Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 28-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Yesterday, I hugged him while he was sitting on the bed. He was standing when I left. I hugged him again and said, “I love you so much, Dad.”
Today I want to be there when the doctor arrives, to see if he really should go home. I will take him home in his car. I will get him settled. I will stay the night. I am the right person for this. I am concerned about his meds. I am concerned about how Mom will react. I am worried about the delirium and the possibility of another heart attack. I will stay the night. I will stay two nights if necessary. I wish I had some clean socks. All this coming and going.
It feels very life and death. I have to be there. Our whole history is in my hands. I want this to go smoothly. He has a walker. We will get to the car. I will put it in the trunk. We’ll get home. Mom’s chest will heave in anxiety. Her lips will tremble. I’ll try to get them both to sit down. Mom has congestive heart failure—an ongoing condition as opposed to an episode. I am the right person, but I have never done anything like this before.
Time has gone all funny. On Wednesday, my Mom said, “You haven’t been here for a while.”
“Yes,” I said. “I have. I was just here.”
Then I had to think when that was. What day did I go and see Dad to find out that he had delirium? Two days ago. The same day Mom and I went to see him when I left her at the front doors of the hospital with her walker before parking the car, rather than have her walk so far.
I asked her to wait right where she was, but she kept rolling toward the main doors of the hospital. I wanted to park the car and come back to where she was; I asked her to wait. She kept moving forward. How annoying.
It’s a transition. Slow down and make sure that she’s completed tasks safely.
“Let’s get you seated on the walker over to the side,” I said.
She sat down on the walker seat. I put the brakes on.
“I’m going to take your purse,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I’ll keep it with me.”
“I’m going to take it,” I said. “We don’t know who is around here.”
My brother thinks they let street people sleep in the waiting room of Emergency. Street people in the country? I don’t really get that.
I took her purse and went to park the car, concentrating on details. I couldn’t quite see her from the pay station, but I knew she must be there. And she was. She waved as I approached.
“Who’d have thought, after everything you and I have been through together, that we’d end up here, eh?” I said, thinking it just wasn’t that long ago. None of it was.
Everything, meaning birthday parties in the backyard, Halloween-costume tantrums, scrapped knees, all the Christmas turkeys. And now this.
