We are now beginning our descent
No passenger knows how long the descent is. A pilot can say that they’ve begun the descent, but excluding their estimate of how much time until we touch down, it’s sort of meaningless to most of us.
How high is thirty-thousand feet anyway? Can us mere landwalkers really distinguish between twenty- and thirty-thousand feet—without direct photo comparisons?
We just know that, well, we’re descending. We know it’s time to strap in out seatbelts (or at least pretend to and hide our rebellion under a jacket or something), open the window shades, and sit there and wait. And wait.
Eventually we can see the ground get closer and closer, and then there’s that moment where you just seem to hover above the ground and you wonder why we haven’t landed yet or if we’re going to land, or what about now, or now, or—
And then there’s that bounce. The wheels touch the pavement. And like that, the descent, and the journey, it’s all done.
“There’s trouble, Daniel,” my mom says when I walk through the door.
“Hm?”
“Your daddy just asked me ‘what day it was today.’”
I don’t see why that’s trouble. He asks that regularly.
“We just came home from church...” (I know this) “and he just asked me what day is today.”
I’m starting to connect the dots. There’s only really one day out of the week where my dad regularly leaves the house and goes anywhere, and that day is Sunday when he goes with my mom to church.
“And I asked him if he knows where we just came from and he said ‘no.’”
Huh.
My mom could be overreacting here. Maybe he just didn’t understand the question, which, is actually quite cognitively complex. Maybe he just said ‘no’ because he knew that might end the conversation, and his confusion.
Still, I evaluate him periodically that day, that Sunday.
Lately, he seems more out of it than usual, which continues to be a weird thing to say. How many levels of ‘out of it’ are there? Turns out, quite a lot.
He now seems out of it to the point where I’m not sure if he’s even responding to his own body anymore. A body has needs, and its job is to alert itself when it’s not getting enough of those very basic things: food, water, getting rid of waste.
I’m starting to see failures on all three fronts.
My dad never seems hungry anymore. He clearly has an appetite—he can still eat all three cha siu bao when we go to dim sum. It’s just that he doesn’t seem to want to unless we put food in front of him.
My dad drinks coffee, which despite my ‘coffee-flavored-water’ jokes, is not water, and I suspect he drinks this because it’s habit. He has some tea at night, but that also seems to be habit. He never drinks water throughout the day. He also drinks prune juice, but that’s because my mom forces him to drink it.
Which, she does because he does not seem to also respond to basic bodily need number three: waste management.
My dad now very rarely has, I guess the official term is ‘bowel movements,’ or ‘BM’ for short in hospitals, which is a strange acronym to me, but whatever. I think he still goes to pee, but he also wears diapers so who knows.
It’s weird that this is where we are now. There are still flashes of cognition—a bill comes in the mail for his recent hospital visit and he suddenly understands how much money it is, whether or not medicare should be covering it, and even provides (useless) advice on whether I should pay it or not.
And then he goes right back to his couch, watching sports on TV (and he always thought sports on TV was a waste of anyone’s time), and not knowing what day it is.
To be honest, he’s really not my concern at this point. My mom is, since she’s the person who has elected herself as his designated caregiver. She’s the one who could sustain some major injury in her quest to be the hero (or to fulfill some selfish desires, if you want my take on it), and if she loses her abilities, then both of them are in big trouble. That’s my concern.
And I think I have reason to be concerned now.
I have spent a significant amount of time the past two years in hospitals and airports. It might be strange to say but I find the two to be similar.
Both require surrendering a huge amount of control. Both are the setting of some of life’s greatest moments of joy, and life’s greatest moments of heartache. Both are full of people arriving, and of people departing.
I hate hospitals. I love airports.
I love airports because airports signal movement, and it’s no secret that I prize movement, and mobility.
Movement, change, those things alter your surroundings and force you to literally get some new perspective—and perspective is a currency I wish we valued more. You cannot get perspective by imagining it, seeing photos of it, reading about it—though those things help; you have to go out and actually experience these things on your own. You have to move.
Some people get on planes to get away, to take a break, to rest, to maybe recalibrate what’s most important in their lives.
Some people get on planes to go adventure, to explore a new land that’s entirely unfamiliar, to reduce everything about their life down to its most basic, raw instincts: food, language, how to have a conversation with another human being; even, how to be kind.
Some people get on planes to see a loved one, because they treasure that time with them, or because that treasured time is coming to an end. And like all goodbyes, we all want to be there until the very last second, to catch that last glimpse of them, before we may never see them again.
Regardless, I think it’s it’s important to remain open to those opportunities, the people you will meet, the discoveries you’ll make, the mysteries you’ll encounter. You never know how long they last, before it’s time to pack up and take off to a new place, or to pack up because it’s time to go home.
And when you do come home, you will come home with something new, something that will make home look different. A lesson that you will take with you, in what is now a new chapter of your life.
