lobsterchick's Diaryland Diary

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Happy Birthday, Dad

**Warning: This is a long one, and it's sad. Don't say I didn't warn you.**

I don't feel like I've avoided this issue thus far here at the Cove, but I also feel like if I didn't talk about it right now, I'd be avoiding it.

When your father goes to the doctor for anything beside a check-up, and then he and your mother want you and your sister to meet you for lunch at an Old Country Buffet, you should probably get wind that there's something going on.

I mean, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it's cancer if I were you, but a little healthy suspicion will certainly keep you from getting completely blindsided.

I tell you this because I was completely blindsided. I sat in the restaurant, my entire body gone numb, my throat closed up against an onslaught of tears that threatened, and couldn't believe my parents expected me to eat.

Finding out your father has a potentially life-threatening illness is not pleasant at any age. Finding out at 14, when you're already a dramatic princess is like finding out that the world is going to crack open in 30 seconds and you can't do anything to stop it. I was convinced I'd never eat again.

Of course I did, and I managed to keep my head about me when my father made phone calls every night, informing friends and family that he had cancer. He cut straight through the bullshit where I would have hemmed and hawed, and just came out and told person after person. It was his matter-of-fact attitude that made the cancer a part of our lives, not the end of it. He received chemotherapy and radiation treatments, not losing his hair (except for in his ears--his hearing suffered a little) or any significant amount of weight. By four months later, in August, his cancer was gone. He wasn't considered to be in remission because it hadn't been gone for a long enough time, but there was no sign of it. He delivered this news to me, again, in a most plain way, appearing to have no strong feelings either way, which I'm sure was for my benefit. To get excited was to get me excited about something that may come back as quickly as it had gone away.

And it did come back, later that year. My father's oncologist suggested surgery as a second course of treatment, and he agreed. However, he wanted the surgery to be performed immediately, while the surgeon encouraged him to put it off until after the new year.

Again, I was totally blindsided. I never wondered why the surgeon wanted to postpone the surgery; I never let myself wonder. To address the possibility that my father might not live to see another Christmas was beyond my realm of ability. I simply could not conceive of a life without him.

The Tuesday following Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1994, the day after the L.A. earthquake, my dad went into surgery. Originally I hadn't been able to go to the hospital with the rest of the family, because I had my first semester final exams. Fortunately, that day was bitterly cold, and school was closed. Mamatoo, who was pregnant with Francie then, picked me up at 6:30 and we went to the hospital to wait.

He came through the surgery okay, which allowed me to prolong my delusions. Everything was fine, he would be fine, he'd be back home in no time, and everything would be okay forever. But then he started developing infection after infection, talking, as my mother said, "out of his head." She spent every evening at the hospital, pretty much leaving me to myself. I didn't have a license, so I sat at home, doing homework, talking on the phone, and watching TV, completely oblivious to the pain she and my father were enduring. I marvel now at my self-centeredness.

One day each weekend I spent the day at the hospital, usually with my Aunt M.T. and cousin Lobster, or some other friend or family member who'd come to see my father. I alternated between my dad's room and the waiting room, doing homework and reading magazines, mostly bored out of my skull. I knew better than to complain, though.

Finally, one cold Saturday in mid-March, the day after my friend Allie's slumber party, my dad came home. My mom supported him in his walk up the driveway and into the house, and set him up on the couch with his feeding tube.

A week later, I came home from school and he wasn't there. Ridiculously, I still thought everything was okay, and that he had just had a doctor's appointment. But it turned out he had started coughing up blood, and my mother had rushed him back to the hospital. After that, things steadily progressed from bad to worse, and then even worse, until even I finally had to admit that things looked bleak. He kept regurgitating blood, no matter how many transfusions he was given. Finally, a few days passed without any "episodes," as they came to be known, and his doctor called the family into the room one morning, ostensibly to discuss the treatment plan.

While all six of us leaned against the wall and sat on the other bed in the room, listening to the doctor saying things were looking up, my father started coughing. The doctor laughed nervously, saying, "Come on, Mike, don't make a liar out of me." My dad coughed again, and blood poured out, all over him. The rest of the family leaped into action, grabbing each other and getting out of the room while someone went to go get a nurse. I was absolutely stunned, though, in the most basic sense of the word, and I could not move. I stared at my father as he sat there, almost childlike, trying to catch the blood that was falling from his mouth. All I could think was, I don't want him to be embarrassed. I don't want him to feel alone and think I don't want to see him. Finally my sister Brownie came back in and physically yanked me from the room.

The next few days are just a blur of nurses calling our house, and everyone rushing to the hospital. My sister and I went to Easter Mass that Sunday, dirtier than we had probably ever been, from not having showered, but in our Easter dresses. People looked at us, but we just sat and prayed that our dad could somehow pull through.

That Monday, I was supposed to go back to school after Spring Break. My mom had even written me a note explaining to my English teacher why I hadn't read Much Ado About Nothing over the break. But I sat at the kitchen table, feeling guilty, unable to move. "I don't feel good," I said, "I don't think I can go to school." For once in her life, my mom didn't take my temperature or ask me a million questions; she just went to the phone and called the office, and we went to the hospital.

It seemed like the whole world was there, and our family, plus my dad's brother and his kids, took up the whole waiting room. We camped out there all day, moving in and out of my dad's room when he was alert enough to have visitors. Our family was never very demonstrative with our feelings, so when I brought myself to tell my father that I loved him, I knew I had accepted that there was no time left.

He didn't die that day, but the next morning we received an early call from his nurse, encouraging us to rush to the hospital. My mom went first, followed closely by Brownie, who had the unenviable task of mobilizing the family, and me. It was sunny as we drove, but by the time we got to the Intensive Care Unit, rain had started pouring as though it would never stop. My dad's room soon became so full of people that we had to rotate out, and while I stood in the hallway, watching the rain, I begged God to please just let him live. But my mom's best friend appeared at the door, and I went into the room with her, and almost immediately, he died. I watched him breathe his last breath, and hope, that tenacious light that still shines when all the other lights have burned out, finally went out itself. Once a person's chest falls, and doesn't rise again, hope is useless, and rather than being a comfort, is a sign of delusion.

Even though now I cry watching a McDonald's commercial, I refused to let myself cry then. I watched everyone else indulge in tears, and convinced myself that I couldn't do it because I didn't like the way I felt physically when I did. I sat through a two-day wake, comforting other mourners, and heard, countless times, that people couldn't believe I was 15. People who hadn't seen my father in 10 years or more turned up for the world's longest, most-crowded wake, and there were more cars in my dad's funeral procession than I've ever seen in any other, even some I've seen for policemen.

The Monday after he died, just two days after his funeral, I sat again at my dining room table, unable to move. I looked up at my mom and said, "I don't think I can go back." She sighed, and said, "If we don't go back now, we won't ever want to go back." So I got up, went back to school, and pretended like everything was normal.

10:08 PM - 12 July 2003

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