Again

Congestive heart failure this time. For some reason it feels different. He has been in the hospital since I moved to California, in and out of doctors' offices, but this is A Thing. A Thing That Could Kill Him. There have been a number of Things in the last five years, and every Thing is scary in its own way, but being so far on the other side of the world makes the Thing into someThing else entirely. I'm still trying to nail down the words for it.

We were on the way to the airport, heading back East for my husband's brother's college graduation and my parents' 50th anniversary party, conveniently scheduled for the same weekend. I called my mother to confirm flight numbers and arrival times. 

"We're just getting to the airport now," I said. 

"Oh, where are you going?" she replied. 

"To see you guys," I said, thinking she was being absent minded - maybe she thought we were arriving Wednesday and not Tuesday? 

"But the party is next week!" 

I cried in the airport, both feeling like an idiot and angry and sad we would miss the actual 50th anniversary party, that we again would be the only family members not there. We watched The Voice with my parents that night, after 12 hours of travelling and frantically consuming our first East Coast pizza in months. The next day, in the middle of the celebratory graduation dinner in the City for my brother-in-law, I got a phone call from my mother that Daddy was in the hospital with pneumonia. We abandoned plans to meet up with friends and headed to the suburbs, getting to my parents' house after 1am.  

The next few days proceeded much like every time he has been in the hospital, but leaving was harder. I held his hand more. The medicine he was on to get the fluid out of his lungs was dehydrating; his skin looked like crepe paper, but his hands were strong and soft. I helped scoot him up on the bed when he slid too far down, helped retie the gown after using the restroom, helped clarify things the attending said for my mother, an unspoken acknowledgement from the doctor that he didn't have to dumb things down for us. 

Then we came back to Southern California, and it feels like we exist on a different space-time continuum. I call my mother every day, and while the directives are different (which surgery when and in what order), the tone is the same. It's rough, we're getting through it, we love you, here, say hi to your dad. I talk to my brothers who give me more information, in more serious voices, with more dire outlooks. I talk to my friends, and no one knows quite what to say. I talk to my husband and he hugs me while I cry.