Life throws you curveballs, my dear.
This is a sentence someone I’ve known for a very long time whispered into my ear late last night and the whisperer of this nugget of truth knows precisely what she’s talking about. She’s dealing with her own screwy pitches right about now – we all are – and I felt in her hug and her whisper a bolt of blatant empathy I found rather comforting. Maybe others might have felt put on the spot by what she said or become offended by being included in her mass of a mess, but I took only kindness and compassion away from her words. Sometimes, I guess, it’s hard to know exactly how you’re supposed to feel or which action you should be taking. Sometimes it’s difficult to delineate when you should just sit still and do absolutely nothing at all. Sometimes it’s really hard to sit still, even while the world around you is spinning and you feel like you’re losing your grip on everything, including gravity.
The thing about life and family and a lifetime spent with family is that it changes – and I’m okay with that, I suppose, as long as the changes can be tracked. Far too logical for my own good, I’m weirded out by shocks and surprises, the ones caused when there’s been little or no preamble to a massive and seismic shift in the family unit. I know it’s a real flaw of mine that I look to find the linear genesis of the journey that got us all here rather than just hopping on the bumpy trip right then and there and allowing myself to be careened forward. No, I look backwards – and it makes me feel dizzy every time.
Here’s what I know for sure now: the term “health scare” does not begin to capture the devastation or the alarm that descends upon you with a weight of tragic heaviness when someone you love – someone you rely upon – falters. Certain things instantaneously stop dead inside of you while other qualities you didn’t even know you had in the first place spring into the kind of action that do not require shit like sleep and sustenance for fuel. With a “health scare,” certain questions finally get answered like Why was he in so much pain? but new questions keep popping up all the time and it becomes really hard to even know where the beginning is anymore. And when you’re like me and you always want to get to the origin of the story, the responses to your questions are never comforting because all you are left wondering is what question you’re going to need to ask next.
My stepfather has been in the hospital for over a week now. Severe back pain, which we were all certain was caused by one thing, was in fact caused by another thing entirely and he was rushed into an emergency surgery that left me in a rocking ball of terror on my living room carpet. I swayed back and forth for about five minutes while holding a photograph of my father to my chest and spoke to it in the way I only do if I’ve completely lost my way. Let him be okay, I whispered. Tears streamed down my face and my puppy – who has never seen me cry before – slowly approached me. She stared for a second at this odd visage before her and then, when I reached out my hand, she scampered into my lap and licked my face in perhaps the sweetest show of solidarity I’ve seen in a very long time.
I’ve become very acquainted with a local hospital. I know the faces of the guys who do the valet parking and I know there’s one who is faster than the others. When I’m feeling particularly anxious, I meet his eye and he runs like the wind to take my ticket in a way I am more grateful for than my tip will probably ever illustrate. I keep my car keys and my house keys separated at this point. I know which food place on the first floor sells good coffee and the sweet candy striper in the gift shop waves to me when I walk by. I made her acquaintance early, on that very first day, when I felt nervous about all I didn’t yet know and realized that maybe doing some shopping would calm me down. The thing is, there’s actually not all that much to buy in a hospital gift shop unless you’re in the market for some slippers – which I don’t wear – or sixty-pound boxes of assorted chocolate, which I’d love to devour in less than an hour without help, but I’ve decided that the one thing this experience is not going to bring me is cellulite. I’m choosing to embrace holding onto that which I can fully control, so instead of a humongous box of Godiva, I bought sugar-free gum and mints and I paused dramatically in front of the selection of Sesame Street plush toys.
“Do you think Jack would like a Snuffleupagus?” I asked my mother early into his stay.
“No, Tuffs,” she responded. “Would you like a Snuffleupagus?”
I did want him. After all, it’s not all that common to find a Snuffleupagus in stores, but it just seemed like the wrong time. I bought Jack ChapStick instead because he kept pointing to his lips.
