It’s been a weird month. I’m a little burned out and not confident I can describe it well. Back in my ad agency days, a star copywriter shared a helpful saying when you’re staring at a blank page: Write it straight, then make it great.
I’ll try the first part, but I got nothing great for you. I’m still coming out of a malaise, something like a zombie state with maybe mild depression mixed in there. At the low point, arguably the high point, I was in a hotel room at a conference and could not stop watching YouTube clips of a romantic comedy released last year called “Anyone but You.”
Naturally this spilled over into a broader search for Sydney Sweeney, whom I’d never heard of, but now occupies all five spots in my celebrity top five. There is no one else. Mostly I kept going back to the movie though. I have the helicopter scene memorized down to how she shyly fixes her hair as that perfect specimen Hangman is running up the stairs.
I must have been lying on my stomach on the bed hunched over an iPhone 12 mini for two hours. I only stopped the rabid electronic consumption — there are worse things to binge on alone in a hotel room when feeling down — upon discovering the movie is on Netflix. As soon as I got home, I asked my wife to watch it with me after the kids went to bed. She humored me because she’s always a trooper and probably sensed I needed it. I can’t explain the compulsion and vague uneasiness.
My wife said it was because I had been compartmentalizing too much, suppressing emotions and aggressively changing gears. On a Thursday, my dad went in for a heart exam and thought worst case they would put in some stents and he’d be out of there in a few hours. My mom even had meat defrosting on the counter, which I know isn’t best practice but they’ve been doing it forever with no known problems.
His heart, on the other hand, was in such bad shape they wouldn’t let him go home for what turned out to be 11 days. He was immediately transferred to Texas Health Plano and wheeled into massive quintuple-bypass surgery 36 hours later. One of the doctors afterward said short of a heart transplant, it was as big as you could go, let alone for a 70-year-old.
Besides the five bypasses, there was a clever yet terrifying treatment for atrial fibrillation called a maze, which entails burning a pattern of scar tissue in the heart chambers to scramble faulty electrical signals. The left atrial appendage was clipped to reduce the risk of stroke. And the scary audible once they sliced open his chest was deciding he needed a new aortic valve, the door that keeps blood flowing in the right direction.
The surgery was on a Saturday, and I spent a good chunk of my waking hours at the hospital for the ensuing five days. Then I switched into single dad mode as my wife left for a three-day trip. When she got back that Sunday night, I packed for a company retreat in Chicago. I got back from that Wednesday evening. My mom called Thursday morning, and we had to take my dad to the emergency room for potential complications. He left the hospital again Saturday, and I left in a Lyft again for the conference early Monday.
So yes, I switched gears a few times and felt like a sociopath butterfly dressing up and cracking jokes with strangers in overstimulating work environments. Honestly I’m low-key proud of how I’ve been a machine over the past few weeks doing work meetings from the hospital, pushing informed conversations with doctors and nurses, being a patient father to two young kids, drinking with bigwigs in ballrooms, not missing a workout. I have indeed compartmentalized well, which my wife and probably some professionals would suggest is unhealthy.
I don’t suppress anything though. I tried to take it all in and dial into the moments. It’s part of the circle of life to see your parents reduced to utter helplessness. My dad tried to play it cool leading up to the operation to save his life. When my mom had to help him take a whiz, he mustered a trite joke about preferring the nurse to do it instead. My mother countered it would be too hard to find his penis.
He was still relatively loose in the pre-op room with us, but when showtime came and we said our goodbyes he looked overwhelmed and almost childlike. I stole one last look back, and I’m pretty sure there was moisture in his eyes, which I had never seen before.
I guess he was afraid to die, despite many comments in the past projecting otherwise. My aunt volunteers at a hospital and said you’d be surprised when it comes time to face death, even the frailest and oldest don’t want to go.
I realized I’m the same way when the surgeon called after the operation to explain the valve. The replacement is supposed to last 10 years, maybe less; maybe they can do something else after that. I was fixated on the shelf life of this solution, and the surgeon said somewhat callously but correctly, well, he’s 70.
It’s true. Eighty years old would be overachieving for my dad’s genetics and possibly mine too. I just hate having to think like that, to put a number on it and manage the end as if life really isn’t infinite after all.
I’m just greedy. My dad should have died on hot pavement six years ago if it weren’t for Jim Sanders, so really all this time is bonus. But I want more. It’s not enough. As I said back then, your 30s are a good age to get to a place where you’re prepared for the loss of a parent. I turn 40 in a few months and need more time.
This was a solid dress rehearsal though. They actually stopped his heart to perform the surgery, and then he was on a ventilator in I.C.U. afterward. Bloated from fluids, my father looked dead and embalmed. The next stage was somewhere between life and death, a swirl of pain, fatigue, paranoia, fear and drugged-up nonsense. All I could do was stroke his forehead like I would my 2-year-old.
I get so frustrated about entirely optional conflict like Gaza, how humans create hell on earth because they can’t accept a slight variation of their fairy tales. But I don’t need to google why religion exists to see its usefulness in evolution and survival.
Because when you think about how the lucky ones get to see their parents age and die, and then it’s their turn and they have to say goodbye to their own kids… it can take some effort to not jump off a cliff. I’m not religious, but I’m only jumping if there’s a helicopter on the other end to take me to Sydney (Harbour).
This was really beautiful, I enjoyed reading it. As someone who is 8 months into being 40, and a nurse who works with cardiac patients, I related to every line. Life is wild. Time spent contemplating mortality has gone from once in a blue moon in my 20’s, to perhaps a solid 10 minutes out of every day now that I’ve entered my 5th decade.
Also we’ve barely met, but I’m a friend of Leilani’s. I’m pretty sure I’ve read every single one of your posts since like mid 2018 and I’m always excited to see it pop up in my inbox. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with the world ☺️