I had that feeling I like to call, "I didn't even adequately dread this before it happened" when I got home the other day and my Mom met on the porch and said Dad had a rough day now is on oxygen (thank you new tumor). Since at that point we had only known about the tumor in his lung for about a week, I told her that I didn't even get time to imagine that he would ever even need to be on oxygen. My Mom said that she doesn't want to spend her time dreading what might happen because it detracts from the good time she could be spending with my Dad. (This is the type of thing that makes me think I will probably never be as mature as my mother.) She said, "I'm not going to live there. I refuse to." I more or less said, sincerely, that that's good for her. I also let her know I'd send her a postcard from the land of adequately-dreading-every-possible-worst-case-scenario because dreading what could happen is a place I've visited a lot. Like, I keep a toothbrush a there.
The same sort of thing happened last weekend when I was texting with my sister. She had returned back home to Oregon and I was in Seattle. I wanted to know if her car had gotten fixed because that day it filled with smoke while she was driving it. She said it was still in the shop, and that she was in Oregon and driving Dad's truck. And, he gave her gas money and said to drive it every day. In the 12-plus years I've had a license, I can count on one hand the number of times I've been allowed to drive my Dad's truck. Actually, that might be an exaggeration. I can't really remember ever driving it. We were both bummed to realize our Dad doesn't need his truck anymore. I hadn't thought about that until just then.
We found out later my sister's car was smoking because, according to the mechanic, there was probably a mouse nest in the vehicle that slipped down into the engine and caught on fire, then the smoke was blown inside the vehicle by her defrost system. Country living has its risks.
I'm very sad to hear about your Dad's illness. I know that might sound a bit trite or impersonal coming from someone who was never really close to you or your family and has only recently spent time with you at parties or weddings but I do know, intimately, how hard it is to watch a parent fight as their own body tries to destroy them from the inside. I look forward to reading in this blog that your Dad wins his fight and that your visits to adequately-dreading-every-possible-worst-case-scenario-ville become less frequent because, really, it's a pretty self-destructive place to stay for very long. I know because I ended up staying there for a long time even after my Mom...lost her fight. I, honestly, have no advice that will be guaranteed to work for you but I hope you never forget to be good to yourself and spend as much time with your Dad as possible.
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The smoke....ahhh to have those worries again. I think Henry and I might have recovered from the smell by now.
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