I’ve met doctors who specialize in infectious disease, the art of swallowing, physical therapists, and surgeons. They all speak very loudly and they have all shown remarkable kindness. Most are somewhat confused as to who I am and they keep mentioning that only immediate family is permitted in the ICU. Are you his daughter? I keep being asked this question. “Yes,” I respond with a smile because that’s how I always describe my relationship with him – but then I watch with a smile as bewilderment sets in all around us because I call him “Jack,” not “Dad,” and my stepsisters came to the hospital at the end of the week and we look nothing alike because we have completely separate sets of parents and I could see the doctors trying to put our complicated family dynamic into place in their heads. I wanted to explain it all at one point, but I knew there were other things we should all be concentrating on instead.
I feel like I’ve taken an intense Biology class in less than a week – and I feel like I ended up with a C, just like every other Biology class I’ve ever taken in my life. Still, I’ve learned the definitions of things like “staph infection” and what the frontal lobe of the brain controls. I’ve seen some good days and some very bad days that I could have sworn were made up of far more than twenty-four hours. I’ve taken time off work and sent friends sub plans. I’ve been almost gobsmacked by the resilience of both my mother and my brother and I’ve learned to use the railing of a hospital bed to hold me steady while I do leg-lifts.
I have realized that sometimes nothing is quite as exhausting as sitting all fucking day.
But I have also had moments where my stepfather whispers to me that the doctors speak so loudly and it’s annoying him and times when he’s held my hand and brought it up to his lips to give it a few quick kisses. He’s back to knowing exactly where he is and who everybody who walks through his curtain is and I think it’s nice that he didn’t slap me or tell me to go fuck myself when he reached up and pulled a tube out of his nose and I shoved it back in and looked straight into his eyes and told him to cut the bullshit. One of the doctors asked him what he did for a living, and he responded, “I built a wing on this hospital.” He’s been cleared to eat and the terror of the last week is finally somewhat abating and, when he eventually gets out of ICU, it will be time for him to get healthy in the way we’ve all been pleading with him to embrace.
He’s going to need rehab for his back and I’m not sure there’s ever been a more difficult patient on record. The good people at whatever rehab center he’ll be checked into have absolutely no idea what they’re in for. “You might need to call in the cavalry,” I said quietly to his physical therapist – and when she laughed, I looked her straight in the eye and told her I was serious.
It’s in these moments, though, that I feel the most alone. I want to just come home and be greeted by a warm hug and maybe a cup of tea and a salad with vegetables I don’t have to slice myself. I want someone else to field the phone calls and the text messages. There have been so many – too many. It’s sweet, of course. I’m beyond grateful that people care about my family and me, but sometimes there’s nothing to report and sometimes there’s too much to report. Saying words like, “Nothing’s really changed,” depletes you of hope. Saying other words like, “Possible stroke,” almost destroys whatever you’ve convinced yourself is still inside and keeping you going, even if you know at this point you’re just running on fumes.
I’ve experienced some very odd moments in the last week that I blame on having too much time to think and not enough time to actually process anything that’s going on. Maybe my psyche has been working overtime to try to balance everything and that’s why my dreams have been entirely fucked up. My stepfather is not in any of them and my real father is not either, but other men are showing up and they’re so vivid that I can smell them. One who made a long cameo was an ex-boyfriend. In the dream, he arrived at some family event – it could have been a wedding, but I can’t recall – and we had this sweet kiss that was pretty chaste. But the girl he was with – a girl I know – was not about to read our smooch as anything other than incriminating and she sat me down in the dream to tell me everything the guy had ever said about me that he didn’t like. I can remember thinking in the dream that I knew things he had said about her too, but that I wouldn’t say anything because I didn’t want to hurt her needlessly, even when she smiled meanly and blurted out, “He says you’re moody!” Dream Me laughed loudly and announced, “He’s right!”
