the modernity ward

The Dashboard Melted, but We Still Have the Radio

The housing search continues unabated. And I'm sorry, nice people with the pretty Victorian, but I am just not going to pay you $300K for a two-bedroom house. I'm just not. Also, Nashville home owners in general, please see the following list of Things That Are Not Other Things:

-room tucked under hipped roof with maximum height of six feet but only right in the middle, and no windows: NOT A BEDROOM.

-stall with sink you can wash your hands in while you sit on the toilet AND soak your feet in an infant tub, all without stretching: NOT A FULL BATHROOM.

-living room bounded on one side by the front door and on the other by glass French doors: NOT A MASTER SUITE.

-concrete-floored basement with open stairway and door to garage: ALSO NOT A MASTER SUITE.

-hot plate balanced on the back of a toilet: NOT A KITCHEN.

I only made up the last one.

* * * *

My dad, well, I just don't even know where to start. As long as he's in the hospital he's okay. When he's out, he declines. He's in inpatient rehab right now (the physical kind of rehab) and he's mighty pissed about it, because they make him feed himself and walk and things like that. And he can't demand Neosporin and baby powder and soda and hot blankets all night long like he did at the hospital. I am dead serious when I say that I am markedly more gracious and accommodating when I am nine centimeters dilated and vomiting onto my Birkenstocks.

I get my information from my aunt and uncle. Sometimes I get three pages of positivity and happy stories; when I call to discuss the good news, things have taken a turn for the worse. Soon as my feelings are all lined up and mournful and resigned about that, suddenly everything is amazing again.

It's exhausting. And I'm not even there in the trenches.

On top of this is the expectation that I'll go visit while he's in the facility (for the next week or so). Which I was all ready to do until I remembered that Sean has yet another conference this week, meaning the only way to leave town is to find a petsitter and drag both kids along, which won't go over too well with the no-children-allowed facility. Oh, and airfare for just me would be around $400 on such short notice.

So that's not happening. Which means that I am unsupportive and neglectful, and probably to blame for all this misery in the first place.

Gosh, I kind of feel like I could use...a drink.

(Oh my god I am kidding.)

* * * *

The stress is beginning to literally erupt from my body. In addition to some seriously sexy pimples (really, universe? Right on my nose? What am I, a seventh grader?) I am suffering a bout of episcleritis, which I haven't seen since the days of infertility stress. The whole Rudolph the Red-Nosed and Also Red-Eyed Reindeer look is set off nicely by my new halo of white hair. Yes, every new hair growing in along my forehead and temples is white. Which brings me up to maybe 10% gray in patches. I'm down with the grays, but not so much with the patches of flaming red on the face. Anyway my point is that I am totally at the peak of hotness, and trying to keep my stress eating to things in the microwave popcorn-flavored seltzer family. 

* * * *

The free cable is back on (yay! and we are not stealing it!)so I'm watching Roseanne whenever possible, and very much enjoying it from the perspective of Married Adult Mother-Type Person, even more than I did the first time around (I was almost the same age as Becky). I am realizing that whenever my firsthand role modeling for various adult situations like, oh, money troubles and whatall was lacking, I took my coping mechanisms from Roseanne. I can't decide whether that's awesome, unfortunate, or a goddamned shame*. Thoughts?

*Those are the three categories of things.

Back. And, A Question for You

I just don't even know where to begin. The default setting seems to be eating toast and watching Pomplamoose videos on YouTube, so...yeah. I guess I should start with the overdue library books and the baskets of clean folded laundry, the diapers waiting to go in the dryer, the breakfast dishes. I should start with the real estate agent who's waiting for me to schedule viewings (on which subject more below). I should start with getting some things together to send to the people who were so generous while we conducted our whirlwind tour of Tornado Alley. But all I really want to do is sit in a quiet tidy place and not do much of anything at all.

Visiting a gravely ill parent is sort of unspeakably difficult, especially if you missed out on a lot of the intervening decline. Emotional tectonic shifts combined with the riptide drag of a bunch of little kids who want you right in the here and now, providing crackers and strawberries and little plastic toys, they cause you to kind of lose your train of thought permanently. That train derailed and rolled down an embankment and took out a rusted old water tower on the way down.

