Without fear

“Daniel...” my mom says to me from my doorway.

I twist in my chair away from my monitor, away from some TV show I’m watching.

“I’m not feeling very well,” she adds, “so I’m going to go to sleep now.”

“Okay. Good night.” I go back to watching my show. ‘Not feeling well’ could be anything, physical, or mental. I don’t think twice about it.

The next morning I’m still in my bed when I can hear my mom faintly talking to my dad. There’s something about going to see a doctor, which instantly wakes me up from any grogginess. Today is Tuesday. I’m not supposed to take my mom to see her doctor until tomorrow. Something else must be wrong.

I open my door and walk to the living room. “Morning,” I announce. Both my parents are there, doing their usual thing. My dad is eating cheerios at the dining table. My mom is leaning against the kitchen counter.

That’s where what’s normal comes to an end.

“Can you take me to the ER?” my mom asks me.

“Okay, why?”

“I don’t feel very good.”

While this is enough reason to go to the ER, especially if my mom is asking to go and not being forced, I want to know more. “What doesn’t feel good?”

“I have a hard time seeing things. Everything is moving.”

That sounds bad, but I need more information. “What is moving?”

“You are moving.”

“Do you mean there is something covering me that’s moving? Do you see more than one of me? Or am I moving?”

“You are moving. You are blurry.”

“Okay,” I decide there isn’t much more for me to ask, and probably little more my mom could describe. “Let’s go.”

“Let me take the laundry rack outside first.”

“Why? That’s not urgent. I can do it when I get home.”

“No...we need to do it first.”

“Mom!” I yell, exasperated. She wants to go to the ER, but has to hang the laundry up outside in the sun first? Somehow the priorities seem ever so slightly in the wrong order.

But then I realize that my mom isn’t going to budge here, and if that’s what needs to happen so we can leave, I might as well help her.

I walk with her outside, holding up a rack to hang up clothes, when I sense that her movement seems unstable. Automatically, my arms raise to her sides, when suddenly she tilts over and begins to tumble to the side. I catch her before she falls.

My head begins to connect the dots. She’s losing balance. Complains of something that seems like dizziness. Has blurry vision.

She might have a stroke.

I drive us to the ER, park in the assigned parking lot, explain what’s going on, and then I’m sitting in the waiting area while my mom is getting checked out.

And suddenly I realize, I did all of that from memory. I knew which part of the hospital was for emergencies. I knew which parking lot we could use. It’s all familiar. I’ve been here before. I recognize every emotion, even the slight light-headedness that enters into my brain. There’s one emotion, however, that I notice is missing: fear.

A month ago, we were here for my dad. I remember the emotions pulsing throughout my body. I remember the questions I asked myself. I remember the sense of dread that seemed to lurk around every corner. I feel none of that this time. This visit could signal something bad. It could also mean nothing. I don’t sweat. I don’t panic. I’m prepared, but I’m not afraid. I don’t know if anyone is ever really able to be in control of their fears, even if they know there’s no use in having that fear. Regardless, in this moment, I let the moment reign supreme. I await some news, and if it’s bad, then I guess then I’ll let the feelings flood in. Until then, what’s the use?

This is a very strange new way to approach being in the hospital.

“We did not really need to come here,” my mom says to be after she’s been hooked up to all your standard vital monitors and we wait for a doctor to give us some news.

“Why?” I ask, and then I start to answer for her. “Because it’s too much trouble—”

“Too much trouble,” she echoes.

I laugh. My mom's reactions are predictable. She doesn’t feel like her life is imminently threatened, which means she’s missing out on valuable time to be doing something else. And just for fun, I ask her if I should tell anyone else that she’s here in the hospital. I assume she’ll say ‘no,’ because she doesn’t want other people to worry about her.

“No, what’s the point?” she says, “I don’t want them to worry.”

Like, clockwork.

A team of folks eventually swing by to tell us the game plan: It might be a stroke, or it might be vertigo. They need to run some tests to make sure. Those will take a few hours, and my mom may even need to stay the night (which, of course, my mom is disappointed about).

I originally planned to run a bunch of errands today, and my mom urges me to just go do them anyway and she’ll call me if there’s any news. It sounds like a good plan, so I get my stuff and stand up to leave.

But before I do, I figure it might be good to give my mom a nice gesture of goodwill, that will also make her feel better. I ask her if she wants to pray, which she does.

“Father,” she starts, “help me to get out of here soon.”

I snicker under my breath.

