forthebook's Diaryland
Diary
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That one post
Maybe I’m ready to write about it now.
Maybe. We’ll see.
I still have bad days. I still have days where I remember: taking off from work to see an oncologist who told us that there was nothing we could do (and, a couple of weeks later, calling them to say I’d be late because we were talking to one who said that there was); the smell of the hospital halls and passing by the same family every night whose mother got more precaution signs on her door every week and smiling at the little boy who paraded around the floor in his surgical mask to keep the germs out of his grandmother’s room; watching my father move in and out of consciousness in the ICU ward after his first surgery and being really scared for the first time because the machines in there intimidated me as if I was six and not twenty-one because I didn’t understand what the sounds meant, but I knew they frightened me; seeing my father cry and ask me questions about life that I had no idea how to answer like where she was and what day it was over and over again and how he wasn’t getting better and didn’t want to try anymore; the nurse named Alisoun that I liked the best because of her name and how it comforted me to think she was as kind and caring as AJ would have been as a nurse because she smiled often and always remembered which arm was the ‘bad’ arm and how young she was that I thought maybe she was more like a friend – and how I wanted to ask her all the time “Is he dying?” but never found the courage to do anything more than smile before moving my gaze to the floor when we passed her in the hall; my father with his hair shaved off in Rehab because he hadn’t been able to wash it or comb it or cut it in two months so he just got rid of it and how optimistic I was that he was coming home even if I wasn’t sure he was ready and then how heartbreaking it was when his other arm was besieged by the cancer just days before he was transferred; the bottles and bottles of pills we had to keep track of stacked in white plastic baskets I bought at Walmart for $2 and how my mother kept track of them on a yellow legal pad for pages and pages of how many fast acting pain killers and slow release pain killers and cancer drugs that came far too late and salt tablets and iron pills and antidepressants and stool softeners and anxiety pills he consumed daily; saying the word “daddy” more times than I have since before my age hit double digits because I called him “Kyle” because he was my friend when we talked about college and jobs and alcohol and the hard things in life that I had fucked up with; knowing who was there for me when I started to crack and snap at people at work and to not care about school and skip classes and drink myself to points of exhaustion or maybe just points of distraction and wonder why anything was worth doing when all that mattered to me was at home which I still hated to be at – and at the same time, knowing more who wasn’t; watching CSI in Vegas and New York and Miami and House with him like we did in Rehab and at Queens and how we used to just do at home on my parents’ bed because I made sure I took the night off at the restaurant to see it but this time he only listened because we couldn’t raise the TV high enough off the floor and he couldn’t sit up without the pain bothering him but he still told me made up endings of who was going to get shot although he never really knew; the coldness of the ice water I soaked a washcloth in at four in the morning the day before it happened and crying and writing and wishing to God that I actually believed in God (I wondered, I really did, that if there was a God, then would he forgive me for my mockery of faith if I just could believe in Him and then maybe, maybe he would change things because I was so desperate) but knowing that trying to keep his fever under control was all I could really do; my grandmother wrapping her arms around me when she found me in the doorway of my bedroom curled with my arms around my knees on the floor and telling me over and over that it would be okay when I knew it really wasn’t going to be because it still isn’t; wishing you were at the service even though I knew the chances were slim and then you told me that you couldn’t make it and I knew I had to be strong because the only way I could be weak was if you were there too and I didn’t freak out once – I kept the tears mostly in the back of my throat and I swallowed them over and over even if it felt like the worst pain I could be in because I had to be strong and I had to see things through for myself.
I still have bad days. But it feels so good to write this, even though it still smarts something awful.
4:53 p.m. - 2018-11-24
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