Warning signs, parental love
I wonder if this is what our relationship looked like in reverse, some twenty years ago—my mom kneeling down to be eye level as she evaluates my mouth for cuts.
“Are you okay?” she’d ask, while I breathe heavily and try to nod. She may have been upset with me before, she may not, but either way, in the moment, she’d care most about cleaning my cut upper lip, puffing up and bleeding onto my teeth.
“Tell me if it hurts,” she’d say, as she dabs a cloth in some water and lightly presses it against my lip.
There’s something about physical wounds that seems to pull some emotion out of any of us who care for somebody else, that visceral sight of dark red that reminds us of our mortality, that animal instinct to protect those closest to us.
So when my imagination ceases, and I return to the reality of our roles today, I feel something I’ve never quite felt before as I kneel down to be eye level with my mom, dabbing at the cut on her lip.
“My knee hurts a little bit too,” she says, rolling up her pant leg to reveal several scrapes on her knee.
My mom tripped over a sidewalk curb and tumbled. It’s not bad. She keeps reminding me that she’s fine, she’s fine. Fine or not, it doesn’t change that it’s pulled out a side of me that I’ve never really seen before, and a side that I’m about to see a whole lot of.
“Your dad fell,” my mom calls me to say a couple of days later.
These are the words I’ve heard a few times over the past few years, and every time, I always feel my face flinch. This time, I happen to be driving, and I put all my energy into focusing on the road and not reacting in any drastic way.
“How?”
“He fell off the bed. Can you come home?”
Thankfully, I’m already close by.
I find my dad lying on the floor next to his bed. He’s lying on his side, on top of a bed sheet. I wonder how my mom got that underneath him.
“Dad?” I call out.
He mumbles back.
“I’m going to help you get back into bed, okay?”
“Yes,” I think I hear him say, but I’m not sure.
I wrap my arms around my dad and slowly help him to his feet. I feel the strain in my legs, in my back, in my arms. Even when he’s on his feet, he feels so unstable like he might just topple over if I’m not careful. My mind wonders how heavy my dad is and compares him to the weights I lift at the gym. I’m eventually able to half-lift, half-drag my dad back onto the bed, and when my attention turns back to myself, I suddenly can feel myself breathing a little harder than normal. Heaving, almost.
“Are you okay?” I say just under my breath.
“Yes.” And then a moment later. “Thank you.”
There’s a sign at the gym I go to that shows a dad, holding his son as if they were wrestling around. It’s accompanied by a marketing slogan: Some moments are worth the extra rep. It’s cheesy, but right now, the slogan is actually apt, and I’m glad that working out is still somewhat a part of my life. Even if in this scenario, I’m the dad, and my dad is the little boy.
I’m a little worried he might roll off the bed again, and I can’t run out and buy a railing at 11pm at night. I roam around the house, eyeing various different objects to place against the bed to act as a guard rail. I find a chair, which I can only describe as one of those red, wooden, vintage Chinese chairs with intricate designs making out the handrails and the back support. It’s a short chair with a strangely tall back, and most importantly, it’s heavy. I would’ve tossed these out since they’re not actually that comfortable, but right now, I’m glad my mom has kept them for nostalgia reasons.
I place it backside against the bed, and I doubt my dad can move it without some real intent on his part. I hope he’s okay. Every time he falls I wonder if there’s only so many more falls he can take before something else gives way.
“I got you some water,” I tell him, placing a cup on the light stand next to him. I realize he probably can’t drink from a cup while in bed, so I run out and grab a straw.
He mumbles back to me.
I stand and stare at him for a few moments. Like he’s my kid.
I wonder what it would’ve been like if my dad really were my son. I remember a few days ago when my mom, cousin, and dad were in the car, my mom asked for one of my altoids which I bought because I had just eaten something with garlic before going on a date.
I handed my mom the tin, then offered one to my cousin, before putting it back next to the cupholder.
“You didn’t ask me,” my dad growled from the passenger side.
“Didn’t ask you what?”
“If I wanted one.”
This immediately put me on edge. For all the tricks and games I’ve maneuvered myself into, I still don’t always know what to do when my dad starts going aggressive with his distorted reality.
“I know you don’t like these,” I said, which is true.
“That's not the point.”
“Dad, I asked you before and you said ‘no.’” I’m technically lying, but I still know it to be true. My dad would definitely have said ‘no.’
“My point is still valid.”
I think when you have kids, you bear with such situations because you know that your kids are learning about the world and every situation is a teaching opportunity. When it’s your aging parents, though, you bear with such situations because there’s simply no other way out. They’re the ones who will forget anything ever happened. There are no lessons to be learned, and unlike kids, they get worse. Which leaves you with the one who’s left with the emotional scars, not them.
And as if to prove my own point to I don’t know who, maybe myself, I waited a few minutes, before picking up the tin of altoids and holding them up in front of my dad.
“Do you want one?”
“No.”
It’s the day after my dad fell from the bed, and he’s stayed in bed practically the entire day. Doesn’t move an inch. Doesn’t even go to his couch. And at night when I go out to see some friends and come back home, my mom greets me at the door.
“Your dad fell off the bed again.”
