The prodigal father

Panic.

That’s the emotion pulsing through my blood and radiating off my body. Rapid breaths. Raised hairs. A heartbeat that almost seems audible.

I just got home and walked inside expecting to trudge to my room for an afternoon nap. It’s blazing hot outside, I’m drowsy, and afraid I might not make it to my bed.

But then I noticed something peculiar. My dad wasn’t on his couch. Fine, but he keeps a little basket on the coffee table next to the couch, which is where he keeps a number of things important to him: his keys, wallet, some pens and pencils.

The basket is empty. It’s only ever empty when my dad leaves the house. When he leaves...the house, I repeat to myself.

I dart to one of the two other places he could be, if not on the couch: the bathroom, or in his bedroom. He’s not in either.

I dash back outside and a wave of heat splashes over my face. He’s not in the backyard, or the front. He never goes there. Why would he?

I run back inside and see the empty basket next to his couch again, and it dawns on me. My dad has left the house, and he must have walked.

I jump back into my car and fire the engine and can’t wait for the garage door to open fast enough. Whatever urge I had to take a nap is gone.

Because holy shit, I don’t know where my dad is.

The whole point of me coming back to live with my parents has been to help them transition into their next, and perhaps final, stage of life. For some time, my brother and I have not felt comfortable with my parents living the way they were: more or less independent, messy house, unwilling to accept help with nearly everything, with only some weird exceptions (such as cleaning the floor...like, why that one?).

One of those changes is to get my parents used to not having a car, which is one of the strange hurdles to get over when dealing with someone of my parents’ generation growing up in America. I get it, cars equal independence. We also happened to have built a country where not owning a car is practically impractical at best and impossible for most everyone else. Still, my vote is that for my folks, that mentality has to change.

Which is why we now have one car, an intentional move on my part. I wanted to wrestle some control from my folks, introduce them to the idea of having to rely on someone driving them, and so I could better understand what they were doing on a daily basis since I would have to be involved. There was also some emotional security to it: If I have the car, then I can be sure that neither of my parents are driving around, and are probably at home.

This plan seems to have backfired today.

I first drive around our neighbourhood, to see if I can catch my dad just wandering the streets. My parents live in one of those housing associations, which means there are plenty of pathways and mini fields my dad could have walked to.

When I don’t find him, I check the nearby park, the one my mom likes to go on walks around. There are some families and little kids. No one that looks like my dad.

My dad has always liked to go out. My mom described him as an “old Chinese man” who needs to leave in the morning, be around other people, and not talk to them. He used to drive to some random park, but then stopped for no reason. He also used to go to McDonald’s every morning for a coffee, but I changed that habit by buying him a coffee maker and teaching him how to make it himself.

And then there’s the neighbourhood library. He goes because “I want to read the Wall Street Journal” even though I know he just likes the action of flipping pages and moving his eyes, but not actually gleaning information from it. I know this because I’ll ask him ‘What happened in the news today’ and he’ll say ‘Nothing much’ which is bullshit in today’s climate. And yet: “I want to go to the library.”

The library is the one place my dad has not given up, either out of habit, out of the desire to see other humans, or some other unknown reason. It’s more than a mile away. My dad can’t walk that far. It’s also 90 degrees outside today. And it’s the only place I can think of that he may have gone to.

Because this morning, like he often does, he said that he might want to go to the library.

I want to drive fast because I think he might be there and I want to get there as fast as possible. But then I drive slowly because I don’t want to hit anything, and also I don’t want to miss my dad if I spot him on the sidewalks.

The mile seems to pass me by ever so slowly, as I distractedly turn my head around in all directions to see if he’s there. He never is, and when I finally turn into the library parking lot, in one motion I turn the ignition off, jump out of the car, and dash inside. A cold gust of A/C hits my face, and it’s the only good feeling I’ve felt in the last fifteen, thirty, I’m not actually sure how many minutes now.

I turn the first corner towards the ‘Quiet Area,’ which is where my dad usually sits. I don’t know what I’ll do, or where I’ll go next, if he’s not here. Where else could he be? What am I going to do? I can call him, but he never answers his cell phone and I don’t know why he even has it. What if I’ve already seen the last of him?

And then reality pulls me out of my head. I don’t need to entertain those questions, at least, not today.

Because in the far corner, slouching on a couch (of course), is my dad. After a few moments, he sees me, frozen, standing on the far side of the room. There’s some sort of smile that appears on his face, and he slowly, carefully, gets to his feet and waddles over to me.

A dozen feelings surge from wherever it is in your brain that emotions come from.

“How did you get here?” I ask once we get outside. My tone is demanding, but also mixed with genuine concern, and amazement.