Another guy I used to know well showed up wearing a baseball hat. It was blue, but I have no idea if it was a Yankees hat or some other team. What I remember thinking in my dream was that he never wears a baseball hat but that he did once show me a picture of him wearing one. He hugged me tightly while I was drifting through some trippy REM cycle and I woke up feeling that embrace before the tingle of confusion set in. He’s not, after all, the person I’d most associate with hugs – and I hope the baseball hat thing was only a sign that he’s embraced his sporty side and not that he’s going bald because I really loved his hair.
In the time I’ve spent awake – which is far too much time – there was a moment I turned my phone over and saw a text. It was from a guy I had an incredibly fun fling with, but I kind of thought our fling had been flung. When all of this started to go down – all of these fears and all of these frantic trips to the hospital and all of these questions about when I would actually have some time to do my fucking laundry – I thought about the people I wanted to talk to and I reached out to most of them. This guy wasn’t on that mental list even though he’s a really good guy. I guess I just don’t have any real kind of emotional attachment to him and I’m not used to that lack of connection, especially when that lack does not equate frustration. I hope he’s not reading this because I’ll feel somewhat badly that it’s coming off like I don’t care about him because I do care about him – but I know now that there is a real difference between how I feel about some men and how I feel about others. In any event, he texted me on Friday, a simple, “How are you?” and it took me a minute before I was able to figure out how to answer the question that, a week ago, would not have been fraught with any sort of fear or tension.
It’s scary how quickly life can change in just one week. It’s scarier still that things could always be worse than they are right now.
I ate a package of Chuckles from the hospital gift shop last Wednesday and I hated myself for it. I drove home and talked myself out of stopping at McDonald’s or Burger King and I made myself accelerate when I saw a Taco Bell in the distance. My brother told me he ate a Whopper and my mother worried for five days straight that she wouldn’t fit into her dress for my niece’s Bat Mitzvah, the one that was taking place in the midst of all of this. I told her that she was being ridiculous, that a fluctuation in her weight was so not a big deal. Then I got home and took off every bit of clothing I was wearing and stared at myself naked in the full-length mirror, turning slowly so I could be sure that I hadn’t grown fat – that stress, anxiety, and a package of Chuckles hadn’t yet altered my BMI.
I called my sister and told her that our stepfather had a full conversation with me on Friday, read the word “legendary” off my shirt without me asking him to do it, made a negative comment about Hillary Clinton, and, when I left and a cute doctor walked in, told my mother that she should call me quickly and tell me to get back to the hospital immediately. Her response was to inquire about more surgeries and possible horrors like cancer and I finally had to take a deep breath and slowly tell her that – in the space of so much shit going down – when she gets what is unequivocally good news, she needs to embrace it. Then I hung up the phone and looked again at the picture of my father and asked him to send me an extra dose of strength. I think he might have been busy from all of my other requests, but I hope he’ll get to that last one soon. I probably should have asked for patience instead of strength, but I figure the strength can cover a magnitude of issues.
I contemplated becoming an alcoholic this week purely for escapism purposes, but I only had one bottle of wine in the house and I figured I should save it for company.
A long group text started by my brother to keep us all informed of what was going on one night when things did not look so good kept growing, lengthening like the tail of a terrifying and scaly mythical creature. The pings from my phone were incessant and began to slowly drive me insane. I could almost feel my mind starting to sizzle from frustration and a solid kind of fear and, when yet another text came in from one of my stepsisters, I broke and started typing. They will text you when they have information. Stop asking questions nobody can answer right now. I knew my text would shut everybody up for the time being. I also knew that there were undoubtedly private texts all of a sudden flying around about what a bitch I am and that they were only trying to find out what was happening and I simply decided not to care about any of that, not for a single second. I realized in that moment that I would happily exchange how people perceive me for just a minute of some fucking solitude, and I also realized that we’re part of the same family and they’d end up forgiving me eventually anyway.
The next day at the hospital, one of my stepsisters began to explain why she had texted all of those questions and I just waved her excuses away because she shouldn’t feel badly at all for having questions – but I also wouldn’t be made to feel badly about the fact that I was done hearing those questions and we agreed to call it a draw.
