In the extravagantly fragrant season of oranges blossoming, we are plunged into war
and my aging parents' lives are plunged into chaos as my dad breaks his hip; the lessons are all about living with helplessness.
Mid-March brings the intoxication of a valley full of orange trees burst into early bloom. Their extraordinary, overwhelming luscious fragrance, as always, feels bacchanalian, ecstatic and totally transporting! I wander through the groves in the early evenings when their magical scent is at its height. The quiet peace of these gentle spring nighttime meanders brings such bliss.
And then suddenly this wondrous peace is shattered. Our monomaniacal “leader” and his cronies catapult us into a war that threatens the future of life on this planet. The very day the insanity is poised to begin, my beloved 86 1/2 year-old dad has a terrible fall and breaks his hip. Two days after the relatively routine surgery to pin his fracture, everything starts to careen into a chaos of frightening and excruciatingly painful complications.
It had been a more intensely busy week than usual for me. After my two very long days of work and more than the usual complement of self-care/maintenance appointments, I’d had a flurry of several long delayed lunches, walks and dinners with my small circle of close friends. My eagerness to begin my monthly “unplugged retreat” at the end of this busy and atypically social week was strong and palpable.
An agitated and distraught call from my step mom (reporting the turn toward chaos) sets me scrambling instead to find flights, pack, arrange for my kitty’s care and set off to get myself to Florida immediately. Immediately is 14 hours of being in transit after almost 12 hours of getting up to “escape velocity.” In the moments just after the call as I, with maddening difficulty, try to find a way to get quickly across the country, I realize that am having an anxiety attack. I’m freezing cold; my whole body is in tremor. I struggle for breath. I want to be there right this minute. I feel so helpless. Everything feels so out of my hands. I am not in charge.
I am talking ceaselessly and gently to my very anxiety-ridden self while I try various airlines searching for possible flights. I wrap up in a warm robe and sheepskin slippers though it is well over 70 degrees. The shaking slows and my breathing deepens only once I have seats arranged.
I move in spirals, picking and packing clothes, vitamins, toiletries, food for the endless hours of travel. I “put my house/gardens in order,” let my family of friends know what’s happening and that I’m leaving. All the while there are the calls back and forth to my step mom for updates. My dad is in too much pain to speak on the phone. My step mom is agitated and frantic. More calls trying to track down my sister. She’s out of the country at the time and the phone number she’s left me, forwarded from one of her traveling companions, is missing several necessary numbers!
I am both incredibly, efficiently organized and a mess inside the middle of this efficiency! I am miraculously able to focus my full presence for a 3-hour appointment with a very dear out of town client who is in town for the day. This helps me to pass through the endless hours I have to wait until I can meet my flight. I lose myself into a totally “other” reality for this while.
And then I enter the “between space.” A kind of limbo, a liminal space in which I am cut loose from the usual moorings of my normal life and set adrift in a timeless present that seems “ahistorical.” I am totally in the moment-by-moment slices of now as they unfold. It is as though the reality I’ve left ceases to exist in/for me. And, the reality toward which I am moving has, as yet, no shape. I do not think about or anticipate what lies ahead. I live in the going-time.
I begin writing this on the long plane trip home. It’s been a harrowing and crazy week of 11 to 14 hour days at the hospital with my dad as he moved through a terrible sequence of devastating medical misadventures as his well-pinned fracture healed itself. The hours passed in a trance-like way. Mostly we were quiet together through the worst of it. He was in excruciating agony from complications of being catheterized for the surgery.
I sat with him as he wept and cried out in helpless rage and frustration. All he wanted was to die, to not be there anymore, to end the overwhelm of so much pain, helplessness and the repeated humiliations of incontinence. All there was for me to do for him was to chase down the nursing staff for pain meds, to call in the aides for bedpans or clean-up, to hold one of his IV’d hands and breathe with him, to commiserate with him about how incredibly awful it all was.
