recuperating
Saturday, Jan. 15, 2005
@ 1:18 p.m.
for me and for many, the weekend is an only-time for recuperation. it's a necessary resting space we reserve away from work and play and responsibility because work and play and responsibility are all very tiring. before i began to recuperate last night, before i had a chance to recount my many blessings and prior to opening a book or running myself a bath, i was compelled to call my father. i don't talk to him often: when i do call my parents' house i usually speak with my mother, who demands the most familial companionship by far. if she had picked up the phone, there's a good chance i would have forgotten i'd wanted to talk to him at all. the man who answered the phone was not my father. which is to say that while it actually was my father, it was the first time i've heard him sound his age...which is seventy-one. the shaky voice on the other end of the line was nothing like the one i remember. a few weeks ago, we found out that he's going blind. the arteries behind his eyes aren't functioning properly, and yesterday he went to the hospital for a biopsy. everyone had hoped the surgeon would find the problem and be able to prescribe something other than the steriods he's been made to take for the past three weeks, but instead he was prescribed more and told to take twelve of them every day. the side effects of this type of steroids, aside from making him speak and shake like an old man, include diabetes, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, panic attacks and elevated risk of heart attack or stroke. having read the pamphlet, it shouldn't have surprised me that he sounded like a different man, but it was still confusing. like any child does, at least during their formative years, i'd imagined him immortal.so it is that i have been forced to accept my father's mortality. that his recuperation is unlike my own. while he will recover from the surgery, he won't recover from his blindness. he won't recover from the effects of the prescription. and if he did, if life somehow allowed him an evasion of every possible malady, he still could not possibly recover from a shorter life span. as important as that sounds, it wasn't what he wanted to talk about on the phone. he asked about me. and in comparison to what i knew he must be feeling, my weekend of recuperation was immediately unnoteworthy. i told him about the funny things i'd seen lately. about the good in my life that was like the good in his. and that i was happy, even if i suspected it was fading or fleeting or false.i know my father will stop taking the drugs. and he will go blind. and that then, he will really start to show his age. luckily, i also know that when it comes to making that kind of decision--to waste away under the sway of medication or to lose his sight and remain more or less himself otherwise--my father will not account for self pity. he won't stop to analyse his life or lament his age and shortcomings. and if this man, who abandoned a profitable upper-management lifestyle to be poor and raise his children on a farm he didn't even own, who was patient and firm in his resolve, who found the funniest and the best in everything and talked to us for hours about things parents just don't bother telling their children, would inevitably come to accept even his own age and death...then so would i.this weekend i will begin a recuperation from my self-centered lifestyle. i will do what is necessary instead of what is comfortable. i will consider being wrong instead of fighting to be right. i will cease to be self-observant. i will stop feeling empathy and start being empathetic. this weekend will mark the beginning of a walk in the shoes of someone i have never doubted, and whom i respect, honour and value; and when i've recovered, they won't be his shoes anymore. they'll be mine.
if he is able to accept his mortality, so will i be. in turn, i hope to be able to accept my own. hopefully--which is to say, with and full of hope--i will learn to live my life without only myself in mind.