The season finale of Law & Order last night was so good. So. Good.
The bad guy (Ludacris) won in the court room, but lost in life, and the good guys (all the detectives and their chief and the assistant district attorney) are about to lose their jobs because they lost the trial and because Ludacris exposed all kinds of police misconduct.
If they get rid of the A.D.A., I will be pissed. She’s awesome.
They did that same cliffhanger thing last year, only they just went ahead and killed the A.D.A. and had our favorite lawyer, Jack McCoy, use all kinds of illegal tactics to catch the bad guys. At the end of the episode, they were starting the paperwork to disbar Jack.
No. Way.
At the hospital the next morning, I alerted my father of the crisis. It must have been first Monday, because my brother was there, and we were still in the first hospital room. He moved four times during the Eleven Days Of Dying.
“Daddy, they’re going to disbar Jack. Daddy, did you hear me? The season finale of Law & Order was so seriously last night; they murdered the A.D.A with the long dark hair and they’re going to disbar Jack. Daddy? Daddy, they’re going to disbar Jack.”
He kept sleeping.
When they stop waking up all the time, that’s bad. But I already knew.
When he did wake up, he jumped a little.
“Hey kids.” It took him awhile to say that.
“Daddy, did you hear me? They’re going to disbar Jack McCoy. What are we going to do?”
Law & Order was our favorite show. When I moved to the east coast, I had the upper hand, because it came on an hour earlier here than it did back home. So I would call him at the end of an episode, just as he was watching the opening credits, and I would say, “Daddy, want me to tell you how it ends?”
He would tell me to call back on the commercial and hang up.
“Daddy, if they disbar Jack McCoy, I’m never watching again.”
He looked at me with wide eyes and nodded his head. He agreed we could never watch Law & Order again if they disbarred Jack McCoy.
That was First Monday. I think. That also must have been the day of the Morphine Incident. I remember my brother in the OR now. He didn’t know my dad was allergic to morphine. I think that’s why I remember being alone. But I do remember him tag-teaming the surgeon with me once I brought it up.
It was nice to see my dad tell the entire OR to go to hell for that. That was his old self.
It was nice to see his old self. Old Self had been absent the week before, because of the pain medication. It was really bad. Hallucinations and whatnot. Dr. Gordon ordered a CAT scan, to make sure he wasn’t losing his mind. Actually, it was to make sure there wasn’t a brain tumor, but he didn’t tell us that until after.
We hated that part.
That was the part where I thought, this is the worst it can get. He is losing his mind. My dad’s body was never healthy; not after he had Polio in 1952. But he was probably the most well-read man on the planet. In college, we used to call him before history exams and ask him to debrief us on things like the latter half of the 19th century. And he did, in great detail.
I thought, this is the worst it can get. He’s losing his mind, and he’s going to live. He’s going to live that way.
During that time, they had to ask him what his name was and what year it was and stuff like that. I think the day he got it wrong must have been Last Tuesday. Because I was definitely by myself. It was before 8 a.m., and I was definitely by myself.
One of the doctors came in, but it wasn’t Dr. Gordon, it was somebody else.
“Can you tell us what her name is?” They pointed to me.
He choked it out. Swollen tongue, dry mouth. He choked it out. “Mel.”
“Right on, Dad.”
“Can you tell us what her name is?”
“He did. He said M-.”
“No, wait. We want to hear him say it.”
“He did. He said Mel. That’s what he calls me.”
“Oh, ok. We didn’t hear him.”
That’s when I became my dad’s voice. His mouth was so swollen and dry, no one could understand him. But I could.
“What year is it, Mr. Lane?”
“1969.”
“What did he say?” They looked at me.
“He said 2006. Daddy, what year is it?”
“1969.”
They looked at me. “We heard him say 1969.”
“Well, that’s the year he got married and finished his master’s degree, so it must have been a good year.”
I knew I should leave it alone. He was on pain meds, and tired, and I knew I should leave it alone.
“Daddy, do you know who I am?”
“Mel.”
“I’m your daughter, right? So what year is it?”
“I said 1969.”
“Daddy. I’m your daughter. What year was I born?”
I was born in 1976. I was trying to reason with him.
“Mel, why are you asking me this? Did I get it wrong?”
I started to drizzle tears. I nodded. He was visibly very upset.
“Goddamnit, Mel. I am really struggling with this stuff.”
He was very, very frustrated, and very, very angry. He took his cancer personally. When he was diagnosed the first time, he shook his fist at God and said, “You hit a kid with Polio and you leave him alone.” He was very frustrated and very, very defeated. That was the worst part.
