I Did Not Want to Go...
- ~Tinooselove
- Jun 26, 2019
- 10 min read
Updated: Jun 27, 2019
Welcome to Tinoose's Other World! I wanted to break in my new blog and website Tinoose's World with a re-post about my dad that I originally published on November 11, 2008 in Tinoose’s Other World. The post was deleted because my photos were held for ransom by Photobucket in their attempt to monetize 3rd party hosting in 2017. That was the end of my blog, and almost all of my online records of my doll collection and stories were permanently lost as a result of the cleanup that I had to do after deleting my Photobucket account. Thankfully, I had saved two posts because they were extra special to me. Here is the first one…
While cleaning up some of my old files on my laptop this evening, I found this thing that I wrote on January 15, 2007-- almost a year before the death of my father on January 2nd of this year. It was kind of a shock to come across this document all these many months later, and it brings with it a fresh rush of grief as I remember my father once again.
***
January 15, 2007 I really didn’t want to go to my parents’ house this Sunday. It was very cold outside, the buses were on the Sunday/Holiday (i.e. hardly running) schedule, and I was sick, very tired, and depressed, and honestly, all I wanted to do was go back home and crawl back into bed. I've had this epic battle (Should I or shouldn't I?) raging in my mind and heart all morning long about it, and every time I came to a decision it wasn’t long before I'd flip to the other one. Mentally, I pictured the buses I would have to catch in order to get over there from my church, imagined the thick brown cloud of nicotine that has become the normal forecast at my folks' place because of my dad’s chain smoking, recognized the headache that I would end up with from the visit, tried to resign myself into committing to another afternoon of dealing with my mom’s broken-record lament for her only son, half-heartedly planned the logistics of making a stop in the middle of the trip in order to pick up some lunch for them, struggled with the knowledge that I should stay a while for my parents versus giving in to the overwhelming urge to flee back to the quiet balm of my own little apartment in Capital Hill. Visiting my mom and dad always required a lot of planning and stamina and resolve, and I desperately wanted to put it off.
After navigating the dangers of walking through rugged piles of ice and snow along a heavily trafficked Quebec Street, I finally arrived at the doorsteps of my childhood home, and I used my key to let myself in—my dad is often physically unable to get to the door and my mom never hears the pounding and the yelling, so last year we finally made copies of the house keys to use in case of an emergency. I've only used them for non-emergencies thus far. My mother was sitting in the living room knitting something, watching television and talking to someone inside of her head. She glanced up at me and said “Oh, Tina’s here. I feel better now.” That was both one of the oddest and most poignant greeting (even though it wasn’t directed at me) that my mother has ever put forth, and I paused for a moment before coming all the way into the house and shutting the door –the light, the fresh air, the world- behind me. The house was very hot as usual, but on that particular day I welcomed the heat.
As I unpacked the lunches from a Japanese place between my church and my parents' house, I automatically answered my mother's deluge of questions: Where is Gladys? Is Carlton coming? Is the baby ok? Are you hungry? Is it Saturday? Are they going to take your father away soon? “Me fyowa you lanchee mochoteeta—nisu! Lureta salumondu-Japanesu!” I brightly announced to my mother and showed her the ginger salmon bowls. Her round face lit up and she opened her eyes wide. Taking a fork from me, my mom poked around in her bowl for a moment before she tucked in like a very hungry little kid. Satisfied with her progress, I carried the 2nd bowl into my father’s room just off of the living room. His room, as usual, was dark (heavy curtains drawn, walls stained brown with nicotine and age, the glow from the TV and a small florescent fixture are the only sources of weak light in the room) and dreary. While my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I looked sadly over my father, taking inventory. He was a skeletal figure curled up on one side of the bed that he used to share with my mother, big eyes staring at the screen. He seemed surprised to see me standing there, but did not move or say a word. I encouraged him to try the salmon that I brought, telling him that it was my favorite dish from the restaurant, and assured him that it was really good. Since he made no move to take the bowl, I set it down on a chair that he used as a table (every other surface was covered with mail, coins, pill bottles, and neatly folded socks). I hesitated for a moment at the doorway, for I never knew what to say to my father, but then I turned and left his room to rejoin my mom on the old striped avocado-green couch.
She was still steadily eating, and so with a sigh, I opened up my own bowl. For the next couple of minutes, the only sounds were the blare of the football game in my dad’s room (Chicago VS Seattle), the faint drone of the traffic on Quebec Street, the annoying buzz and rattle of my dad’s oxygen unit, my mom’s noisy chewing and audible gulping, her faint mutterings, and the scrape of metal forks against Styrofoam containers. My mom asked me, “Is this red salmon?” Yes, I replied. “Japanese restaurant, right? Oh, oh…oh… the rice is good. Tokyo Japanese restaurant?” she asked. Uh… how did she know? It was from the Tokyo-San Bowl over on 7th and Colorado Blvd! “Cook a man or a woman? How much was it?” All the while she dribbled rice and big chunks of salmon down her front as she consumed the meal. I watched her from the corners of my eyes and chuckled at her enthusiasm. It was such a pleasure to see her eat with so much happiness. She wore thick cream colored socks that she knitted with her gnarled hands, old brown corduroy pants--faded and worn in the knees, a long sleeved pink t-shirt, and a knee-length teal tie-dyed sleeveless twill dress pulled over the whole ensemble. Her hair was pulled back into a low ponytail—gray, white, yellow (from the nicotine), and very thin. I wanted to cry when I looked at my mother’s hair. It used to be so thick and black and shiny. When did she get so old?
