Don't Leave Me |
|
Baby blue walls. Muzak version of "Fame." He thinks it's Wednesday.
"Don't leave me," he says, squeezing my hand.
"I'm sorry you feel bad," I say.
"I don't feel so bad."
He refuses to take the catheter. The nurse tells him if they can't monitor his urine, he'll die.
Two hours of arguing later, he takes the catheter.
"His condition is a result of people listening to him," the doctor says.
Letting him only eat bananas, vanilla pudding, and orange juice. Not making him see the doctor more. Letting him live in an assisted living community instead of a nursing home.
It wasn't my fault, I want to say. I'm just his granddaughter.
But I'm the only one here, so I listen.
My parents are still in Washington.
His kidneys are dying, they say. His intestines aren't working. His potassium is so high it is fucking up his heart. Potassium, the doctor says, is what they use in lethal injections.
The only way to lower the potassium is through his bowels. So he goes. And he goes. And he goes. Every few minutes. It is everywhere. He is in a diaper.
The nurses never stop smiling. They say, "He can't help it, it's the medicine," when I look at them apologetically as they head back with another set of sheets and towels. And they smile at me. At him. How is that possible?
Are you the mother? asks one nurse.
I stare at her. Wrong room.
Your grandmother's on the phone, another one announces.
My grandfather stares at her.
My grandmother died of Lou Gehrig's disease years ago. Wrong room again.
When we arrived in the morning, I thought, this is nothing like the TV show. As night falls, it is just like the TV show.
A paramedic rushes a man in on a gurney. "What'd he hit you with??" she shouts. He wails in return. "You're not gonna die, so shut up," she yells.
I'm her husband, a young man tells the desk nurse, clutching the countertop with white knuckles. She's in Room 5, she points.
The police chase a cursing, shirtless man down the corridor as he screams.
HOLD STILL! a male nurse yells to the man who keeps wailing that he's dying.
Have we really been here 14 hours? I've lost all track of time.
I go to the bathroom, put the seat down, and cry.
We're still in the ER because there's still no ICU bed available.
My uncle arrives. He is a large, hard-assed Cajun who likes beer and guns and being tough. We're not close, because he lives out of town, but I see my father's face in his.
The doctor asks us if we want them to take extraordinary measures to resuscitate him should anything happen in the middle of the night. My uncle doesn't respond, but looks at me. "It's your decision," I tell him. "I want you to help me make it," he says.
He continues, "I had to help make the decision to pull the plug when Mama was dying. Your dad and I did." And he starts to cry. "And I have to live with that. Every day. Every day. I can't go through that again."
My grandfather is trying so hard to be brave. He wants me to hold his hand. I sing to him. I tell him a bedtime story, the story of his life. It's a good story.
It's a story of a little boy who only spoke French until he was six years old and went to school. It's the story of a young man who married his sweetheart in secret because they couldn't afford to move in together for a few months. The young man paid the priest $11 to keep their secret, and they were married for 46 years. 46 years for 11 dollars, he would say. Then -- "Best deal I ever made."
It's the story of the father of three boys, whose middle son is my father. It's the story of a shrewd businessman who decided he would take my dad to Canada before letting him go to Vietnam. My dad had allergies, so they didn't have go to Canada.
It's the story of a world traveler who took his kids all over the country and his wife all over the world. Who told his granddaughter tales of Ireland and Belgium and the Holy Land. Who told her not to rush into getting married. To never settle. There is no rush, he told her, over and over.
It's the story of a husband who lost his mind for a little while when his wife of 46 years died a horrible death. A husband who doesn't trust doctors or hospitals because his wife made him promise not to put her on life support, and they put her on it anyway, and in the days before living wills, he couldn't fight them.
It's the story of a grandfather who got close to his granddaughter when he moved to her hometown after his wife died. Who got his life and his health back and lived like a much younger man. Who laughed so hard sometimes at his own jokes that he would snort. Who would take her to lunch every Thursday in his big white car and always eat seafood gumbo and bread pudding with extra sauce. A man who was the life of his swanky retirement community. A flirt who would be left love notes from the female residents. A man who kept a single fresh red rose in a vase in front of his wife's graduation picture, where she smiled at him every day in her long white gown.
An elderly man whose health started deteriorating as he entered his mid-eighties. Who fell a few too many times and became afraid to walk. Who started going around in a wheelchair, he was so afraid. Who stopped driving. Who stopped embracing life with zest and excitement. Who stopped eating.
Whose hand I hold now, as he lies there hooked up to a heart monitor and a saline drip, whose every bodily system seems to be failing in some way, who is waiting for his son, my father, to return tomorrow.
I am waiting for my father. I have to tell him over the phone what is going on. I need my father. He needs his father.
next journal journal archive home
|