“Daniel, can I ask you something?”
“Uh huh.”
“This…” she points at an address on a piece of paper, “this is where I will have the surgery, right?”
It’s not a surgery; it’s just a procedure, a colonoscopy for some stomach pain she’s been having, but I’m not interested in correcting her.
“Yes.”
“Do I need to call and make the appointment?”
Strike one. “No, you made the appointment yesterday when we saw the doctor.”
“But…” she looks back at the address. “No, the doctor was at a different address.”
Strike two. Thank god we’re at a red light. “It’s, the same, doctor.”
“But why is the address different?”
“Because one is his office, and the other is where he does the surgery.” (still not a surgery)
“So which place am I going to for the surgery?”
I point at the address on her paper. “This, one!”
“But I haven’t made an appointment at this place yet.”
“Mom! You did it yesterday!”
“No…that was with the doctor…”
“Mom!”
We’re way beyond three strikes, and I’m beyond starting to get angry and frustrated. I try to rein it in, but I can’t, and I can see my mom is starting to get sad at how angry I am, at how angry I often am these days.
This flareup returns again sometime later at night, when she reviews her instructions for the colonoscopy. There are three steps:
A week before, stop taking certain medicines, like aspirin.
A day before, she has to be on a clear liquid diet.
Twelve hours before, she needs to take a dose of a prescription drink, which needs to be followed up with water.
Six hours before, well, it doesn’t really matter anymore.
This is so troublesome, she says. “I’m going to just cancel it.”
“No!” I say more fiercely than I mean to. But apparently, last year while I was traveling, she made a similar appointment, and she canceled it. I can’t let her do that again.
She of course, doesn’t remember any of that.
“Do you understand?”
She looks at the paper, and then up at me. “No.”
I sigh.
I’m about to explain to her, again, the steps she needs to follow. She’s about to ask more questions. I’m about to get angry again. I can feel it. I’m sure she can, too.
I just don’t understand why it’s so hard to explain something that’s really not that hard to understand. I repeat this line to myself.
And then it hits me, and I begin to calm down.
There is a possibility, one that I don’t want to admit, because if it’s true, it means that—once again—I’m the one that’s going to have to adjust. But maybe it’s true. And if it’s true, well, it’s kind of sad.
What if my mom doesn’t understand this list of three steps because she actually can’t understand such a thing anymore? What if three steps, with its corollaries and minor details, is too much? What if her brain can’t cognitively process it? Not even in Cantonese?
There’s been a way that I look at her lately, and I wonder if it’s how she looked at me when I was a kid. I evaluate her face, see the way her hair falls over her ears, look for signs of emotion within the deep recesses of her eyes: joy, sadness, pain, anything. The way her eyes look back at mine, looking not for answers but for something far more basic, something as simple as, connection.
As if that’s all she needs. As if that’s all she knows how to want. As if she’s actually a little child now—in metaphor, in brain power, in reality.
I suspect that no one, not even doctors or other experts of the field, can truly say how much cognitive ability she has, or how much she has left. It’s sort of a meaningless measurement to most, if not all of us.
How do you even measure cognition, anyway? In time? Years? Can a mere, mostly healthy thirty-something really distinguish between an eighty year-old with Alzheimer’s and a four year-old forming sentences by putting random words next to each other? Can they even be compared?
I just know that, well, my dad and mom, they’re descending. The ride is getting bumpy, turbulent, even. I wish I had a metaphorical seatbelt to strap myself down with, but I don’t, so I kind of just hide underneath my determination, humor, and hope.
All while I simply look out the window, wrestling with that unsettling feeling that one day, I will wake up, and suddenly, the descent, the journey, it’ll all be over.
One of my favorite things to do is people watch. You can do this anywhere in the world, but airports happen to be one of my favorite places. You have children clinging to their parents. High school students, traveling on their first trip as friends. College kids trying to go home. The elderly, looking like they’re just trying to get to somewhere warmer or wishing they had stayed home entirely.
But the most interesting set of interactions has to be the arrival—that designated ‘welcome’ area where passengers clear immigration lines (if there are any), have picked up their bags, and march out towards their freedom.
You can see it on people’s faces, the excitement of someone scanning the crowd for somebody familiar, only to make eye contact, and running to embrace them. The nonchalance of a business person just looking for their name on a piece of paper, or an iPad, so they can get to their hotel. The weary travelers who are relieved and tired and just ready to go home. The adventurers, who sling their bags on their backs and are ready for whatever the new world has in store for them.
I think no matter who you are, after the descent, you hope there’s something that awaits you. If not a person, then a place; at the very least, a home.
Because we all go somewhere when we land. Some of us are still in the air, hanging in the balance, just now, hearing the pilot announce those fated words. But we will all land, and we will all go somewhere.