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Monday, 06 September, 2010
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| Unexpectedly Coping |
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| Written by RJ Lavallee | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 14 July 2009 05:13 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In the weeks since I last posted, a lot has been going on, and has gone on. The last four Little League games of the season. Our first and only playoff game. The start of the recreational swimming season. The end of the school year. Each one of these things came with its own little set of concerns and responsibilities like my role as manager of the Little League team, and role as director of the swim team. Maybe it was my being overwhelmed by too many responsibilities. Maybe it was simple fatigue. Or maybe it was that I have yet to really confront the emotions that are wrapped up in what happened to my father almost ten years ago, but the moment I remember the most over the past three weeks – more than the boys ending the school year, or my team's last Little League game – was last week when I was walking through Target. As I turned down the aisle to get a new 25 pound box of cat litter I passed a man riding one of those mobility scooters. He might have been as much as ten years older than my own father, or as little as five years older. His age was not the issue. My father is in great shape for a man his age, and he will be the first person to claim it's my mother who has made sure he's maintained such great physical condition over the past ten years, but when you look at him sitting in his wheelchair you may be surprised to learn that he is almost 73. In the best of circumstances I think we all have a difficult time as children watching and comprehending that our parents are crossing the threshold into being elderly. I am fortunate enough to be very surprised by my parents' chronological age given their behavior and appearance. They don't look or act their age, and I mean that in a good way. This surface issue – their seeming younger than their actual years – masks a larger paradox of aging. I can only imagine the splendor and fear that my parents feel as they crest into the twilight of their years. The right of passage of having your own parents pass on, leaving you as the elders, as the matriarch or patriarch of a family has to be a mind-bending moment in ones' life. I, on the other hand – after all it is always about me – am in that middle ground: watching parents age, and watching my children grow. Seeing that my oldest boy, Tanner, is already on the threshold of tweenie-dome – he's turning ten in October – is amazing, and also frightening, since the initial reaction I have is “how can he already be ten,” which I rapidly follow with “that means I'm ten years older.” Yikes. So as I passed this elderly man in the Target you might imagine that I was struck by his age, and the parallel that my father is also aging, and that having my father in a wheelchair, and seeing this man in one of those mobility carts elicited empathetic feelings, or longing because my father is, after all, 3000 miles away. I have to admit that I felt none of that. Maybe as I deconstructed what was in my head afterwards I did start to see or feel a little of that, but I was struck by something far more palpable. This man that I saw had a dressing on his left arm. As I walked to his left, as we passed each other, going opposite directions in the aisle, I couldn't take my eyes off the gauze dressing on his left forearm. The dressing was fairly clean, but in the very center, along a strip about a half inch wide by five inches long, you could see that for whatever wound that the man had the dressing, it was weeping, that tell tale color of a wound that was going to take a long time to heal: a dark, brownish red, ringed by a putrid yellow. Instantly I was rocketed back ten years to the moment six weeks after Tanner was born, the first day I arrived in Dubai and went to see my father in a hospital bed, two days after the collision between his body and an SUV spilled eight pints of his blood over the arid street corner of the neighborhood he had called home for the prior six months. There he was. Prostate. Oxygen piped to his nose. His limp, unresponsive feet cold as ice under thin, inadequate hospital blankets. He looked battered. He clinged to life. He looked old. And it scared the living hell out of me. So here I was in the innocuous aisle of Target staring at this man's wound and all of this other information poured through my senses, all the way back to the smell of that Intensive Care Unit where my father was draped with dressing after dressing: on his forearms, his back, his abdomen, and particularly on his thigh, where a grapefruit sized piece of flesh had been torn from him and left in the grill of the SUV. None of them were healing quickly, and the wound on his thigh was so deep that if I had had the strength and stomach I would have been able to peel aside the dressing and look deep into his thigh, almost to his femur. I wanted to vomit. Standing there in the Target I became dizzy. I didn't know if I wanted to cry, vomit, pass out or all three. I had to keep walking. It took every remaining drop of focus I had to execute each subsequent step forward. Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Down the aisle I continued until I reached the electronics section where I realized I had forgotten why I was in Target to begin with. Cat litter. Right. I'm in electronics. I need to go to the other side of the store. I turned around in time to see the mobility scooter turn tightly to the left, on its way to the registers. So off I went to continue my errand. As I carried the litter to the front of the store, I almost hoped that I would see the elderly man again, allowing me to better grapple with my fears, and painful memories of seeing my father on the precipice of mortality. On the drive home, however, I realized what was the most overwhelming aspect of seeing this man in the mobility scooter. Innocence was lost. Ignorance was gone. I had been face-to-face with the mortality of one of my parents, and, really, of myself. I realize that I'm luckier than others; this moment did not come until I was in my early 30s. Does this mean that returning to the day-to-day little traumas of being the volunteer director of our swim team becomes any less important? Or does it mean that I have any different impression of the politics that swirl around my sons' elementary school? No. If anything I see more importance in these little endeavors that many can easily deem trivial. There are many people I deal with through either the swim team, elementary school, or even through the work for which I'm actually paid. It's not up to me to determine what the importance is, or to quantify the level of importance anyone else places on any of these endeavors. It is my responsibility to make sure I live up to the expectations people have of me fulfilling the roles they've asked me to fill. Maybe concentrating on these responsibilities is a ruse for avoiding dealing with the impossibility of comprehending one's own mortality, or even the mortality of one's parents. But if this is a socially acceptable means of dealing with that impossibility, then I'll stick with it. RJ Lavallee is the author of IMHO (In My Humble Opinion): a guide to the benefits and dangers of today’s communication tools on sale at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and lulu.com.
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