I woke up this morning to a series of messages from my brother alerting me to the fact that my father was back in the hospital, after being discharged less than a week ago, with pneumonia. My first thought was how grateful I was that this started happening after I was back on dry land and accessible by phone & email and text.
My second thought was how the timing totally sucks. I have just returned from a weeklong trip and I am behind on everything (except perhaps sleep) and if I ever needed a visit from my best friend, it is now. But, I am acutely aware of the truth of the Yiddish proverb “Man makes plans, God laughs.” In other words, I should have seen this coming. My life was too nicely aligned for everything to go smoothly. If it hadn’t been a medical crisis with my father, it would have been something else.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how lost at sea I feel (and yes, I chose that metaphor deliberately). We kind of went through something similar with David’s grandfather a few years back. There was a period where he would get horribly weak and we would all make plans to come see him and then the crisis would pass and life would go as back to normal as possible. I remember feeling like life was off-balance at the time, but this feels different.
For one, David’s grandfather had this incredible capacity to bounce back after one of his scary episodes. I keep waiting for my father to bounce back, but it just isn’t happening. Instead my father just seems to be getting weaker and weaker. Now, it may just be that the pneumonia had been lingering this whole time, which is why he never seemed to get better. But even if that is the case, my father doesn’t have a lot of resilience, so an extended illness is just going to leave him weaker than he was before.
Then there is my fear that we are at a point that I can only refer to in my mind as the stage-that-shall-not-be-named. I truly have no idea if I am being overly anxious or just preparing myself for the inevitable. My brother is heading into the hospital in a few hours and hopefully I will get an update then, but so far everything I know is third-hand. Even so, my gut is telling me to move my trip up and head east this week. The worst that can happen is that I see my father sooner than I had planned and everything turns out ok (or as ok as can be expected).
And there is an upside. It means I will get to spend my birthday with my niecelettes (As I said previously, this may be mostly about my father, but they are still an awesome bonus). And, if everything turns out ok, I can always take a road trip and spend a night with my best friend in Philly where we can eat at our favorite Mexican restaurant. She and I had big plans for her upcoming visit, but we can reschedule it and still do everything we wanted to do.
Addendum: I have decided to go out sooner rather than later. I leave Thursday morning and at the moment, I have no return date.