I’ve kept swatting it away, but you can’t really swat away ghosts for good, and I don’t know if you can defeat them either. Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not, but I think it’s time I acknowledge it and make it real, which means I can finally confront it.

How’s your dad?, a friend texts me.

He’s fine, I reply. And then, something compels me to text him something else. I think you’re one of the few people who will understand...but I think part of me was hoping that he wouldn’t be fine.

I hit the ‘send’ icon, and immediately feel vulnerable and open to judgement. I don’t think I feel weak, maybe because I’m also, for once, being honest.

It’s not that I want my dad to be dead. I want him to be happy. I want him to be free from pain, even mental pain. To not be angry all the time, and to not feel like everyone else is angry with him. I want him to feel relief.

And maybe, I look at my mom, and I think I want her to feel relief too. My memories are landfills of rotting memories of how they’ve spent most of their married life at each other’s metaphorical throats. Yet, I suspect that my dad is a jenga block that if you were to remove, the whole lot falls apart. Maybe my mom, and my family, are too old to be able to rebuild as you often do when things break. But I also feel that maybe keeping this stack of jenga blocks together just isn’t good for anyone anymore.

I can completely understand, my friend replies.

I don’t know if I want my dad to get well. I don’t know. I’m scared to admit and confront myself that the answer might be ‘no.’

But I guess thank God, that it’s not up to me.