“I walked.”

“The whole way?”

“Mmmm….no. Someone gave me a ride.”

This startles me. “Who gave you a ride?”

“Ehh...I don’t know. A ‘Good Samaritan.’”

Someone picked him up? I don’t know how I feel about this. I’m glad he’s okay, but the idea of him getting into a stranger’s car is mildly problematic. I also don’t even know if he’s telling me the truth.

But then I realize, as I start to piece together what happen, that even if he could lie to me now, he has to be telling the truth. Once he sits in the car next to me, I turn and see that his shirt is covered in dirt, dried grass, and some small branches. I check his face, and it looks like there might be a slight sign of a scratch.

He must have fallen. Someone probably saw him and offered to help.

“Can you show me where they picked you up?” I ask.

We drive a little ways towards home, and suddenly my dad points out the window. “Right there.”

It’s a small field next to a park, maybe a third of a mile from their house. The field is littered with dry grass, just like the stuff on his shirt. I swallow and feel every part of my throat move.

As we get back home and my dad returns to his couch, and all starts to seem normal again, all of those emotions begin to sort themselves out. I stand there, just staring at him for a while, letting my mind go from sixty to zero without spinning out of control. My dad still looks so silly, lying on the couch. I’m simultaneously relieved, heart broken, upset, laughing. I want to scold him, but how can I? I want him to be safe. More than anything, I want him to be here.

I know that there’s no way to express that to him anymore. Not in a way he’d ever understand.

I stop thinking, and I remember that it was a hot day. I grab my dad some water and set a cup down on the coffee table next to him, next to where his basket where his keys, wallet, and everything else goes.

“Oh. Thank you,” he says.

One of the biblical stories I learned as a kid, that most people seem to know, is of the prodigal son. Some kid wants his inheritance (i.e. he wants his dad to be dead), gets it, squanders it, and then comes back and his dad accepts him again. The story includes an older brother who doesn’t do any of what the prodigal son does, and weirdly most pastors seem to boil the story down to “Which brother are you?” which always seems weird to me.

If the story is actually about how much God loves—especially as a rebuke to those who somehow believe they are more deserving of said love—the story, like most childhood stories for me, just doesn’t go deep enough anymore. What if the son couldn’t come home? What if he had no mental capacity to come home? What if the father went out, found his son, but his son couldn’t recognize him anymore because he had Alzheimer’s?

Some people would write these questions off as me just trying to be funny, cherry-picking, straw men arguments, or just deflecting the point of the story. Maybe. But I think about them, because I think about my dad, and that as my dad continues to descend further and further into the black hole of mental disease, what does it mean to still love him?

Because he will descend. It gets worse. I’ve read concrete stories about how it gets worse. My own friends remind me that it gets worse.

“You know, you can still argue with your dad,” one friend told me in an effort to explain that I need to be ready for what’s to come.

I didn’t bite. I was upset. I felt like my friend was shutting my feelings down.

“Hold on, let me finish,” he interrupted, and took a breath before continuing. “Your dad still understands what a car is, what driving is, even if he makes no sense in why he wants to go out.”

I opened my mouth to protest again.

“Dan, your dad still knows who you are.”

That silenced me. I sat, on a rare sunny San Francisco day, leaning over on a table with my head resting on my crossed arms. My friend just looked at me in support, waiting for me to pull myself together.

I've since read about the stories I’ve read, where there come days when spouses of dozens of years suddenly think their partner is a burglar. Where grandparents say the most horrific things about their mixed grandchildren because their children married someone else of another race. Where people actually wander aimlessly.

I imagine, for my dad—unless Mercy steps in and takes him away—that day will probably come, and maybe sooner than I think.

Even then, I think if I truly love my dad, even then, I will still want him to be here.

“I’m not saying it doesn’t suck,” my friend added. “It fucking sucks. I can’t imagine how you feel.”

“It just gets worse…” I finished for him.

“Yeah. It’s going to get worse.”

And so I do one more thing now that my dad is home. I take a piece of paper, a pen, and like the other notes I’ve been leaving him, I make one more. This one’s bigger, more like a sign.

Hi Dad, if you need to use the car or go somewhere, let me know. I’m happy to drive you. I grit my teeth, as I leave this last part, a smiley face.

I hope this works. But every time I think I figure something out, something else changes.

This is the game, I guess, a game where all circumstances around you get worse, and the only thing that gets better, is how you respond to it. There's nothing to fix, no one to fix. That's what love is, right? The will to take something terrible and mold it into something beautiful?

I don't know. I don't make the rules.

I'm just here to play the game.