What is becoming far too clear is that we all deal with things differently and that complicates things in ways that nobody can really prepare for. I try. I know that I shut down emotionally in a crisis and that my eyes and my voice turn cold. I know that it’s a defense mechanism that I immediately prepare myself for the worst-case scenario because I never again want to be surprised by the death of a loved one. I know that I get quiet when other people get loud and that my mother is fucking phenomenal in a crisis and that my brother can and will sleep in a chair. I know that I drove towards the hospital on Day 2 of this nightmare and repeated aloud to myself to be as outwardly kind and compassionate as I really am inside, to not allow my fear to harden my interactions with those who need me. You can fall apart later, I told myself as I made a right turn down a pretty tree-lined street. It was an easy agreement to make with myself because I knew I would never break later. That strength I worried for a while was depleted is back; I no longer think it went away in the first place. I think maybe it was just sleeping.
Sure, I might have had to postpone writing for a site I was excited to join for the time being, but I found an extra twenty minutes to go get my eyebrows waxed. I arranged what could be arranged because I wanted to surround myself with things that made sense. I set up an appointment for my dog sitter to come on the day of my niece’s Bat Mitzvah so I wouldn’t feel the need to rush home from Westchester and I checked with my sister to be sure that she’d be okay with me showing up in sweatpants and changing into my dress at the venue so the sequins wouldn’t come off during the long drive. I got my makeup done that morning and asked the girl doing it to give me the kind of smoky eye that made me look like I’d been on a glamorous bender for five days straight since that’s how I felt – minus the glamour part. I showed up and walked into the room to find my sister and her daughter looking more beautiful than ever before and I slipped into my dress, walked around to see how amazing everything looked, found a great white tufted couch in an empty room, and sprawled across it while my sister snapped my picture. My brother, looking later at my photos, held that particular one up and said – with absolutely no humor in his voice – that I’m his sister and he’d rather not see me looking like that. I was just glad he didn’t flip back through my phone to see anything even more scandalous because Lord knows that shit is on there, too.
The party was soothing in a way I hadn’t expected. I was excited to be there for my niece’s big day, but there was no way to deny that it was coming at a very bad time. We would all be away from my stepfather and he didn’t want anyone else to visit him because he’s not about looking weak in front of people. His is a mindset I understand, one that I recognize from somebody who came before. But I was not looking forward to getting dressed up and I figured my shoes would hurt and that I’d spend the entire day answering two questions:
1. How is Jack feeling?
2. How do you walk in those shoes?
With preservation of my own sanity in mind, I created answers to both before I even arrived:
1. He’s feeling much better, thank you. No, we still don’t know exactly when he’s getting out of the hospital, but I’ll be sure to keep you posted!
2. Carefully and painfully.
I managed to extricate myself from nearly all complicated conversations in under three minutes flat. That’s a good thing; it usually takes me about five minutes to slink away from someone gracefully. I danced in my heels the entire evening with nary a searing pain shooting up my leg, which is also an improvement as I often leave events with feet that have turned an alarming shade of blue that I’m pretty sure is the color Crayola would title “Agony.” I all but knocked some child out of the way so I could get to the cotton candy station first. I ate almost nothing else and I didn’t drink a thing because I just wasn’t in the mood to hold anything else.
I felt a lot of love in that room and in the rooms of the hospital where we’ve all spent a lot of time. We sometimes express that love differently, and I’m trying to be better about understanding those differences while attempting to be less judgmental about others and myself. But I know there actually sometimes is a “right” thing and a “wrong” thing one can do in a fraught and emotionally enflamed situation, and I am at least attempting to crawl in the direction of what’s right.
I hope just someone wonderful is waiting for me at the finish line with some cotton candy in his hand – and that he won’t ask me for even a small bite because some things might change and I might have the desire to always do what’s right, but I’m way too busy this week to master the art of sharing and that fluffy cloud of pure sugar is mine.
Nell Kalter teaches Film and Media at a school in New York. She is the author of the books THAT YEAR and STUDENT, both available on amazon.com in paperback and for your Kindle.