What matters to me
My little nephew is cute, and I’m supposed to be here, watching him do cute, little nephew things, like play some version of basketball with nine other tiny kids where they just run back and forth to the same squares taped on the floor. I’m supposed to be here to support him.
Really, I’m paying attention to my older nephew. He’s standing in front of me, his head about as high as my waist now, reading a comic book. My hands gently grip his shoulders, my thumbs tapping into his shoulder blades. Something tells me to enjoy this moment, because he’s now as tall as my waist—he’s growing up.
The timing is oddly prescient.
Because I'm still your son
Dad,
You have Alzheimer’s. This means you don’t always remember things. It means you don’t always understand things. Still, even if it’s somewhere deep within you, I think you’ve noticed.
I don’t talk to you very much anymore.
In fact, I tell other people: “I don’t talk to my dad at all anymore.”
The exception is if you ask me a question that I can’t answer with a hand gesture. Or if I need to address both you and mom. And there will always be other exceptions.
But they will be the exception.
I don’t like this new rule of mine. But I don’t have much of a choice anymore. I have to defend myself. I still have to support you, and this is my way to do both.
Dad, I’m kind of afraid to talk to you. That’s the truth. I’m tired of you yelling at me. I want it to stop. I don’t think if I’ve ever admitted to you how much it hurts when you yell at me.
The first of many such Christmas cards
Dear Scott and Mary Bailey,
Thank you very much for your Christmas card to my mom…
***
“Daniel?”
“Yeah?” I grumble, annoyed as my mom enters my room.
“I got a card,” she says, placing a Christmas card onto my desk. “Do you know who this is?”
I sigh. I’m not doing anything important—that’s not the point—it’s that I have to stop whatever stupid thing I’m doing to help my mom out, in this case, to look at the names signed at the bottom of a rather generic Christmas card with some generic greeting about ‘Jesus being the reason for the season’ and hoping that the recipient also feels ‘joy to the Earth.’
But there’s a couple extra sentences. Something about how ‘we haven’t seen you in a long time and we hope you are well.’
And then I see the names. It’s from the Bailey family.
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.
Are we the selfish ones (two)
I take you to see Dad every day. Sometimes twice a day. Even when we move him to the skilled nursing facility—you don’t know what that is…how about I call it a rehab center—you want to go there twice a day. It eats up hours of the day, my day. I have nothing to do while we’re there, and technically neither do you, and yet you seem to get something out of it that I don’t.
If I had to bet (and I mean that figuratively, because you’re allergic to anything I do that’s remotely related to gambling), I’d bet that you miss Dad. You hate it when he yells at you, doesn’t value you—let alone say ‘thank you,’ is mean to the person who holds the door open for him just a little bit too long.
But the moment he’s gone, you’re his knight in shining armor, a set of armor that always looks like it’s about to collapse and clang as the pieces fall to the floor.
“I really pray to God that He takes John home soon,” I hear you say, sometimes to me, sometimes to people over the phone.
But I don’t think you’re really ready for that. You certainly don’t seem ready, even at home.
Are we the selfish ones (one)
I think you’re sick.
You cough. But you always cough a lot—still, something tells me that you’re coughing more than usual. Like you’re almost wheezing.
You seem weaker. You can’t get up without Mom’s help. I wonder if it’s the couch that’s the problem—it’s leather and the cushion has a lot of give so you practically sink into it. So I buy you a new one. It’s firmer, and you seem to like it. But you still seem like you have trouble standing up. Or staying standing up.
I buy you a brand new walker. I push it to you. You push it away. Even when I’m holding you and I can tell you’d fall over the moment I let you go, you push the walker away. How come strength and sense fades with Alzheimer’s, but not stubbornness? Someone goofed up somewhere.
Mom thinks you’re fine. She says you’re fine. You’re just being lazy. You’re just being dramatic. Somehow, I think she’s sneaking in a “I really hope…” in the beginning of each of those.
We finally test your temperature. It’s one hundred two.
I give you Tylenol. Mom asks me to take you to the ER. I say let’s wait an hour to see if the fever goes down. But she’s made up her mind, and like a cooked egg, late-night college mistakes, or the One Ring, some things just can’t be unmade.
“Daniel, please. Okay? I won’t be able to sleep if we don’t go. Can we just go now? Okay? Please. Okay?”
“Let’s go,” I say, two minutes later.
Getting my legs back
I’m in the Big Apple. It’s 3 P.M.
Which means it’s noon back in California, back where my parents are. They should be awake, and if all is normal, my dad should be sitting on his usual couch—doing nothing, just sitting there, like normal.
But I don’t know if things are ‘normal,’ at least not for sure.
I pull out my phone and open an app that lets me view the two security cameras I installed inside my parents’ house; one that views the kitchen, and one for the living room. I bought the cameras thinking that if I could check in and see with my own eyes, that my parents are okay, then that would free me to be wherever I wanted to be in the world.
In a sense, that’s what I’m in New York for, to answer the question: “Could I live away from my parents?”
The view loads, the one of the living room. My dad is there, sitting on the couch, legs propped up on the coffee table.
And then I swap cameras to see the kitchen.
And in that instant, I get the answer I’m looking for.
Pillbox
Thanks to some videogames I played as a kid, ‘pillbox’ to me is—first and foremost—the defensive structure built to fight in wars; those little concrete structures with small windows you can fire guns out of.Thanks to the powers that be, pillboxes are also, well, those little plastic boxes people can use to put their pills in so that it’s easy to remember what pills one has to take.
Pills, and pillboxes, have become a bit of a warzone in my parents’ house.
My mom has anywhere between fifteen to twenty pills to take on any given day. Most are over-the-counter stuff; stuff like vitamins, fish oils, etc., all with varying degrees of scientific backing. Things that I’m sure my mom randomly heard one day, five years ago, were the cure-all, or was somehow absolutely necessary to take as you aged.Others, are prescriptions. These are a bit more serious.
I’m not very good at keeping track of pills myself. I can barely remember to take a daily vitamin, and will only remember to take antibiotics because, goddammit, I hate feeling sick.
I cannot imagine taking twenty different pills. Forget helping somebody else, take twenty pills.
After life
There are many Chinese traditions when it comes to honoring those who have passed away. I only know of a few, but there’s one that sticks out to me, one that I don’t uphold, not that I really uphold any of them.
The tradition goes like this: visit the grave of your ancestors, and do two things—bring food, and eat some of it, while leaving some behind, and bring money, usually fake, and burn it, usually in a small metal tin.
The core belief is that it visiting their grave is a time to commune with them, to eat with them, make sure they’re well-fed, and that they have enough money in the next life.
Home is a place in time
I feel homesick.
Well, truth be told, I don’t actually know what I’m feeling. Homesick, is just the closest feeling that comes to mind.
So that’s what I say: I feel homesick. I want to go home.
But I am home. I’m not in the house I grew up in, but I am in the same town.
The town where the streets are largely the same. There’s the same Taco Bell, the one pizza spot, the small library. The Safeway moved across the street, but that hardly counts as change.
But the more time I spend in my hometown, the more I realize, it’s not even the same town. The demographics. The busyness. The downtown. They’re all very different.
So what do you mean, Dan? What do you mean, you want to go home?