“It’s ok, Daddy. You’re gonna be fine. Fuck whatever year it is anyway.”
And the little girl held her Daddy’s hand and tried very hard not to cry.
And that was very hard.
Apparently, I have a memory for shit.
I just hung up the phone with my brother. He said, “Yeah, I remember when that doctor tried to give dad morphine.”
“What? You were there?”
“Yeah, I was there.”
“You weren’t back in L.A. that day?”
“No, I totally remember that. They gave him that bracelet that said morphine on it.”
I have no recollection of him being there.
Not a shred. Not even when he reminded me he was there, in the OR, arguing about the morphine.
Is he sure? Maybe he was at lunch. If he was there, where was mom?
Why do I remember being alone in the waiting room?
He must have been at lunch.
Am I remembering the right day? Maybe the OR situation was on First Monday, before he flew to L.A. Maybe I cracked on First Monday.
If you asked the three of us to write down what happened, you’d have no idea we were talking about the same man.
Daddy meeting his little baby granddaughter, the Friday before First Tuesday.
Today is Last Tuesday.
Today, I got to the hospital at 7:30 a.m. My brother told me to get there at 6:30 a.m., but I am Medusa in the mornings, so 7:30 a.m. was my compromise.
Come to find out that 30 minutes earlier, my dad had pulled the NG tube out of nose. That’s the tube that was draining his tummy because something was blocking his intestines. I don’t know what NG stands for.
He hated that tube. We basically made them superglue it to his face so he couldn’t pull it out. But when I got there, he had ripped through the tape and yanked it out.
So maybe it would have been better if I had arrived at 6:30 a.m.
They were trying to put it back in, but he was having nothing to do with it.
“Can you help us? Can you talk to him, please?” the nurse wanted to know.
I wished really hard that my brother was there. This is his job.
“Daddy? Daddy, we have to put the tube back in.”
He was not having it. His tongue was huge and swollen, because he hadn’t been able to drink anything for a week, because of his intestines or something, or maybe because his kidneys were failing, or maybe because the tumor on his shoulder was the size of large grapefruit, or maybe because the cancer has metastisized to his entire skeleton in a matter of days. I can’t remember. Anyways, his tongue was huge and swollen, and he did his very best to tell the NG tube to go to hell. His swollen response was, “Hell, no. Only if Dr. Gordon says I have to.”
So I went out in the hall and pretended to call Dr. Gordon. I think my brother would have actually called Dr. Gordon, but I was too chicken. So I went back in the room and told him that Dr. Gordon said.
So, in came the nurse to try and guide the tube back down his nose. My job was to hold his arms down.
It didn’t go well.
They couldn’t get the tube in because he was fighting so much. He was shaking his head and he turned all red. “You’re supposed to be helping me,” he said to me.
The nurse left.
“I’m sorry, Daddy.” I hugged him and laid my head on his shoulder, but it was hard to stay there and not tug on any other tubes, so I couldn’t stay there long. I massaged his hand instead.
But by this time, I knew.
We had to go down to the OR later to get a pain pump inserted into his spine. I can’t remember where my mom was. She got to the hospital probably around 10 or so, or maybe eight, I can’t remember. I think she went to lunch during the OR trip. She said she’d been doing this with my dad for years now, which was true, and we didn’t need to go down there with him. But I called my brother and he said to go, so I did.
In the OR, they tried to fill his pain pump with morphine. My dad is allergic to morphine.
“No,” I said. “N-O. He is allergic to morphine. You can’t give it to him.”
“Well, I already ordered it from the pharmacy,” the surgeon said.
I was flabbergasted. What a bitch.
“Well, then we need to cancel that order and fill it with something else. Not Dalodid, he was on that last week and it wasn’t good.”
“Well, I’m going to have to chase down the order if we’re going to cancel it.”
What a bitch.
“We don’t have a choice. Do you want me to run to the pharmacy? I’ll do it myself.”
At this point, my dad piped up, with his swollen tongue, and his huge frustration at being patronized. For some reason, people talk to sick people like they’re babies or incapable or something. My dad was the smartest person they probably ever met. I’m not sure where they got off treating him that way.
“I have told you people a thousand times,” he choked out, “no morphine. I get headaches, I’m allergic to it, you people are not listening. No morphine.”
It took him about four solid minutes to get that out.
“Don’t worry, Daddy. I got it.”
“There are no notes on his chart that he’s allergic to morphine,” the surgeon said.
