In the past month or so I have been feeling happy, making a special effort to not take the things and people in my life for granted. This was triggered by a conversation with a friend, which made me realise that the things we think will be our problems never turn out to be the saddest things in our lives. Now, if I am getting hung up on some work issue or worrying about the logistics of my relationship, for example, I think to myself, I should be so lucky that these are the only things I have to worry about. I know there will likely be times ahead where I will have real, deep sadnesses, simply because they are a part of life, and I’ll look back on all the fretting I experience now and see it as trivial.
Today I went to see my Dad. I haven’t been to see him in months, so I was surprised when the receptionist at his home did not ask who I was there to see when I came in, only got someone to take me up straight away. I did not have to give his name, and then when they didn’t recognise who I was referring to, to clarify I meant Horse, which is the name he asks people there to call him. This was a relief.
When I knocked on his door he asked who was there. When I said my name he told me to come in but then looked warily at me from his chair. ‘Is it really you, Is?’ I noticed that he had torn out of the wall the neat unit installed there for him to buzz for help from the nurses, its wires dangling behind him. His guitar had been snapped at the neck and lay broken alongside one of the walls.
He was less talkative than usual. He was experiencing great tooth pain; when I said he ought to ask for a dentist he said there was nothing wrong with his teeth. He told me the problem was his mouth had been filled with metal fillings, which ‘they’ were using to administer electric shocks to him. He kept opening his mouth wide, pulling it wider with his fingers for me to see, his eyes furious. I was surprised that when I told him that the people in the home were there to care for him and help him, he calmly told me it was simply the way he saw it. He wasn’t willing to debate.
We talked about the nice things about where he lived. I told him I thought it was glamorous to have an ensuite bathroom, and he told me what he’d like to get an interior designer to do with the place. He’d have a chaise longue by the door, and some sort of wall or screen so people couldn’t see his bed as soon as they opened the door. He thought he might find a lamp for his bedside at the car boot sale. ‘When I was there the other day, I was looking for… what was I looking for?’ he said. We looked out his window, across the allotments there. ‘It would be nice if I could just take a walk, but there’s only a lift to get down, which would be great if it works, but it doesn’t work, does it?’
I felt guilty when I realised the lie the nurses must have told him; more so that I didn’t correct him. My dad lives on the 3rd floor of a home for adults with complex needs. Nobody may leave or enter without a nurse’s pass. As far as I am aware, my dad has not left that corridor since he came to live in the home about a year and half ago.
There had been a question I wanted to ask him. It was something I had been wondering about recently. I knew I could ask him with the safety that he would not remember me having asked after I said it. My parents married when they were 23 years old after having known each other for 6 months. It was my mother’s second marriage. My father left 11 days after they were wed, but my mother was able to persuade him to come back to her. But he always had a bag packed under the bed. So I wanted to ask him, if you could go back and do your life again, would you still get married and have children?
He paused and considered the question. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Not necessarily in that order, but I would.’ This was a great relief to me. That my dad did not regret having had us as part of his life. I had, despite my guilt and sense of betrayal at doing so, recorded this conversation on my phone. When I listened to it back when I got home, I could hear another patient sobbing loudly from another room.
My Dad is only 57 years old. When I look at this photograph, which is in his room, of him and his mother with my sisters and me, it gives me real bodily pain. To look at us all there, oblivious of what was to come. His paranoia, his addictions, the physical harm that would come to his body as a result of his psychotic episodes. I can’t help but just feel so unbearably sad.
I never imagined then what my parents’ involvement in my life would be when I was older. All my dreams were about myself, some including my sisters. My parents had split up long before I was old enough to consider them as people in their own right, and the futures they might have when taking care of my sisters and me was no longer their main priority. So I never imagined how he might be as a grandfather, for example. And by the time I would be old enough to consider this, I would already know that the care my father needed would be equal to or greater than the care a child needs. That makes me sad too, now — that even in my imagination there has never been a future with him in it participating as a father normally might. I feel so much grief tonight for that. For what I’ll never even be able to imagine.
stormborns
2087
gracieabrams
romaincrisis
