It has been 65 days since papa’s operation. Two months since we came home, tried to gather our lives, created new routines, and then made newer ones on top of them. The last 2 weeks have been the least anxious I remember being. Certain labors have sustained me, TV shows and books have provided distraction and work has come to make me feel content. I suddenly found in my mind space for Merriam-Webster’s ‘Word of the day.’ I am turning into a ‘yahoo’ for I ‘exculpated’ papa for frighting us.
It has been a long journey. We celebrated tiny milestones on the way-the: the first time papa bathed on his own when he drove his car again when he was able to move all the balls on the Respirometer – by merely talking and smiling. I still help him moisturize his legs and we still avoid travel, but we have decided that we will forget anything that ever happened to him once the wound on his leg heals.
In no way, do we see this life as a rebirth. We are painfully aware of what we went through, but we choose to mentally tip-toe around those conversations, around caregiving, and around dealing with exhaustion. We did not talk about the physical trauma of uprooting veins from his legs and planting them back in his heart. We do not acknowledge how much we relied on papa to be a shock absorber, we do not acknowledge how much he absorbed. We are disappointed in ourselves. We deal with it on our own.
And in the dealing, I realized that the hardest thing I dealt with was not the anxiety, the hospitals, the reliance on doctors, or the viscous uncertainty of life. The hardest thing I had to deal with was the realization that papa is human, that he doesn’t fly around with a cape after I sleep to keep this big family together. He merely, only humanly, by being himself, in front of that TV, roots us.
