Life Is But A Dream
April 24th, the day before my birthday, my dad suffered from an aortic dissection. He complained about confusion, lightheadedness, and numbness in one side of his body and was taken to the hospital in Dover, Delaware, near where he was doing a job in his free time, a common pastime of his.
The symptoms subsided and it took the doctors a while to figure out exactly what was going on, but quickly he was flown to Penn Med in West Philly for emergency heart surgery. Somewhere in there, likely when he was under and on bypass, thus making it impossible to judge symptoms, a piece of his heart lodged in his right motor cortex.
My mom and sister went up that night to be with him after he got out of surgery.
I heard the next morning, my birthday morning, about his surgery and stroke.
I also heard about my little cousin running away from home, which he did Friday morning the day before this all went down. He sent me a message one day on Facebook telling me he was unhappy and how he was recently diagnosed with Autism. He thanked me for never judging him. I never responded.
Later that day I decided I would fly there. My mom has a way of making things feel less important than they are, but some instinct in me told me this was more serious than she would ever dare let on, so I booked a flight to Philly and rushed to get my pets boarded and my shit packed.
On Monday I had arrived in Philly, a place I had absolutely no interest in returning to, to be there for my father. Except, at least at first, he wasn’t really there.
My mother and sister were though…
My mom lamented over the next few days about having an “out of body experience” and “not feeling any of this was real.”
She was always very reserved. Even during this time I only ever caught her with wet looking eyes and a neutral looking face twice.
My sister, on the other hand, seemed kept together only to laugh about something unrelated and break down crying for a minute.
I think initially I echo’d my mom. Weird bad shit is going on, better keep it together for everyone else’s benefit. But I guess it was less than that. It was more like what she had expressed to me. I could see his non-present half-open eyes, mouth agape even after they de-intubated him, and saw just another bad day, for him and for me.