It was way harder because Sean was away until the day before we left -- I've been on solo parenting duty for nine of the past eleven days, I think. Boo frickin' hoo, I know, but it contributes to the overall...wha? (Although there was a high point: Jenn came to visit, and Sophia has requested her immediate return.)

So that's what's going on. My tether to the right-now is pretty thin, so I have to do just one thing at a time: put a dish in the dishwasher. One folded shirt in a drawer. One email. One library book in the car. Making the choice to be here, to stay here, that's the thing that can keep you alive.

* * * *

In other news: I need your wise consult, internets. We recently learned from our landlords that the house we live in is going to be sold to someone who will most likely tear it down and build new on the site. Our lease will be honored through its end in July, but not renewed. There is also, the landlord mentioned, the possibility of the buyer providing some sort of financial incentive for leaving before the lease runs out.

Hmm.

What kind of incentive, we asked -- and got back "Well, what were you thinking?" as a response. And what I'm thinking is that the buyer is hoping that we'll open the bidding pretty low. And I want to make sure we get as much as is fair out of this, because we were really not as ready to buy now as we were going to be in a year (we'd thought about renting for 2 years to save up a down payment).

So we're wondering what to ask for. One suggestion was to ask for the amount of our rent per month, for each month that we leave early. So if we left six months early, six months' worth of rent money goes to us. No, it's not entirely logical, but it's a starting point. Clearly we'd want to prorate it so that the sooner we leave, the more we get, but how much per month is fair? 

For reference purposes, if someone is buying a house in this neighborhood for a teardown, the lot alone will run you upwards of $200K, and probably closer to $300K. Our rent is $1350 a month (and we will NOT be buying in this neighborhood, as much as I love it -- gentrification hath progressed too far). Would $1350 per month early be too much? $1000? What do you think?

Skeletons

Every time a picture of Zachary Quinto pops up on my screen (why, internet? I haven't seen a movie in years and no, I do not want to receive his "tweets," unless that is a new slang term you kids are using for Thin Mints) all I can think is "Skeletons of Quinto." For the rest of the day. You're welcome.

BUT it's nearing Halloween, and there are skeletons everywhere, including in my own family. Nothing about which we didn't have a general idea, but urgh, the specifics. Anybody who's dealt with an addict for a loved one probably knows the combination of gut-drop and forehead-slap when you kinda knew, but you didn't know. You didn't know about that.

I hate it when people allude to fascinating prurient details and then won't share, because why the hell did you bring it up if you weren't going to deliver? Come on! If there's anything the internet is for, it's the divulging of humiliating specifics! Well, that and YouTube videos of people lancing their own boils. So, um, sorry. Even I have my limits.

And you know what I like to do when I skate too close to my limits? Distract myself! Yes, I like to distract myself with fun, shiny, twirling pinwheels of sparkles and harpsichord music! Whee! This time around the pinwheels are made of real estate listings, and boy howdy, can they suck up an afternoon. Boring old settled married folks like myself can get about real estate, I am learning, like freewheeling single ladies get about the dudes. 

I never stalked a guy, but I drive by houses of interest on a daily basis.

I check their online profiles obsessively; I zoom in on their pictures to deduce key information from the background detail. I pay attention even to the ones that are taken already -- hey, you never know. Somebody might take a job out of state. Somebody might go to a nursing home. Things happen. When they do, I'll be there with my earnest money.

Yeah, yeah, the analogy kind of has its limits. What crazy thing have you done in the name of real estate?

Central Processing

A strange thing happens when you divulge your truest, ugliest, most conflicting sentiments on the internet. People read them.

I know, right? Shocking. People read them and they respond to them. They tell you they know, they experienced something like it, they never felt that way but now they understand a little better how it might feel.

And then they compliment your writing.

No, no, no, oh my, no, don't stop. By no means should y'all stop. It's just -- how can I put this delicately? In fact, how can I put this at all? Real tragedy (and, okay, sometimes imagined tragedy, like dealing with customer service at Comcast) brings out the best in my writing. Out of the grief and horror of infertility, lengthy grinding illness, the accrual of a thousand losses, an anticipated hold time of seven minutes or more, comes a work of taut lyrical beauty, five hundred words of diamond-sharp eloquence to pierce your soul and remind you why you switched to DirecTV.

