Bloody to the Bone

I spent 24 hours watching my dad struggle to get a good breath this weekend. He is decimated, bruised and thin-skinned. He gurgles when he sleeps and jokes when he is awake. I've started this post hundreds of times and erased, deleted, emptied his trash; longed for anything about him to be mine, just mine; I've prayed and begged in my prayers to be significant to him.

Eventually, my prayers were answered, but in such a way that I haven't recognized. His world and mine are written so differently. Our family rules were scripted differently:

"Leave well enough alone if that's what he asks." Or, "She is so reserved, she must not need me."

I started to say that I've never been in my father's shoes because I am the weaker of the two, but maybe that's the only thing that binds us. Maybe we have a teeny glimpse into what each other feels. Few people can understand the depth of dignity it takes for others to bore through to get to the real person unless you've been whittled away at unrelentingly. Eventually, the digging of divots to the flesh wears down to the soul of a person. And they have to give it up just to stay alive. Just give it up, Dad.

Dad fell with no one around and as he lay on the new carpet, half conscious, I imagine he was at first warmed by the slow throb of vodka numbing his hip. And as that facade melted, he laid there for five hours before he had the nerve to push through the pain while he dragged his skinny ass to the phone.

Years ago I read a seven-line news story in the paper that started with, "There was a sixteen-mile trail of blood." It described how an Indian had pulled himself up into the stowed snow chains that hung under a semi truck and passed out. His drunken body dragged to a whittled stub and he couldn't do anything because the one part of him that was left was tangled up so tightly and didn't hold his brain. I imagine the pain subsided when his brainstem ripped away.

It might be an overexggerated comparison, but I know Dad felt the pain as the skin all over the front of his body peeled onto the new carpet as he dragged his 90-pounds bones to the phone for 3 hours. Knowing his stubbornness and pride, it took him another half hour to get the nerve to dial 911.

Then he made a phone call to my brother, who was in town, to tell him that he wasn't up for a visit that day. No freaking shit!?! But for God's sake keep the facade as high as you can so no one sees behind the curtain. So Dave granted Dad's request and left well enough alone. In 24 hours, I've discovered that anything I would normally take at face value is now suspect. Question everything.

And the pitiful part about it is that I understand it. I've dragged myself through the house so many times with only a short cry or 5-second vein-popping scream at the end after I crawled down the garage ramp and wrung out my bloody socks. I understand. I got his nose and his drive to be independent.
Today he's sedated so the alcohol TDs won't be too sever to cause a deadly seizure. If he doesn't get pneumonia in the next two days he has a chance to make it to physical therapy rehab to try out his new hip. He's hallucinating, which I recognize, and he's sad, and he's proud; which I recognize. There are moments in your life that you have a right to check out of, like when your body is banged up so bad that your mind has to accept that people are rolling you over to change the shitty pad under you. And there is really no other place for you to shit except right there, smeared between your legs. You have to find ways of accepting it by talking about the weather or praying while they clean you. We don't talk about things like that because dignity seems to be more important than surviving the really nasty parts of being frail and broken.

I get that he's tired of living that shitty, greasy-hair, drunken life, except that there are people here that he still wants a relationship with, or he would have given it all up in a pile of bones stuck together with white translucent skin right there on the new carpet.