It’s dinner time when I get back at home. My dad’s sitting on the couch, the TV blaring the lights and sounds of the news into his eyes and ears. The house otherwise looks like it’s inhabited by ghosts. Any of the usual signs of my mom’s presence are missing.

“Mom’s still at the hospital,” I say to my dad, walking over to him. He doesn’t seem to react, so I give him a little more information. “They think mom had a stroke.”

I don’t actually know that that’s true yet, but I guess anyway.

My dad grumbles, as if he’s annoyed, though I can’t help but wonder if it’s actually a sign of sadness or worry, and grumbling is simply the only auditory reaction he knows how to provide.

I also wonder if I should have actually told him the truth. Maybe, without him knowing it, he has to deal with very unconscious emotions of my mom having a stroke, without any tools to process those emotions. I’d bet that would just leave him agitated, without knowing why, and just make him angry as he usually is anyway.

I tell myself to lie to him next time. Just say that “Mom is out for a walk,” or “She’s at church.” I assume it’s all the same to him now.

It’s strange, having the mirror situation as before, where this time my mom isn’t home and it’s just me and my dad, and I wonder what it’d be like if my mom weren’t around in a more permanent sense. Although I’m sure it’s full of surprises, it also honestly seems rather simple. I just let him do his own thing, make sure he has enough food and keeps some semblance of personal hygiene. Most of his antics don’t bother me, and now there are no other outside people—my mom included—to switch up the variables. My dad’s become a very predictable robot.

I still think if it were up to me, I’d move him to an assisted living center. It just seems better for everyone involved.

A friend of mine calls, asking how things have been going, and I tell him about my mom going to the ER.

“I hope things end up as well as they can,” he says.

At first glance this seems like one of those empty statements that don’t really mean anything. There’s no wish for something concrete, no specifics, just some gesture of hope. But in reality, it actually seems like the most appropriate thing to say; he knows that he shouldn’t wish for my parents to get better, and so he doesn’t. He doesn’t give me any of the standard-issue “praying for their recovery” or “I hope they get well and can come home soon” responses. He recognizes that at this stage in life, getting better is the exception. I strangely find that to be a very kind, and nuanced, thing to say.

The hospital, the mental gymnastics, the confusion, this is all a part of the journey. It’s not something you experience once and not something you learn to handle overnight. It’s also not something that you go through because there’s good somewhere in it, or some other morally ambiguous statement of the sort.

Caregiving is hard. To be honest, it sucks. Learning to grapple with the mere fact that things do not always get better shatters all the pillars of my world the same way it did the very first time I encountered it.

It’s just something you face head-on, without fear, and without knowing where you’ll end up. It teaches you things I don’t know how you can learn otherwise. That’s what makes it meaningful. Not good, but meaningful.

My mom calls me the next morning and tells me that they’ll discharge her in the afternoon. I ask her if the doctors figured out what happened, and she says that they don’t know yet. Somehow I bet the doctors do know, and told her, and she just forgot.

I skim through her discharge papers once I’m at the hospital, and it turns out we were right: she did have a mild stroke.

“Aren’t you glad you came to the hospital?” I ask her, wondering if she still thought it was a waste of time.

“Yes, I guess,” she admits.

I wonder how this latest development will impact her ability to be my dad’s caregiver, or at least the facade of it that I’m starting to build for her. What does this mean about her health? What does this mean for hiring in-home care? What does this mean about how she’ll interact with my dad?

I scuttle those questions for another day, or at least until they I encounter them next. Which, at least for interacting with my dad, comes up very quickly. In fact, that question rears its head as soon as we get home.

I hear them talking, but don’t know what is actually being said, until my mom comes to find me later.

“I asked your dad if he knew where I was last night,” my mom says.

“Yeah?”

“He said he thought I was at home.”

“He doesn’t really pay attention, Mom,” I tell her. I know where this is going, and I need to head it off first.

“It’s like he doesn’t even care,” she sighs.

“Mom,” I say to her, deciding to be even more blunt about it, “his brain is broken. It doesn’t work. He doesn’t know how to care, not anymore.”

I once again leave out any mention of that this is exactly how my dad has always been to varying degrees. That this might be who my dad really is, who he is at his core, and that he’s not the man my mom remembers him to be.

“It has nothing to do with you,” I continue, “he’s just like that with everyone now.”

I can tell some of this is sinking in, at least temporarily, by the way she just sits there, staring out into space. It’s silent for way too long, before she finally speaks up again.

“I guess I just have to learn,” she says.

I think we all do.