In between bites of fish, I would lean over to the left on the sofa in order to look into my dad’s room to see if he had started eating yet. No... he was still just lying there listlessly. I briefly worried that my mom would take his bowl away and eat it herself if he didn't get started. She really loves fish. After we finished eating, my mom opened up a bright yellow I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter container and thrusted it under my nose. It was filled with bright and sugary and stale Apple Jacks. She was saving them for her 6 year old granddaughter. She could not understand why my brother and his daughter didn’t visit every week (they live in Texas), but it never stopped her from buying food for them in anticipation and an unshakable faith that they would knock on the door at any moment. She generously said that I could have some. I took a few and popped them in my mouth as I leaned over again to see if there’s been any change in my dad’s room. My dad had rolled over to the other side of the bed, but he was still just lying there quietly.
My mom talked nonstop, this time about how I should punch the lights out of the Japanese man-cook for charging $7 for the bowl of fish and rice. (I lied-- it was really almost $10 a bowl, but she didn't need to know that.) After a brief diversion (my mom spilled her water and we scrambled to get it mopped up), I looked into my dad's room once again and realized with a start that he was sitting up in his bed and eating. I was so happy! Like my mother, he ate every drop and declared the meal delicious. After clearing away the mess from the lunches and picking rice off the sofa where my mom was sitting, I got up and sat on my dad’s bed next to him and asked him how he was doing.
“Same old same old,” he said moodily. His body was folded nearly in half as he rested his elbows on his legs and hung his head. He assumes this position so he could draw breath in and out of his lungs. It made lip-reading impossible, but this position was one that gave my dad’s voice a reassuring resonance that is normally lacking due to the ugly symptoms of COPD and congestive heart failure. Both have rendered his voice thin and weak and full of phlegm. The cave created by his body from the position he took--the small space between his head and the floor-- all came together and created full and deep acoustics as he spoke. If I close my eyes, I could pretend that my dad was still healthy, able-bodied, and muscled. If I close my eyes, I couldn’t see his naked scalp through the sparse crinkles of yellow-ish gray hair, couldn’t see the swollen skin framing the urine-yellow “whites” of his eyes, I won’t see the former boxer reduced to knobs and bones, and loose, dry, and flaky skin. If I close my eyes, I can’t see my dad’s dying spirit struggling to remain upright and stoic, just as life and decades in the Air Force demanded.
My dad talked non-stop, just as my mother did earlier. He repeated himself –as he did every single time I visited—about how the IRS screwed him when he retired from their Colorado office after 10 years of service. He talked about how my mom drove him crazy with her behavior (she has schizophrenia), about how these people called him all day long trying to sell him things that he didn't want or need. As he talked, I glanced around his room as if seeing it for the first time. I stared at the muddy walls, remembering the cool moss green paint that my mom and my brother and I painted there one summer afternoon years ago. I looked at my dad’s massive accumulation of mail, wondered if any of it could be thrown away. I puzzled over the coins spread all over his desk. Why? I gazed over my dad’s bent head into a corner of his room, overwhelmed by the understanding that this room has become my dad’s haven, his resting place.
My dad talked and rocked himself gently, and then suddenly he took a detour and started to reminisce about his mother. “I really miss my mother a lot,” he said, “She was the only one I could ever talk to, and I could talk to her about anything, and she always understood me. And even when she didn’t understand she always tried to understand or took the time to learn more about what it is she didn’t understand. And I could talk to my mother about anything.” He told me about how my grandmother once sent him $50 –which was an incredible amount of money back in the days—and how the unexpected gift had literally saved his life. He talked about how he’d never asked his mother for money, and about how he always wanted to do for her instead, even after he got married and started his own family. I was startled by this sudden change in the topic, and I felt incredible sadness because my grandmother—his mother—had passed away about 4 years earlier. I thought about how lonely my dad must have been in those long years without his mother’s weekly calls, without his mother’s love. I could hear the longing in his voice and in his words. Just because he never talked about it, just because he never showed any weakness, we as a family never talked about things like that, as well. I knew that my dad was depressed after his mom died, he showed signs of it to be sure, but to ask him about it, he was always 'fine.' When my grandmother died, it was a shock to us all despite her age. None of us knew that she was sick with cancer because she did not want us to know. By the time we found out, a mere hour before her death, it was too late. She died less than an hour after I called to chat with her and got a home care nurse on the phone instead. I then called my father in a panic, but by then my grandmother had lapsed into a drugged coma, and he never got to talk to her, never got to hear her tell him what was going on, never got to hear his mother’s love for one last time. And I truly understood at that moment sitting next to my father in his bedroom that he was still deeply grieving his mother’s sudden departure from his life.
My dad talked on and on that Sunday afternoon with topic shift after topic shift. He said something about his aunt and why he couldn’t understand why she could “do those things to hurt people” and then turn around and “expect those same people to take care of her when she needs it.” Baffled, I tried to figure out what I had missed when my dad veered off again to talk about a newspaper article that was written many years ago about him and his father, about how his father was a boxer before him, about his family, and then he said, “...and I guess that’s really what it is all about.” And just like that, his words choked to a halt. I looked closely at my father and realized that he was sobbing. I have never seen my daddy cry before, and without a second thought or hesitation, I reached out and started to slowly rub his back.
I really didn’t want to go to my parents’ house this Sunday.
But I am so glad that I did.
~Tinooseus!
This is very sad and bittersweet. Thank you.
Very beautiful.