monday 17 january 2011
turners stale
My daughter and I came to live in Western Mass in April of 1985, though not to the psychological cesspool that is Turners Falls until August of that year. Homesick as we were, we made the 240-mile roundtrip back to our hometown fairly often until the fall of 1986. That's when I came down with palindromic rheumatism and chronic fatigue syndrome, both at the same time, and the number of trips home dwindled with my unreliable energy.
At Christmastime that year, though, I was able to make the trip, helped by lots of caffeine. We left on the 24th, early in the day, since both of us were on school vacation. Pictures in the memory tell me that that year was one of our snowless Christmases, but I'm not absolutely certain on that.
Evening came on. We usually opened one or two gifts on Christmas Eve, and that year was no exception. My mother and daughter and I were all in the livingroom, deciding which packages we wanted to attack, when my father came into the room with both a gift and a state of low-level agitation. Not anger, but a kind of nervous urgency.
He badly wanted Mum to open HIS present first. This was unusual for a couple of reasons. First, it had been years, I believe, since he had chosen a gift for her. She usually told him what she wanted, and he bought it. The first ten or so years of my life, money was on the tight side for my parents, and in those years my father made Christmas for the kids his priority. This left my mother with either only one rather inexpensive gift, or no gift at all from him. She did not take this with equanimity, and when finances improved, she assured herself a suitable gift by telling him what she wanted. And the second strange bit was that if he did in fact ever choose her gift himself, he would give it to her as soon as he bought it, rather than saving it for the day itself.
So here he was on Christmas Eve with a gift he had chosen himself and had actually saved for the right time, urgently telling her to open his gift first. There was a little whiff of pride, too, mixing with his nervousness. I was sitting beside her when she opened it, and he was standing on her other side. When I saw that the box said Towle Silversmiths (a very old and prestigious Newburyport firm), I knew he had spent some money. But the shocking part was that he had acutally gone to Towle's and picked out something.
Inside the upscale box were two silver bells, about six inches tall. One was an actual bell that could be rung (with a lovely sound), and the other had a music box in it that played a song. What other song would it be but Silver Bells. My father's cheeks were pink with excitement. He was waiting for her to gush, to be delighted. She said Oh thank you, dear in a high-pitched pleased voice that I myself knew to be phony, and he probably did too. He said a few more things, pretended he believed she liked it, and went off to his bedroom.
When he was gone, she turned to me. Why did he think she would want these bells? Because you love silver and gold, I told her, and because you've always loved the song Silver Bells. She would not relent. I wanted to brain her. The gift was unsatisfactory to her, and furthermore, he'd been acting strangely for a couple of months. Strangely how? She couldn't describe it, but he wasn't himself.
Later we all went to bed, colored lights burning inside and out. It was about 1:00, I think, only an hour into Christmas day, when I heard my mother at their bedroom's private exit saying What are you doing out there? What's the matter? My father had got up out of bed and rushed outside in his underwear. I got up. What's wrong? He's outside in his underwear. He says he can't breathe.
She called an ambulance. I can't remember now whether or not he had fallen to the ground. It was decided that she would go with him and I'd stay with my sleeping child. She would call me when she knew anything.
I don't recall how long I waited for the phone to ring. When it did, I was told it was a heart attack; what the doctor called a SILENT heart attack, without any left arm pain or chest pain or other common symptoms. It was caused by congestive heart failure, but that wouldn't be known for another day or two. And congestive heart failure was, the doctor said, what had caused my father not to be himself for a couple of months.
Relatives needed to be called when the morning was at a decent hour, and I believe I had to do that. Most of the calls were long distance, and I don't think Mum could do that from the hospital. Whenever that was finished; whenever I had my kid breakfasted and dressed; whenever I had let her open at least a couple gifts and told her that Grampa was in the hospital and we were going to see him, we loaded his gifts and her gifts into the car and went along.
Naturally he was in ICU. They would let two of us in at a time, once an hour for fifteen minutes. My daughter opened and played with her Christmas presents in the ICU waiting room. We ate our lunch and supper there. Throughout the day and early evening, relatives arrived, stayed a while, then left. On our first trip in to see him, daughter and I took in some of his presents. He was so weak he could not unpeel tape and untie ribbons. He tried, but his hands were too weak. I did it for him. He didn't even give a crap about the gifts, I could tell, but he was trying to act Christmasy for my daughter's sake, who was seven years old at the time. He also put on an ultra-cheerful if wan performance every time she showed him one of her own gifts. I'm pretty sure he even apologized to her for getting sick and screwing up Christmas.
My father had a very sheepish air about him most of the time that day and evening, and I, if no one else, knew why. My father felt loved that day. That all these people would come on Christmas day to a depressing ICU and visit him made him feel loved. This was a thing that didn't happen terribly often for him. He was a difficult person in some ways: fussy, nervous, and quick-tempered. It was often hard to feel relaxed enough to behave in a loving way with him. But there were times when it could happen, as on this day, and he would almost always go sheepish. As if it overwhelmed him to see that he might just be loved.
We are not the only family ever to have had a Christmas medical emergency, and we were not the last. But any of you who HAVE had such an emergency know how much weight is added by the fact that it is Christmas day. The one day of the year when you most hope things will go well. They did go well. He didn't die. And the fact that we spent most of Christmas day and night in ICU and didn't cook our Christmas dinner and didn't have a normal Christmas in any way is, and was, irrelevant to me. What mattered to me above all things was that he must not die. That was my most important, most lasting Christmas gift on 25 December 1986.
~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
read... Lucked out... Lifelines~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(stained glass at www.signals.com)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No comments:
Post a Comment