“Make one,” I said. “And he needs one of those red bracelets that says he’s allergic to morphine. And we need to cancel the pharmacy order right now. Point me to the pharmacy. I’ll do it.”
The nurse said she would take care of it. I thought that was nice of her.
I was really glad I went to the OR with him.
I waited in the waiting room for an hour. The procedure was supposed to take 45 minutes. I finally asked about him.
“Oh, he’s done, they took him back up to his room.”
Um, hello?
I ran back up to his room and assaulted his nurse.
“Diego, he can’t have morphine. Did they fill it with morphine? Are you sure? Please double check. No morphine.”
My mom was in the room by that time. Diego promised me there was no morphine.
Last Tuesday was also the day that Dr. Gordon came to visit in the afternoon, and I hit him with the hard question.
“He’s been here for a week,” I said. “He’s not getting better. He should be getting better. What’s the situation? What’s the status? What does this mean? Why isn’t he getting better?”
I broke down in front of Dr. Gordon, which is exactly what I didn’t want to do. It was my job to manage the situation. I couldn’t break down.
“You’ve been here everyday since Friday,” he said. “Why don’t you take a day off? Don’t come in tomorrow. Rest. He’ll be ok.”
“No, I need to be here.”
I didn’t want my dad to think I didn’t care. I didn’t want to miss a day, because he might think I was being flippant about the situation. And if it were me, he would not have missed a day.
“You’re not doing your dad any good. Just rest. Take a day and sleep.”
My mom agreed.
“But you didn’t answer my question, Dr. Gordon. He’s not getting better.”
He gave me a really complete answer about kidneys and bowels and cancer and pain, blah, blah, blah. Dr. Gordon is a really good doctor.
But they all agreed that I should take the next day off. So I left the hospital that night around six, and my mom stayed with him. I slept until 2 p.m. on Last Wednesday, when my mom called.
“Dr. Gordon wants you to come down,” she said.
“What? I thought I was supposed to take the day off.”
I was not excited about going back to the hospital and watching my father die.
“Dr. Gordon feels that your father needs to see you.”
Translation: Your father is going to expire very, very soon, and you are the only one who can keep him alive until your brother gets here tomorrow. My dad and I have always been soul mates, so when someone says, “Your father needs to see you,” needs, not wants, it means “You are the last resort. He will stay alive for you.”
No one had said yet that he was going to die, but I knew.
I drove my brother’s car to the hospital. He had left it there after we drove home from L.A. on Thursday. He flew back to L.A. and was flying back on Thursday, so I had the car. I love that car. It’s an Infiniti G35. It’s a great car.
When I got there my mother was outside in the hallway. I went into his room and she said she was going to the lobby to call her friends. I sat there watching my father die.
Dr. Gordon walked in.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“I told you to stay home.”
“My mother told me that you said I needed to come down and see my dad,” I said.
“No, I never said that.”
“Can we go out in the hall and talk with my mom? I don’t want to upset my dad.”
My mom came in the room, so we just talked in there and probably upset my dad. Selfishly, I wanted my dad to hear this. I wanted him to hear what she did.
“Mom, Dr. Gordon wants to know what I’m doing here, which is funny, because you told me that he ordered me down here. It seems that he did nothing of the sort.”
“I thought it would be good for your father to see you,” she said. “And I knew you wouldn’t come unless you thought Dr. Gordon told you to.”
There’s a little girl in the room, and she’s the only one who knows, besides the doctor, that her Daddy is dying. She’s been watching him die and managing his care for days now. She cracked in front of the doctor yesterday. She slept for about 15 hours last night. And knowing this, her mama lied to her to get her to come down to the hospital and watch her daddy die some more, just in case it looked different than the day before. Her mama went out to the lobby to use her cell phone, and the little girl sat with her daddy.
She left the hospital after the conversation with Dr. Gordon. She was pissed. She told her daddy she loved him and that she would be back tomorrow, on Last Thursday.
She went home and went back to sleep, so she didn’t have to think about her daddy dying, or feel hurt by her mama. She waited for her brother to get there tomorrow and take care of things, so she could be the baby again. That’s her job.
Today is Last Tuesday. This is my father’s last Tuesday. In less than a week, we won’t have him anymore. In less than a week, it’ll be a year, and I think I’m supposed to have some sort of peace with it, and that people will treat it with less weight, because it’s been a year.
There is no peace and there is no less weight.
Today is first Monday.
