I am sitting on my sister’s sofa in the home I grew up in. My father is struggling to exist in the recliner beside me. I have visually and conversationally observed him to see what it is I’m up against. I have had to use my mom voice on him already once in the last 30 minutes. “I’m not leaving until you’re in my car or the back of an ambulance, and I’ve got all the time in the world.”
I can feel my cheeks and ears flush as I look away from him. He hasn’t whipped me in over 25 years, but I still get sick to my stomach confronting him. He says he hasn’t bathed in over a week and he’s embarrassed, I tell him to go clean himself up if he must but that we’re going regardless.
A month or more ago he walked into a clinic and they refused to assess him as they felt he needed emergency care. Afterwords he told my sister that if he wasn’t better by Easter he’d take himself in. He doesn’t want to go on the weekends because he feels the care he’ll receive is less than what he’d get on a Monday. A handful of Mondays have come and gone… and so she messages me. Says something has to happen. I’ve briefed my children on the situation and put on my loudest trap music and rapped my way here.
My sister is gentle, she is kind even when she shouldn’t be. I am envisioning her allowing him to die because he didn’t want to go. Bodily autonomy and whatnot. Meanwhile I’m envisioning my nephew walking in on Papa in front of his westerns succumbing to the death rattle. I look at him and tell him that I would not be able to forgive myself if I allowed him to traumatize my nephew by letting him decay in his line of sight.
This is happening. The last time this happened I left his ass in the emergency room after he decided to leave against doctors orders. I’ll do it again too.
You can lead a horse to water.
He wants to talk to me about how dialysis is the only way to remove the fluids he’s got built up, but last I checked he didn’t have an MD behind his name. To my knowledge, no one with our last name has an MD behind it.
He struggled his way out the door far enough to fall into a rocking chair to smoke a cigarette. Took a minute to catch his breath and has been groaning for a solid 10 minutes. I told him it sounds like he’s in pain and he says it’s all he can do to walk from one side of the room to another.
He’s wanting to bargain. He wants to tell me horror stories of reviews he’s read of the hospital closest to us. He wants to tell me about the lady he bumped into at the local diner who was on a stretcher for 10. and. a. half. hours. Can you believe it? I counter with one of ten people satisfied with their care bother to review, but ten of ten dissatisfied people will review.
And then he turned his westerns back on and leans back into his recliner.
He’s been asleep now for an hour and a half struggling to breathe in his sleep. He moans and gasps and I think that it’s happening. It’s going to happen. I’ve reached an agreement with my sister that I’m just going to call 911 once my nephew is asleep and when the paramedics arrive tell him we weren’t able to wake him. It’s mostly true. When we’re able to wake him he’s alert for less than a minute.
I want to care but I’m so mad that it’s reached this point. My children are home alone, I have my own appointments in the morning, my children have school… I’m exhausted just thinking about it and so so angry at him for not taking care of himself; if not for himself, for his children and grandchildren.
He never went to the hospital. Instead I stayed up till midnight to take him after he declined an ambulance ride and legend has it he is still getting ready to go, but never actually going.
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