Dad, these days: Part Four

   It has been two weeks since I last blogged. About anything, really, I have been so wrapped up in dealing with my Dad in the hospital and feeling that I wanted to be updating the people in his life as constantly as possible. So not a lot of energy for blogging, to say the least.
   But I do have the desire for things to be a little more normal tonight so a-blogging we will go...

   Life with Dad has been a roller coaster ride, on pretty well a daily basis. More than one of us has been at his bedside and, literally, thought we had just seen his last  breath. Twenty seconds later he's wide awake, alert, and commenting on life around him. I have seen his breathing stop like this probably three different times. Each time I have resisted the urge to simply reach over and shake him awake, get the damned breathing started again. At this point, I have no real fear of him passing, right in front of me. I have a much bigger fear of him passing alone somewhere, in a dark sterile room.
   What we have right at the moment is an inability to plan much more than the next day into the future. There was a day last week when for most of the afternoon he'd been more or less incoherent and disjointed in his thoughts and speech. He'd also been semi-comatose. Then, in the midst of all that, he sits right up, looks around, and says, "Do you think we're at the end of all this?" It was hard to reply, it was almost as if he'd been given a little bit of extra insight, perhaps a glimpse into the near-future. All I could reply to him was, "I don't know, Dad, just let us know when we are."
   Given where he is at any moment on this roller coaster ride, it is possible to see him never leave the hospital and it is possible to envision him months or years from now, in some long-term care placement, keeping us guessing on a daily basis. I am quite prepared for either of these eventualities.
   I am also prepared for the eventuality that he might outlive me. There have been deathbeds I have sat on the edge of and thought to myself this person might live longer than me. Such is the fleeting quality of life that one should never make presumptions about the nature, length or quality of their own.

   So I have stopped making the presumption that my Dad will be alive the next time I see him. Because of this, each time we part, I tell him that I love him. I have not done this freely, or often, in the past. Perhaps it was the "man" thing happening.  But I do it now and he replies in same. It really seems like the only way to say goodbye these days.