“Really? When?"
“Maybe around 5:30.”
It’s now 10pm. I’m mildly annoyed she didn’t call me sooner.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I called Auntie Mae and Uncle John,” she tells me, referring to two family friends. “They came and helped lift your dad back into bed.”
“How did he fall? I put the chair there.”
“I moved it.”
I glare at her. Now I’m mad. “Why!?”
“I didn’t think he needed it.”
My mom can really frustrate me. I want to protect my dad from physical harm, from both causing it and being the victim of it. My mom wants to protect my dad’s livelihood. She wants him to be normal. Or at least, her memory of normal. She wants him to be able to walk without a walker, sleep without a chair next to him, and when I look into her wide eyes, more than anything, I think she wants my dad to be okay. I don’t know what this says more about: her, or me.
I race to my parents’ bedroom and see my dad lying on the bed, more sprawled out than normal and sticking his legs into my mom’s side of the bed. The chair’s been returned to the side, but it’s a few inches away from being flush with the bed, and so I push it back.
“Don’t, move, the chair.” I seethe as my mom joins me in the room.
The last time I went with my parents to see my mom’s neurologist, when we left, my dad went on one of his little philosophical rants that I’m surprised he can still do.
“This visit has been good for me. I have seen people who are in much more lamentable conditions than me. And yet they still strive to live. People in wheelchairs and other things. Sitting here does me no good.”
And then he was silent. Like he is now, lying down in front of me. He has always been in his own head, his own world, spewing philosophy to himself. I wonder what it is that makes him want to say things to himself and things like that. It sounds mildly like gratitude but the way he phrases it makes me sure that it’s not.
But maybe he should be grateful. Because I sense that things are about to get a lot more 'lamentable.'
The next day my dad seems to be back to normal. He’s woken up a little later than usual, around 11am, but immediately goes about his normal routines: make coffee, eat Cheerios, even read the newspaper that I went out and bought for him. On the surface, we’re back to usual shenanigans.
Life, has other plans.
In the late morning, I hear my dad cough from across the house, but the sound comes with a little more punch than usual. I don’t think too much about it; I’ve also been very busy with contract work lately and so I have plenty to do today. At some point, my mom passes my room to get to the bathroom.
“I thought you were going to take a nap?” I ask, thinking of what she told me an hour or so ago.
“I can’t,” she responds.
“Why?”
“Go look at your dad.”
I get to my feet and go to where my dad’s couch is, when I see: There’s vomit everywhere. The couch, his coffee table, the floor.
Gross.
“It’s kind of green-colored for some reason,” my mom says, showing me the tissues in her hand.
I tell her not to worry. It looks like it’s just residual dirt from the floor.
“Go take nap,” I say, “I can help clean it.”
“Okay,” she obliges.
I clean the mess, wash my hands, and head back to my room to work. My fingers tap tap on my keyboard, when I hear a faint, weak noise from the living room.
“Sun Gei…”
I freeze. It’s my dad.
“Sun Gei,” he calls again, calling my mom her original Chinese name. “Sun Gei…”
I peek outside. My dad has puked again. It's darker this time. I was wrong, it can’t just be the dirty floor. I start mopping up the mess, beginning to feel concerned.
And then he pukes again. It’s even darker. It almost looks black. I’m no biologist, but some high school part of my brain fires off the idea that old blood is black. I also start noticing that my dad has starting shaking. Almost convulsing. I’m now on high alert.
“Hey mom,” I yell across the room as she slowly shuffles out of her room, and stops when she sees the puddle of black with bits and pieces of, solid something, strewn about.
“Oh no…” she sighs.
“I think we need to take dad to the ER.”
We bolt into action. I wipe the floor, just enough so that my dad won’t step in his own gunk. My dad can’t move, so we lift him into a chair while I get the walker. I order my mom around a bit, telling her to make sure we have his insurance cards.
And then we need to move my dad into the car. If I had to do all the heavy lifting when my dad rolled off the bed, this time I have to do even more. My dad not only can’t seem to move, he seems to be working against me as if he’s confused, and maybe scared. I tell him to tell me if I’m hurting him, and he stays silent the whole time. Beads of sweat form around my temples as I lift and drag him to the car, but I don’t know if I have it in me to get him actually into the car, and right now I really wish my parents didn’t have a CR-V and had something lower. I lean against the side of the car for a moment and feel my dad’s weight collapsing and gravity sucking him down, but something clicks in my head and I know that this is my dad in my hands, and I will move heaven and earth for him to be okay, and I summon every ounce of strength in my muscle fibers. With one last heave, I lift my dad into the car until his trembling ass is finally on the passenger seat.
I jump in the driver’s seat. My mom crawls into the passenger side. My fingers grip the steering wheel and my habits kick into gear. Unlock the parking brake. Shifting into reverse. A glance at the mirrors. And we’re out of the garage.
“Don’t drive too fast,” my mom cautions, as she always does when she’s worried.
I sort of listen. I sort of don’t. My heart is racing, although my exterior is calm. I have always been good at staying calm in high stress situations. Somehow, I know I need to stay calm, especially right now.
I know a storm is coming, and that things are going to look very different, very soon.