All right, I am making fun of myself here, and so what? The fact is I am left with -- everybody jump out from behind the couch and scream "Surprise!" -- ugly, conflicting sentiments. Bad thing translates to opportunity to hone craft translates to compliments from readers translates to the blogger feeling mighty decent about her own skills as she re-reads her post that brought so many readers to tears and then remembers -- shit. Oh yeah. That.

It is an...unforeseen condition on my part. I thank you with all my heart, internets, for reading my posts and for responding. It helps, it honestly does. But whenever you read a particularly tragic post, remember that most of the time I am sitting there snickering at my own ridiculousness even as I grieve. Most likely I am eating some sort of non-dairy pudding-type product as well. We all have our coping mechanisms.

What to Say

You can say I'm sorry it didn't work out the way you wanted it to. You can say I think you're right, you do need a liver transplant.

You can't say The lead doctor has a point: the meds might help, you might improve; more important, you do have to demonstrate your willingness to go to therapy, AA, whatever. You can say I wish things were different, but you can't say but I understand why they aren't.

You can say I'm sorry you're feeling so awful; I hope it gets better. I know on top of everything that hernia is making things so much worse. You can't say I spent how many summers in Kansas to help you recuperate from hernia surgery you never had, that you canceled again and again? You can't say I knew that even ten years ago you didn't want anyone to get a look at that liver of yours. You can't say There were hundreds of chances to fix it before it got to be the size of a fucking volleyball, you had people lined up to take care of you. And you chose alcohol over those people.

You can say You're tired but you can't sleep, I know. It's hard to eat, I know. You can't say  The torment in your body is probably nothing compared to what's roiling in your head.

You can say I know it's hard to get out to AA meetings but you can't say because you're embarrassed or because you still can't admit you have a problem? Why did I have to badger you even today to get you to tell me about the counseling requirement? And why wouldn't you say that it was alcohol counseling until I asked you point blank? You can say six months until reevaluation, that isn't too long.
 
You can't say you brought this on yourself. It's your fault. It's your fault. I hate that you are suffering but my expectations for you are no less than those I have for my four-year-old -- that you will experience the consequences of your choices and learn from them. I won't make excuses for you. It is hard to get up off the recliner and choke down a hamburger when you feel miserable but if you want to live this is what you have to do. It sucks to admit you have a problem but trust me, everybody else in the world is well aware. It doesn't diminish our love for you or our admiration of your better qualities, but believe me, you ain't foolin' nobody but yourself.

You can say It's tough work. You can't say but if you put half the effort into survival that you put into covering up your drinking you'll make it okay. You can say I love you.

You can't say I can't do this for you. You threw yourself down that hole, and I'll reach down as far as I can, but you have to scrabble your way on up. I can't haul you out on my own. I won't even try.

Sealed in the Book of Life

If you didn't know, Yom Kippur is Monday after next. And if you didn't know, it's the Day of Atonement.

And I know you didn't know it's the day my father will find out whether, in the eyes of the transplant center, he merits a spot in the liver transplant pool.

When I wrote about him last he was "recuperating" at home; now, after a brief stint at his brother's house a couple of hours away, he's in the hospital, back in his hometown. He's in a bed in a building he's worked in since before I was born; caring for him are people who have known him as long as I've been alive. I reckon they're as much family to him as we are, at this point.

His house is packed up, what remains of his personal belongings (and those few things that are rightfully ours -- the giant box of family photographs, the odd surviving toy) boxed in the garage. Goodwill came for most of the furniture. His brother -- his seventy-plus-year-old brother -- did all this for him; the "angel" of a real estate agent helped coordinate things. The house goes on the market as soon as all the papers get signed. If he gets on the list, he'll have to stay in a hospital in another city; if not, I don't like to think about it. Hospice.

He won't be going back to that house, ever.

