I’ve never been good at smalltalk. I blame my father for that.
After my mother moved out of our house just shortly before I turned seven, my sister and I started accompanying my father to work on occasions when he couldn’t find a babysitter. He was an emergency room doctor and often worked back-to-back shifts at emergency rooms all over the Houston metropolitan area.
My sister and I would stay in his on call room, eating vending machine food and watching TV from the hospital bed, while he worked. Sometimes we would play in the hospital hallways and distract the nurses. We just had to make sure that my father never caught us since, depending on his mood, his reaction could range from amusement to contempt.
Sometimes the drives between one hospital and the next took hours. Anyone who’s ever driven from one side of Houston to the other knows that it’s a sprawling beast of a city.
My dad was often exhausted from a combination of workaholism and sleep apnea and, since my sister pretty much always fell asleep a matter of minutes into any long drive, it became my job to sit up front and keep him from falling asleep at the wheel.
Maybe it was because he was essentially trusting me to keep all of us alive, but on these drives, he never treated me like a kid. I was the copilot, a fellow soldier, and his confidant.
We would sometimes listen to music or books on tape, but mostly we would just talk about anything and everything.
Death was something that came up a lot.
I remember him asking me what I thought happened after we die and how, when I told him I thought we were like gas being released from a jar, that we become part of everything, extending infinitely into space, he smiled softly and nodded, eyes still fixed on the road, calm as could be, almost as if he were daydreaming.
When he told me that he wanted to choose how he went, that he never wanted to be old or bed-ridden and that one day, he would choose when it was his time and go, I understood what he was saying and accepted it.
I don’t remember feeling any fear or sadness. It seemed like a fair choice and one that was his to make.
And I can’t say now that I feel differently, except that I’m not sure his plan accounted for the possibility that our birth and death and everything in between may be guided by forces so much bigger than we could ever wrap our minds around. And that to try to tamper with or control the very essence of our existence, the energies that cause our hearts to beat and our spirits to be drawn to everything that they are, might be absolutely futile.
That perhaps there are some things we are destined to go through in one form or another, for the growth and evolution of our souls. And that if we try to bypass these parts of our journey, we will only find ourselves rerouted again and again back to that same part of the path until we have the courage to walk down it.
I can’t know if this is true for certain, but it feels true from the depths of my being.
And I’m not sure where he is right now. My father, in and of himself, was quite the force of nature.
Sometimes I think he’s everywhere at once, permeating every swath of existence.
Sometimes I think he’s living another life. Revisiting everything he loved and everything he wasn’t yet ready to meet in his last one.
I hope this time he feels like he can face it.
Whatever it is.
I guess that’s something I hope for all of us.