Yes, all my angst and fatigue of late can be satisfactorily explained by the fact that I was simply carrying around too much hair. I remedied that yesterday by having seven inches chopped off and returning myself to the pixie cut I sported when I was four years old. The process was remarkably restorative-- I found I had a bounce in my step and a brightened outlook that not even a town full of McCain/Palin yard signs could dampen.
This could also be due in part to the fact that I submitted my mail-in California ballot just this morning, having taken great pleasure in marking my unpopular (for conservative, rural California) choices. Far from feeling the barely submerged panic of the regionally outnumbered, I looked at my fellow citizens today with a measure of calm. Yes, we disagree. Fundamentally. But I got to have my say as an American voter. Official documents with my name printed on them showed up, I filled them out, and then I walked them to the post office (I kind of don't trust my mailman, but here I'm going more on Abby's evaluation of him-- she snarls and barks at him through the living room window like he's Satan himself, and I scolded her for it until he started routinely giving me other peoples' bills, which I then had to hand deliver to the proper address. Hey, they're time sensitive, right?).
I'm also in another period of Pantslessness. He left Wednesday and will be gone for a month, during which time I will turn 30 and my youth will officially have faded on the vine. I'm actually looking forward to this age landmark. I think I've always felt 30, or older even, and now my body and employment history are finally catching up. I can finally shock my peers by reciting the bands and acts I'm old enough to have seen live (Elliot Smith! The Kids in the Hall!) and get away with spending an entire Saturday drinking hot tea and reading books without it seeming like some pitiful cry for help. I also left a party early last weekend with the explanation that I was tired, and no one took it personally or demanded that I take a shot and get my game face back on. Seriously, this age thing has its advantages.
Before he left, Pants gave me my birthday present, which stands in direct opposition to my newfound peace with aging. He got me a beautiful Burton snowboard, all slick matte black with big arching, glossy teardrop designs in rainbow colors on the deck. We had admitted defeat on my snowboarding boots only a week prior, when my repeated attempts to break them in (by clomping around the house in them while I cooked) kept resulting in numbness, cramping, and sickening pressure on my notoriously jacked up big toenails. So when he unveiled the board, I couldn't help myself and instead strapped my tennis shoed feet into the bindings and scooted around on the living room carpet. Who needs ankle support? I'm getting old-- I'm expected to break a few bones.
The difficult thing standing right underneath the purchase of a snowboard is what it says about our holiday plans. Pants' dad has Alzheimer's. He lives in an assisted living facility, and his losses in the past year or two have been great. I mean, they've been great over the whole stretch of the disease, as his particular strain seems to be one of the more severe, but the degree to which we've lost him recently has been huge and hard to bear. There is a mountain, whole suffocating snow drifts of guilt accumulating over our continued absence from the daily process of D.'s gradual disappearance. I look at Pants and I see a man driven to sharpen his every move and thought and reaction in this incredibly complicated machine that he flies, this razor's edge of risk that he lands on every day, and I see how it makes sense to do this when your own father has forgotten how to brush his teeth, is wearing two pairs of pants by accident. I see this, and I try to understand, but sometimes I feel like I can't breathe, like I'm caught between two realities that are tugging so hard in opposite directions that there's no room in the middle.
The question came up rather early on whether we would be coming back to Texas for the Christmas break, and my immediate instinct was to say "Of course." It didn't seem like there was any other logical plan. Pants will deploy for eight months starting in January. Eight months in the timeline of D.'s disease is an eternity. The factor no one says outright, partly because it seems ridiculous in the face of D.'s continued, daily, and permanent loss of cognitive function, is what if he dies? It hurts to write that. It hurts because the question could also be, "Isn't he gone already?" I feel like I'm walking a tightrope over the reality of loss and it's actual conclusion.
Pants' family seems to be at different stages with the whole thing. I got an earful from my sister-in-law, L., a woman I love dearly, who came out very strongly on the side that says, "Yes, D. is still here, and as family it's your iron-clad duty to come and see him, even if he doesn't remember you, even if he immediately forgets you were here, because that's what family does. That's what you'd want for yourself." I'm inclined to agree with her. This is how I grieve. I feel like I need to plunge into it elbow deep, and maybe go a little nuts for while, talk about it too much, write something really bad about it, and then dream about it for a few years. Of course, I also come from a family of over-talkers who never hesitate to pry out the ugly and slap multi-syllabic words on it. In fact, we even paid good money to do this on microphones in front of a roomful of strangers in San Francisco. I don't claim this is necessarily healthy, it's just what I'm used to.
Pants' family, on the other hand, works in measured silences and long, drawn-out negotiations that happen in subtleties verbalized in very short phone calls. He does have long talks with his mom on occasion, over the phone, but he always goes outside for those, or closes the door to the study. When I try to draw him out, it's painful and slow, and I feel like I have to do a lot of work on the front end to make sure this is a good time and setting for a Conversation. It's kind of like trying to feed a deer out of your hand. Words about deep emotion come from him slowly and with great effort, and because it's not fast and accurate, I can tell he feels off balance. Further, because it's his father, and because his father is dying, the words are buried and painful and no single combination of them seems adequate to the task of describing what that feels like, or what he needs in the face of this grief.
In January, Pants will get on the U.S.S. JOHN C. STENNIS (I found out carrier names are in all caps, like a shout. Apparently, being a moving city loaded to the gills with bombs isn't enough emphasis), and he won't get off for eight months. There are sometimes exceptions, like if an immediate family member dies, and the Red Cross gets involved and sends a helicopter for you. You go home for a short time, and then you get back on the boat. Just as often, though, you can't get off. Circumstances don't align and you're stuck. I can see how horrifying this might feel, this complete immobility, sleeping on a shelf every night, seeing the same people, eating the same food, marinating your brain in stress hormones with every launch and every trap-- even without the fear that something awful might happen at home. So say it does, and you can't get off the boat. The reality of what's happened-- what's been happening-- doesn't change, only your ability to be there.
(Ah, being there. So much of my nearly thirty years on this planet has been devoted to parsing the incredible importance of this phrase, and the incredible aching hole left by its opposite, not being there. But perhaps there's more to it. Say you're able to take being there for granted, as in "Of course he'll be there." Then what? Does it hurt any less? Do all problems, and the need to deal with them, stop because one more person is standing there, breathing in the terrible right next to you? I don't know.)
Pants does not want to go back for Christmas, and has told his family as much. I think his mom is OK with it. She understands him in some fundamental ways that I'm still working on. Through holding still and feeding the deer, I've learned that he's been able to cobble together a delicate web of peace around the awful lead fact that his dad is fading, has faded, will inevitably fade completely. His grief is a subterranean aquifer, miles deep. His grasp of the truth of it is all he has. In order to keep moving, he's had to turn his head and focus with laser intensity on something else, and luckily he's got the daily task of staying alive in a jet to fill that purpose.
But it still aches like a gut punch, every day. I drive home after work and school at night and watch the yellow road markers click by under the beam of my headlight and know that half a country away, the man I knew as my father-in-law is closing his eyes. He may have already forgotten me, having only known me for five years. I think of him every day, am probably seeing more of him in Pants than I know, but I don't know how to hold on to him, or even when to admit that what I'm holding isn't there anymore.