It was our house, all of ours; we all lived there before my parents got divorced, then my sisters and I and our mother after. When we left for the East Coast my dad moved in, and while our familiar furniture was mostly replaced with the crappy divorced-dad-apartment stuff, a few things stayed completely untouched: on my old bedroom wall, for example, a pencil rendering of John Lennon, a copied illustration from Faeries. Under the sink in the bathroom, last summer, I found a box of hair dye. I hadn't used Balsam Color (the cheapest! the cancer-iest!) since I was fourteen.

It used to be so beautiful, that house. It was sunny and bright and full of nooks and crannies for hide and seek; it had a beautiful yard and a treehouse/chicken coop and tire swings. There was a half-size tennis court in the backyard where we would rollerskate, bike, set off firecrackers, and where once, at my own birthday party, I gave myself a bona fide concussion during an ill-conceived relay race. It turned into a mausoleum as my dad left rooms untouched, let papers pile up in others, tidied -- or maybe just didn't have any stuff -- but never cleaned. It got so dusty I couldn't breathe, on my later visits back, and the curtains were always drawn. The glass got broken out of the lamp in the front yard, and three years later, it's still broken.

* * * *

I don't have a lot of patience with addicts. Having departed from the familial strategy of denial with a side of enabling, I find myself looking hard-hearted, mean even, when I say don't let him stay with you "just two weeks," don't give her money, don't bail that one out of jail again (yes, we've got quite a family history, and that's not even on my dad's side). I never believed any of the crap my dad said -- that he bought airline tickets to visit us and then had to cancel at the last minute because of "the flu", that he just had to taper off the steroids and then things would be "just like old times."

He wasn't drinking by that point, but the behavior was still in full effect. "Just like old times," as he was quite clearly in decompensated liver failure. As he was sitting there with yellow-gray skin, no longer eating.  "Sure, Dad," I told him, and hung up. And then called up his brother and told him the truth -- what my sisters and I had figured out and confirmed with my dad's doctors -- that things could go downhill, fast. That he was not competent to care for himself, even as he told us he had it "all under control."

Hepatic encephalopathy (HE) is what happens when the liver craps out and stops removing toxins from the blood, poisoning your brain. (Okay, that's the Highlights Magazine version.) You get slurred speech, fuzzy thinking, clumsiness, disturbed sleep. You might, say, forget to eat (which you don't feel like doing anyway). You might forget to take your medication, and you might get really grouchy with the people trying to help.

It's hard to know where ingrained addict behavior, even independent of the addicting substance, leaves off and hepatic encephalopathy begins. For that matter, it's hard to know how much of it is just personality. But how much of an addict's personality is truly his own? How much of that person is the one you love, and how much of it is the net of mechanisms designed to protect the drinking and push away those meddlin' kids? Who wasn't interested in the new babies, the drinking Dad or the "real" one? I'd get calls from him that were morose, nonsensical, argued in a circle. Then I'd catch him sober and he'd sound like the Dad I remembered, telling funny stories, asking after the babies. Then he stopped sounding drunk and stared sounding...addled. Somewhere else. That was the HE.

So what's there? What's left of Dad? How much of it is him in the first place?

And how much longer do we have with what there is?

* * * *

Would it be easier if I didn't love him so danged much? Would it be any better if he were an awful person? He is human, and like most of us, boy, is he damaged, but he is also fundamentally good. Even when he wasn't together enough to remember our birthdays, he was providing, providing, providing. At his best he's hilarious, affectionate, silly, kind. Generous. Patient with small children.

That's the person I want back, just for a little bit; that's who I want my girls and niece and nephew to know. He played tea party with Sophia last summer, Sophia who was so overwhelmed with all the new people and he was so patient, he just waited for her to come to him and then -- wonders! -- she crawled up in his lap. They sipped imaginary tea. She remembers him, she wants to talk to him on the phone, but he can barely even talk to me for two minutes. If he stays in the hospital -- oh, if he never leaves it -- she won't get to see him again.

I'm going out to see him, as soon as I can manage it. As soon as I know where he'll be in two weeks (if he gets on the transplant list, he'll move to another city to wait for a new liver; if he doesn't he'll move to a facility of some sort near his brother).

So say a prayer, if you're the praying type. Think a healing thought, light a candle. Me, I pray that I get a chance to tell my dad, in person, so I can see he understands, that we know, we know all about it, we've always known everything -- and we have always loved him anyway.