The Dimming of the Day

"Any thoughts of suicide?" asked the Doc.
"Sometimes," said my 84 year old father, whose list of ailments is a depraved catalog of aging.
Prostate cancer.
Diabetes.
Congestive heart failure.
Alzheimer's.
Emphysema.
A quadruple bypass that is 25 years old.
There's plenty more, I just can't remember it all. He is going to die very soon. The heavy, labored movements. The frailty. The confusion. The loss of time.

The latest cat scan shows bleeding in the brain so he's likely had a stroke and at this moment he sits if front of the television, the junk food bags open next to him on the couch like a couple of old, drunk friends who aren't supposed to be there, but are.

His decline is steep and not pretty and is happening almost a year to the day that my mother began her ride out of town. When my mother was sick, I wanted to be here, all the time. I wanted to help. Night after night after night, my sister and I slept on either side of her to be there at the very instant she needed us. Now, I want to run away. This is a slow, angry burn. I want out.

What to make of it? I find myself without words or opinions. I stare at the wall, a little haunted by my own mortality, by the arc of this thing we have...I confess to being profoundly stumped and silenced by the sheer, unspeakable mystery of it all. We are born, we struggle like mad, if we are lucky we love and are loved and then two bulked up dudes in cheap, black suits ("I'm very sorry for your loss.") show up and bag us, like a white tail on opening weekend. Who cooked this up?

I was watching "An Inconvenient Truth" the other night. At one point, Al brings up a slide taken from the Voyager or one of the other spacecraft. There's a picture of the earth.Not the one you're thinking. Not the stunning, beautiful globe, all blue and white. This is from much, much further out. So in amongst all the stars and blackness is something that looks like a tiny, tiny spec of light. Us.

I can't quite wrap my mind around how large life feels inside my head and the microscopic sized spec of cosmic dust we really are. How do you grab a hold of the significance of life and the utter insignificance of it? Joni Mitchell wondered how to care and yet not care, but I think she was talking about men.

And speaking of men, there sits my father, dozing off, waking up, dozing off, the light dimming...his life a tiny spec now, barely visible even to himself.

Once I took my dad to a basketball game in DC, and we were traveling the DC beltway, (he would have been in his mid to late seventies) he looked out at the ocean of headlights and tail lights and asked, "Where in the world are all these people going?"

He taught me to swim, and to sail. He's a royal pain in the ass, but when it's all said and done, he's a garden variety pain in the ass who simply is who he is.

He taught me to swim. And to sail. And sail I did, as far and as fast away from him as I could get. And now I am back.