Illness and suffering had been foreign to my dad until he turned 72. Since then, he’s developed several health problems: adult onset diabetes, Parkinson’s that mainly affects his balance, some genetic heart muscle problems and surgically corrected carotid blockage among them. Yet, none has caused him the kind of anguished suffering that attended this hospitalization. And, I’ve never seen my gentle, patient, usually incredibly spacious father sent so wildly beside himself.
Once before in my life I had sat helplessly at the side of someone I loved through such suffering. Being with my dad through this seemingly endless trial was even more excruciating than sitting with my oldest friend as she suffered through hideous chemotherapies and a difficult dying.
It is such a challenge to be in utter helplessness in the face of a loved one’s pain. I understand that those who parent face this repeatedly. As someone who’s never parented, all I know of this place comes from bearing witness to the emotional pain of the women with whom I work. Yet, as I learned through this terrible time with my dad, helplessness in the face of a dear one’s physical anguish is, for me, a much greater challenge.
It was an intense and compelling practice just to be with him, just to be with his pain and suffering, to surrender completely into the helplessness, to hold stillness and calmness in the middle of such agitation. It was the most challenging when he was in crisis (as often he would be) through the usually hour-long periods of “shift-change.” Those were times when no one would be available for meds or any other help. All there was for it was to breathe together, to hold hands and inwardly to ask the Grandmothers for their help and support.
I lost it completely when, under Demerol, he crashed in hypoglycemic shock and nearly died. I had my major meltdown on the phone with my sister and then on my aunt’s shoulder in the waiting room. This while they worked to rebalance him and changed his thoroughly sweat-soaked bed and gown. Then I was back in the calm, totally just-this-skinny-slice-of-now place.
All there was to life in these long days was being present in just-this-skinny-slice-of-now, just the very immediate moment of what was unfolding. Nothing else existed for us, except the phone reports to my step mom and close family. All the ordinary details of life fell away. It was like the traveling time, a timeless ahistorical present. We were adrift for days in the not-here, not-there, not-anywhere liminal zone.
Even though they seemed to be trying to kill him, my father recovered, moved on to a rehab facility for two weeks and finally got “sprung” to home this past week. He’s been absolutely ferocious in his commitment to returning to his normal mobility. From all indications, this seems quite likely!
My sister, my stepsister and I had rotated, taking turns in Florida so that he and step mom would not be alone through these weeks. At a point when, at last, things seemed well on their way toward his move to the rehab facility, I came home for a brief time between two “turns” there.
Home now for just a week as I write the second half of this tale, I am in the middle of total amazement. Both at how well he’s doing and, too, at how well I’m doing! Usually, it takes me at least 10 days to recover from my barely three day visits there twice a year. This time, despite the incredible, overwhelming challenges, I’ve come home twice without any of the familiar psychic, physical and emotional exhaustion that ordinarily mark such transitions.
Every aspect of my re-entry has been gentle, smooth, easy. I am neither exhausted nor disoriented. It’s as though I’ve been able to quietly slip back into my life without a single missed breath. It’s astonishing to witness this seemingly new self emerging. Clearly, I am different than I’ve ever been. And, I’ve no real understanding (yet) of how this comes to be so in me just now.
Some of this change seems to be born of the miracle that came in the middle of this trying and scary time with my dad. The time we spent alone with each other was extraordinary. We haven’t had that kind of time in at least thirty years. Or, maybe ever. When he wasn’t in crisis, we talked desultorily about this and that: what he was going through, our shared history, the craziness in the world, the family, reminiscences and a marveling at the wonder of our being together in this way. Many of our hours together were silent as he drifted in and out of drugged or exhausted sleep. But, through all the hours, the powerful closeness, the deep connection between us was so strongly present for both of us. This was the miracle, the opportunity in the middle of the crisis. There was something profoundly calming and healing in this greater, more conscious connectedness we experienced together.
I imagine as there is time to reflect more, to assimilate and to digest all that’s happened I may well “see” more what this newness is/is about. For the moment, it seems enough just to recognize and acknowledge the wonder of the awareness that I am somewhere new inside my self/my life.
Originally published April 2003