Today I was at the hospital by myself. My brother flew back to L.A. for a few days, to make an appearance at his office. He would be back in a few days.
That left me to work the nursing staff and ask all the right questions of the doctors. It was a nerve-wracking role. That was my brother’s job. He’s always in charge- he’s the one that commands people and assesses situations. It’s how he grieves.
I’m the one who provides comic relief. That’s my job. It’s how I grieve.
Today I was alone with my dad in his hospital room, and I thought and thought and thought. I assessed the situation. My father had been in the hospital for almost a week now. That’s a long time. And he wasn’t getting better. New problems kept appearing. It was like a bad acne breakout that we couldn’t manage.
That’s when I knew.
I was alone in my dad’s hospital room, in the middle of the day, and things were very busy out in the hallway, what with all the nurses and all the other sick people. I was alone, and it was quiet in my dad’s room. He was sleeping. No one was there to lend the realization the gravitasse and melodrama it deserved. There was no ominous soundtrack or earth tremors or lightning bolts. No screaming or crying. Just me, alone, assessing the situation.
Just a little girl watching her Daddy die.
I am trying to stay away from the keyboard. I am trying not to write about this. I am trying not to bleed my way through this.
You would think that after all that puking, I would at least have a flat stomach. Usually after that much illness, I walk around for at least a day thinking, “So, this is how the skinny-half lives.”
But no. After all that, it’s not even flat.
There is some sort of major injustice going on here.
And probably a little bit of a body image problem.
Yesterday, I was suffering from food poisoning.
While in the midst of it, I thought, “Surely, I am going to die.”
Then I thought, “Ohmigod. What if I don’t die?” because I felt like twenty different kinds of shit.
I had to drag my deathly-self to the store and buy my own Sprite and bendy straws and saltines, because I don’t have a boyfriend to do those things for me. It’s times like that that I really wish I had a boyfriend. That and when I need someone to pick me up from the airport.
I cannot discuss what it was I ate that made me ill, because the thought of it makes me become ill again. It is also possible that First Tuesday made me ill. It made me ill the first time.
There’s more to be said about that, but frankly, I still feel like ten different kinds of shit. Not twenty this time, just ten, but that’s still a lot. Too much to write something that takes a lot of energy.
My father died on a Saturday.
He was admitted to the hospital on a Tuesday. He didn’t die that Saturday. He died the next Saturday. There were two Tuesdays.
But the anniversary of First Tuesday isn’t tomorrow, it’s the day after tomorrow, which is actually Wednesday. The way the calendar works, the anniversary of First Tuesday is actually Wednesday.
So it’s not tomorrow; don’t worry about tomorrow. It’s the next day.
Tomorrow he was still at home, still sitting in his chair, and we still thought that he was going to be alive in three Tuesdays.
Only this year, First Tuesday is a Wednesday. Not tomorrow, but the next day.
Bet everyone thinks you’re crazy.
You know they do.
Inhale, exhale. Let it go. You’re not crazy.
But why does everyone else think they’re so fucking well-adjusted and normal when they’re just as crazy as you are? That’s what makes this feel so urgent. That’s what makes you feel so manic.
Because it’s very important that they know that they are crazy too, and that they need therapy too, and that the only difference between you and them is that you wear your crazy like a pair of over-sized earrings, and you talk about it, you break it down, you explain all the intricacies, and then everyone thinks, “That one, she’s crazy,” which makes you want to jump up and down and scream until they admit that yes, they are crazy too, but you won’t stop jumping up and down until they tell you that you are ok, until they say that it’s ok, you’re not crazy, you’re ok.
Bet you think I’m insecure because I need that kind reassurance. Bet you’re just a scooch self-righteous for making that assumption about me. Bet you’re own insecurities are just begging for a good therapy session. Bet if you wore your crazy like a pair of over-sized earrings, they’d snap your earlobes.
You’re not more sane than me.
And even if you were, that doesn’t make you better than me.
Right?
Bet it would do me some good to take a vacation from my head.
Show me the best road out of here and I guarantee you, I’ll be the first one on it.
“Cheshire Puss…Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
So long as I get somewhere, she thought. Where ever it is that Not-Crazy People reside.
Which is not where you live, by the way, in case you were thinking of passing some sort of judgement on me and my craziness.
I am clearly overthinking all of this.
Say something to make it all better. Say something to the effect of, Mela, you are still ok, even if you are crazy, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because everyone’s crazy.
Tell me Mela, it’s ok. You are an ok person. I’m just as crazy as you are.
Tell me, “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.”
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