Four years
ago today, I was presenting - for the first time in my career - at a national conference. I had spent the first part of the week with my
family at my sister’s family’s house in California and had flown from there to
Minneapolis to go to the conference.
My husband and my daughters had taken a flight from L.A. back home where
I planned to meet them in a few days after the conference had ended.
Things were
humming along. I actually remember
walking out the door of my house to leave on the trip to go to L.A.; I wouldn’t normally remember something like that from years ago, but
there were two things that have made that memory stick in my head. I remember feeling a little more jittery than
I typically do when I leave to go out of town, because this time I was
traveling in a triangular pattern, first for pleasure and then for business,
and I was nervous that I was forgetting something that I would need on the trip. The second
reason that I still remember leaving my house that day four years ago is that I
got a concerning text message from my dad just as I was getting into the car to go to the airport. As it turned out, that was the last text that
I ever got from him - but that's not why I thought the text was important at the time I received my dad's message.
When I heard the ding on my phone indicating that I’d gotten a text, I grabbed my cell phone out of my purse so I could read the message
as my husband drove to the airport.
“Met with grandmom’s dr to sign hospice papers. Hope the girls take news ok,” Dad had
typed in his typical shorthand form of texting. As usual, I was able to read between the
lines to understand what he meant despite the somewhat cryptic qualities of his
message: At the age of 90, my grandmother (his mother) had been very ill for
over two years. My parents had just met with her doctor to discuss her plan of
care because of health problems she had been
experiencing. She had been moved into a
nursing home a couple of years before due to significant cognitive decline, and
at that point she had severe swallowing problems and progressing overall
physical weakness. In the meeting, I
found out later, my parents had been told that her condition was continuing to worsen and that she likely only had a few weeks
left to live. My dad, acting as her
representative for medical power of attorney, agreed that adding hospice
services to supplement the care she was getting in the skilled nursing facility
was in her best interest. As his message conveyed, he was concerned about how my daughters and the other grandchildren would take the news of Grandmom's worsening condition.
Although I
could tell what he meant by what he had written, what I realized I didn’t
know as I processed the news was how he felt.
Like his mother, my dad was never very touchy-feely; there were many occasions in my life that I witnessed him keeping a stiff
upper lip so as not to show his emotions and several other times when it seemed
like he was just more of the mindset of “Let’s get this over
with” than “Let’s think it over and share how we feel about it.” As he liked to say: “It is what it is …
because what else would it be?” But on
this day, as my husband drove down the interstate, I felt like I needed to
somehow acknowledge the emotions I thought it was safe to guess that he was
experiencing, and so I texted back, “You are a good son. Your mom knows that you love her, and you are doing all the right things to care for her.” I don’t know
why I chose those words or even why I decided to say something that sentimental
to him at that time; it isn’t usually how we communicated, and that’s why that
moment sticks in my head. Well, that,
and the fact that, as I realized later, in
what seemed like such an ordinary instant when I walked out of my house and
closed the door behind me that day, I was stepping into a life so different from the way I had known it to be.
When I was
about ten years old, my dad entered me into one of the first road races I had
entered as a runner, and, for reasons that escape me now, it was one of the few
times in my running career that I ran in a road race in which he didn’t also
run.
Like many
of the races I participated in during my childhood, this one took place in a small town in Mississippi. In my
mind, the scene at the starting line that day blurs into the hundreds of
other scenes like it, but what happened over the next hour stands out as a
memory all of its own. In this race, to my surprise, I found myself in a small
group of runners that had broken away from the rest of the field about at the first
mile marker. Or, I should say, about at the
point where I thought the first mile marker should have been. For the first seven or eight minutes of the
race, there was silence amongst the four other runners and me except for the
sound of our breathing as we ran. Gradually,
each of us realized that we had probably covered a distance of more than a
mile, and one of the other runners asked if the rest of us were sure that we were going the right way. None of us were; we
had counted on being able to follow signs or directions given by
volunteers along the way so that we would know when we had passed each of the mile
marks and where to turn on the course. As we found out later, though, we'd passed by the first turn faster than the race director had expected, and so there was
nothing/no one there to tell us to make the turn and we had continued to run straight down the street. By the time we realized that we were probably off the course, we were well over a mile past that place where we should have changed
direction. We kept running and
eventually saw an old man watering his front lawn, at which point we slowed to a jog and
one of the other runners shouted to him, “How do we get back to the community center?”
which is where the race finished. The
man looked at us like we were crazy and then pointed back over his shoulder in
almost the opposite direction from the way we were running. For some reason, the five of us still didn’t
stop running; without speaking, we all hung a right at the next street corner
to head in the direction the man had indicated, and eventually we found our way
to the finish line.
Since
October 23, 2010, the day when the cancer in my dad’s brain was discovered, in
many ways I have felt like I did out there on the course in that race so many
years ago: lost, confused, exhausted, and in a state of disbelief as to how the
whole thing even happened. But, also
like my experience in that race, I am comforted by the fact that I am not
having to cover the distance by myself, and somehow that gives me the strength
I need to continue along the course.
And that, I
guess, is one way that I have changed, in increments over the past few years: I
have come to see and to believe that it is human tendency to adjust despite
pain and loss – and that resilience is born of character and nurtured by
love and connection.
