Seize the Cake

My Dad is dying.

To be fair, everyone's Dad is dying. We're all dying. Some of us just a little quicker and assuredly than others.

My Dad got his marching orders last December, right before my son was born.
So he didn't tell us for about five months.
He has been diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis, a lung disease that slowly transforms your healthy lung tissue into scar tissue which eventually seizes their ability to function.
Average lifespan from diagnosis is five years maximum.
My Dad is pretty healthy.
He may live longer.
He may also get hit by a rogue meteorite tomorrow, but most likely he will enjoy a slow decline in lung function for the next few years, followed by a rapid period during which all the inhalers, drugs, and oxygen tanks the hospitals can throw at him will only prolong the inevitable.
One day, my father will asphyxiate.
He will run out of breath.

I can only hope that it is at home, in fairly decent shape, preferably after a truly epic meal surrounded by those of us who love him the most.


There are many ways I have felt about this since I found out around the end of May.
At first, I knee jerk gasp-cried into a diaper, while the baby, naked-arsed waggled his legs in confusion on the change table below me. I may have put the tear soaked diaper on him. I don't recall. He doesn't seem the worse for it.
*shrug*
Immediately following, I decided I wanted to do something to help.
Could Dad get a lung transplant?
No, even with the new lungs, it only resets your life to the point of diagnosis granting you another five probably years, and these years will be spent in a bubble of drugs, sterility, and restricted activity to ensure you don't reject your new organs. Dad doesn't want to live like that. I don't blame him.
Drugs, there's a good idea. Aren't there any pill cocktails to treat this biz?
There are, but they're steroids, and my Dad, remarkable bastard that he is, has a spot of TB on his lung leftover from when he self inoculated against the illness as a child. Steroid use would wake the little bugger up, and then my Dad would have the ironic pleasure of dying of consumption in the 21st century.

That's pretty much it.
We met with a holistic healer, who prescribed Dad a prohibitive diet restricting him to consuming only plants and whole grains and water, but again, my dad wants to enjoy his life. He figures, what's the point of prolonging it, at the age of seventy, if it's going to be miserable?
Carpe Lagunum as it were.

or

Seize the Cake.

So we have to get right with this.
We have to get right with the idea that we are all going to die someday, perhaps soon, perhaps not, but unlike most of us, my Dad now knows exactly how he's going to go.

I want to make it better for him. I want to make it easier.
I contacted the Pulminary Fibrosis Foundation in their home city of Chicago, and they excitedly told me all the ways I could fundraise for them.

I thought really hard about it. I so want to be useful. I want to use my hands, my health, my time, my abundance of breath to do something for my Dad, but there's little incentive to having a fundraiser for a foundation that will gladly take all the money I raise and pay themselves to "raise awareness".
My dad doesn't see any of that cash. It won't help pay for his inhalers or new lungs or even research in the field.

So I am stuck with only one recourse.
Make however long we have left together wonderful.

Give him as much access and time with his grandson as he wants. Let go of the petty bullshit from our fights and disagreements, and forgive him for the big stuff he fucked up when I was a kid.
As a parent now, it's a little easier to do the latter. I'm also still his child though, so it's hard.

Amazing, isn't it? How we remember so vividly the way we felt about our parents as children?
My father was so god-like in my eyes. The smartest man, the bravest, most adventuresome, cleverest, funniest, wildest one.
He was also the one who got angry quickest, the one who had the most cutting comment when you made a mistake. His fuse was the shortest, and his punishments were long.
I remember being grounded one summer for two weeks.

I remember the sense of injustice was enormous. While he yelled at me, I could feel his breath on my face, and I burned with it as though I was being forced to wear a hair shirt. I spent the time in silence, living monastically, pledging myself to not hug my father for at least a month after my grounding was complete.

I think I forgot about that part a day or two after I regained my freedom.

There are other memories.
Roadtrips and Christmases and long family walks through the woods and on beaches. All of us sharing a block of Cadbury's fruit and nut as we sat on felled tree at the site where my parents built their dream house.

I remember my Dad springing up like a lion when Alex fell through the roof of a shed on the Australian property. We were picking pears, and I'd lifted her up there not knowing there was a hole in the corrugated tin covered over with plastic. I'd never seen my father move so quickly. He was over the fence in moments and running out of the shed with Alex wrapped up tight in his arms. His breath coming fast and hard.

When I went to college, and after, I remember the weekly phone calls with my parents. My dad was always talking about how beautiful my sister Sarah was becoming, how clever, how talented a writer. How proud he was of Alex living in Chicago and fighting for her dream of working in the movies.
I tried not to seethe with sibling jealousy. It occurs to me now, he must have spoken about me the same way to them. I would listen to him clear his throat on the phone and try to come up with my own accomplishments, my proud moments to hold up in shining comparison.

My father has always said that my emotional happiness has been my priority before anything else.
When I was younger, it sounded like a flaw, but now it's a compliment.
I see the love he has for my sisters, for me, for my baby boy, and I realize how my Dad is only now allowing himself the luxury of forgiveness and love with abandon.

In the shadow of what's to come, he is using what is left of his breath to tell us how much happiness we bring him. He says over and over all he wants is to spend as much time together as we can.

And when you begin looking at the hourglass of breaths we will take in life as running low. The stream between the two globes as thin as a thread, you realize that letting go of the frustrations and the agonies doesn't mean forgetting them, and loving someone doesn't mean that you forgive them for everything.
It just means that bringing it all up would be wasting breath.

And we don't have that luxury around here.