On Monday, I made a Bloody Caesar, in honor of my dad, who very nearly died this Christmas. We had clamato juice in the fridge, which I specifically hadn't opened because I was thinking that when my parents came for Christmas, as they were planning, I would offer Dad a Caesar. That and beer are the only drinks I remember him consuming when I was a kid - my parents never mixed drinks themselves, but Dad would sometimes order one in a restaurant on a special occasion, if out for steak or something fancy, shocking us all.
Dad is not Mennonite; his father was Irish and his mother Scottish, potato farmers who came over on the boat during the famine. He grew up in Winnipeg. His dad worked at Eaton's and his mom raised the kids - nine of them, I think, though I'm quite out of touch with that side of the family and might be grossly exaggerating. As I believe I've mentioned before, he is not my biological father; I am genetically as purely Mennonite as one can get. Also I believe I said something about him not having been much of a father to me, which I feel badly about now, though the fact of his near-death doesn't change that. It just makes me feel more sympathetic towards him than I sometimes have. Something about laying in an ICU bed with central lines pulling at your swollen neck, choking around an endotracheal tube, staring at the commotion about you as a newborn baby stares around from its incubator, invokes pity, makes one wish to take it all back and start over.
This picture was taken last winter at Lake Louise, where Mom and Dad helped my sister's kids on the bunny hill while Pat and I skied the mountain with Caleb and Jule. He looked worn out even then, I see now. What happened on December 15th was not really all that surprising to me though it's always a shock - gradually, then suddenly, we get old, things fall apart.
Mom called as we were getting ready for bed, to say that Dad had taken himself to the ER in Brooks, where he'd been working, with abdominal pain. They had told him that it wasn't his heart, maybe a hernia, Mom said, and they would keep him overnight and run more tests in the morning.
"So what does that mean, if it's a hernia?" Mom asked.
"I have no idea, Mom. That makes no sense to me at all - a hernia," I said. I was impatient, and wanted to go to bed.
She was considering driving to Brooks, two hours away, but it was forty below and she was alone with Angela's kids and Dad insisted that she stay at home. I asked for the phone number of the hospital in Brooks, and Mom asked, "Why? Are you planning to phone him there?"
And I said, "Yeah, I'm thinking about it."
But she hadn't written it down and it was going to be a pain to find and I said not to bother. She told me she'd let me know in the morning how he was doing. "7 am," she said, "when he's up."
I said, "You won't know anything by 7 am."
"No?" she wondered. "I don't know about this stuff." Then she asked if she should buy Jule Sims 2 or Sims 2 Castaway for Christmas.
Half an hour later Mom called back crying; they were air-lifting Dad to Peter Lougheed Hospital in Calgary; they suspected he had a leaking aneurysm and he might need surgery that night. She was driving to Calgary. I was cold, and tachycardic, and curled up to Pat for warmth; we slept until the phone rang again around 4 am. It was my sister Monica, who had also gone to Calgary. "Dad just came out of surgery," she said, flatly. "The aneurysm burst in the helicopter. They're giving him a 50% chance of survival."
"Oh my God. Should I come there?" I asked, and clearly she wanted me to, as did Mom, and they put me on the phone with a medical resident who gave me some actual details: it was a triple A, it ruptured during transport, he had a cardiac arrest requiring ten minutes of CPR, then was taken to the OR, they were trying to stabilize his blood pressure now in the ICU, and if it was her father, she would come.
So I didn't make a cocktail that night, as planned; nor did I attend Caleb's talent show, where he played "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" on his electric guitar. Instead I cancelled my patients, drove to Thunder Bay, and flew to Calgary. I watched women play pool at the Hard Rock Hotel in Florida on TV on the plane, and listened to the old man beside me tell me all about his talented son in Calgary, his talented hockey-playing grandson. He snored when he breathed, even awake. I thought about how my parents would not now be coming to Atikokan for Christmas, and lamented the twenty pound turkey I'd just bought, and the clamato juice. I thought how strange it was that my dad might suddenly die now, at age 63, having never seen a doctor for anything besides back pain, and how though we haven't exactly been close, he is the only dad I've had, really.
Dad married my mother when I was three and I hated him, hated every moment that I was with him without my mother there, because I felt that he had stolen her from me. I used to sleep in her bed; now he slept in her bed, and I would cry and beg to be allowed to lay down with her and he would yell and Mom would firmly return me to my own big empty room, except that sometimes she would have mercy and make a bed for me on the floor beside her bed, and happily I would sleep, on blankets on the floor, knowing that she was safe there above me; I could hear her breathing; I could smell her perfume. If he yelled, I would know, and could protect her.
I was hard on Dad as I grew up, though, thinking that I was smarter than him, mocking his sarcasm, proving him wrong. I was probably eight or nine before my parents explained to me that he was not my biological father, but had stepped in, supporting my mother, officially adopting me; my biological father, on the other hand, was a bad man who had impregnated my mother and then left, wanting nothing more to do with either of us. Until my mom's dad died five years ago I did not meet or in fact know anything at all about this mystery man - who, it turns out, grew up in Steinbach and was well known to many of my relatives, had become a respected teacher of high school English, painted pictures, was on his second marriage, and had two sons close to my age; all of this shockingly un-villain-like to me considering the image I'd grown up with.
So maybe I shouldn't say unkind things about Bruce either, in public or in private; he might well be next with a ruptured triple A or similar and then would I feel badly again, for being such a disrespectful daughter? Such a spoiled, self-centered brat? But he wasn't there, was he, for the first thirty years of my life... can I really call him a father at all? Dad, at least, was there.
And now that he's laying here, opening and shutting his eyes, mouthing requests for water, gulping dry air, having his teeth brushed, his chest scratched by a cute British nurse, I suddenly appreciate that he was, at least, there - I wasn't the easiest child to deal with, I'm sure, and not even his, but there he always was - and for my sister, too, who still lives with Mom and Dad with her three kids, through all the crazy dramas of her life. He drives her kids to swimming lessons, to junior church, to school; picks up groceries, goes back for more groceries when someone's forgotten something, drives my sister to and from work; between all this driving himself around the city selling security systems, through southern Alberta selling feed to farmers. He worries about the bills and pays the bills, doles out cash for Angela's many emergencies, skimps on his house, his cabin, his vehicles, which now rest in snowy graves on the unplowed driveway, to buy too many Christmas presents for the grandchildren, new clothes for everyone but himself.
There is more to this story, and I will continue it later. Briefly: I flew back home on December 17th, prepped for Christmas on December 18th, worked from 8 am December 19th until 8 am December 20th, then drove with my family to Winnipeg, then to Weyburn, then to Calgary for Christmas. We got home on the 28th so I could start work again on the 29th; we were utterly exhausted that night and didn't bother eating or cleaning up or anything. The Caesar was good, though, with horseradish and celery salt, and soon I will buy tomato juice and make a Bloody Mary.
This picture is probably a month old, I realize now that I've posted it. We have much more snow now. We are cocooned in, between droopy frozen spruce trees and the cedars out front. It has been cold, 20-something below - though nothing like that one winter in Saskatoon, when for more than a month the temperature did not once rise above 30 below. That was almost unbearable. I've nearly forgotten now what it's like to feel that you may not actually make it from the car to the hospital without freezing solid.
