Today is the day. In seven-ish hours (by the time you read this, it will have been yesterday), I will be on the way to the airport and hopefully a few hours later, I will finally, finally, have the house to myself. It’s been three months since that fateful night that changed my life forever. Except, it didn’t? I’ve been living with the duality for three months now of everything changing and nothing changing. That fateful night.
Pardon me for going over it again, but I still can’t quite believe it. No matter how many times I recite the domino effect of events, it still hasn’t sunk in. As a refresher. I got pneumonia somehow.
Side note: It’s still freaking me out a bit that I don’t know how I got it. I was so careful with COVID precautions. I only went out once a month to the pharmacy to get my meds. Then, once I got vaxxed, I loosened up a tad. I went to Cubs twice and to pick up lunch with my brother once. That’s it. How the hell did I get pneumonia? And I hadn’t been to the pharmacy that week. I mean, maybe it was nesting for over a week, but that’s not usually how my bronchial issues go. Then again, how would I know? I mean, if I am sick for a week and don’t know, then I don’t know.
Apparently, there are different kind of pneumonia, including getting it from mold? If that’s the case, that’s probably how I got it. Or it might have been a week or two before and just incubating. I did email my Taiji teacher the Tuesday before the Thursday night/Friday morning (3 a.m.) it happened to say I was unusually tired and could not make Zoom class that night. So I had an inkling, but only just.
I was exhausted and apparently couldn’t breathe, so I called 9-1-1. The cops came and bagged me (with oxygen) until the EMTs arrived. Then< I had two cardiac arrests and a stroke on the way to the hospital. They shocked me twice and Epi penned me once (for one of the cardiac arrests). Then, a week unconscious while they shoved a breathing tube down my throat and chilled my body to keep me alive.
Then, they gave my brother the prognosis (not good), saying I would probably not make it even if they didn’t say it in so many words. They told him that if I did come back, I would probably need months of rehab.
Radio silence from me for a week and then, I woke up. I woke up angry, ready to fight–someone, anyone who needed fighting. That was probably part of the reason I came back in good shape–because I was fighting all the way. I’ve said countless time that I believe luck, love, and Taiji are what brought me back, and I stick to that. Truly, I think Taiji is the part of the reason I came back relatively intact. I have been studying it for fourteen years (or fifteen? Many years) and it’s held me in good stead in other situations–like a minor car accident. And in navigating tricky familial relationships. I’ve always been a touchy person (quick to anger), but Taiji has helped me control it.
The last two months has tested that sorely. I saw a side of my mother I really wished I hadn’t–but I also saw a side of myself that was not pretty. A fury that I tried to keep leashed came out when I was pushed beyond the limits of my control. I can deal with my parents on a monthly basis–on the phone. But being around them all the time has been a trial. They are so old-fashioned and frankly horrifying in their viewpoints (especially my father), it’s been difficult for me. I tried to bite my lip and setting up a rolling donation to Planned Parenthood every time they said something that bugged me helped, but it still worked on my last nerve.
Today, my father was crying at breakfast. He wanted to give me fatherly advice, which, no. He has not earned that right. He was absent my entire childhood (and, frankly, abusive when he was there) and now he wants to act like he has something to say? Fuck that shit. I just nodded my head for the most part, eager to get it over with, but I was raging inside the whole time.
After all the bullshit he put me through in the last two-and-a-half months, he thinks he can act like he knows me? Hell, no. I know part of it is dementia, but not all of it. He’s been bitching and moaning to go back to Taiwan since the second day he’s been here. He hasn’t asked me anything about myself, instead declaring things about me that are incorrect (such as, “You don’t like spice, right?” Which is mind-blowing given that my brother and I had a decades-long tradition of giving each other hotter and hotter hot sauces every Christmas. Or asking me if I’m cold when he should know damn well by now that I don’t get cold like normies.)
And my mother has been making herself sick with anxiety. She’s gotten dizzy and knots in her stomach because of all her worrying. She broke a small glass salad bowl while making breakfast. I know that this is not on purpose, but as I said, my empathy is almost completely drained and I just can’t. In the hinterlands of my brain, I feel a remote sympathy for her, but it’s just a generic sense of, “Oh, that’s too bad.” I don’t have the energy for anything more and there’s a small part of me that is impatient because my mother does it to herself. She’s not helping anything by freaking out and making herself sick. And, yeah, I know she’s not doing it on purpose, but she also hasn’t done anything her whole life to try to change it–like therapy.
That’s the biggest sticking point to me. She’s a psychologist. She knows what she needs to do (with my father and with her anxiety), but she has a million excuses why she can’t do any of the things she knows will help. Like therapy. And she keeps asking me for advice when she has no intention of taking it. That’s another annoying thing–she’ll ask everyone for their opinion, confuse herself, and then do what she wants, anyway.
She’s 79 and my father is 82. Neither of them is going to change in any meaningful way. I know this and yet, there’s the tiniest bit of the back of my brain that wishes things could be different. And while I’m angry and tense today, I’m also ineffably sad. I know this is probably the last time I see my father and maybe my mother. Even though I had given up on them ages ago, there’s still that little child inside of me who hopes in vain that things could be different.
For today, however, the goal is just to get through the next few hours without losing my cool. Getting them to the airport is my immediate goal; I can worry about the rest of my life after they are gone.