My Dad

“I’ve this creeping suspicion that things here are not as they seem. Oh, reassure me, why do I feel as if I’m in too deep?”

– “The Stone” by the Dave Matthews Band

Growing up I did not have a very close relationship with my father. And after I got hurt, it was even more strained because I believe he felt responsible for what happened to me. I don’t know if it was his grief over my accident, or just his bad health, but he had a series of mini strokes about 8 months after my injury. He lost his job and pretty much sat at home after that. My mom eventually met someone else, and when I was 21 she asked my father for a divorce, and kicked him out of the house.

For the first couple of years my father was a bit of a nomad because my mother kept the house, and he basically had no money other than Social Security Disability, which isn’t enough to live on. I know this now, because I have been on Disability for the past 7 years, and if I wasn’t married, I would not be able to live on my own and pay my bills. Heck, rent alone would eat up my entire check.

Eventually my father was able to buy a double wide manufactured home outside a little town called Wahlburg. It’s about 15 minutes south of Round Rock. He got a job working part-time as a clerk at our local grocery store, H-E-B. This part is so difficult to write, and I have tears in my eyes as I’m writing it right now. It’s so hard because my father’s fall from being a successful businessman to someone who lived in a trailer is devastating. He was brought up in one of the richest parts of Austin and always had enough money to take care of his family. But he squandered away all of his inheritance, never saving a penny for my sister’s and my school, or even for his retirement. And here I was, trying to navigate my new life in a wheelchair, and taking care of a father that put me in it.

At the time, my father was drinking a lot. I would go visit him about once a week and we would go out to dinner or a movie. On one particular night I arrived to take my father to dinner, and it was clear that my father had been drinking for quite a while. We went out to get in my car and I hopped over into the driver’s seat. He took my chair around to the trunk to take it apart and fell over the back of it and was too drunk to stand up. No one was around to help, and I had no idea what to do. So, I carefully lowered myself onto the gravel driveway and scooted myself back to where he was slumped over my chair, scraping my legs and bleeding the whole way back. When I reached him, I was unable to help him stand up, so I grabbed my phone out of the pouch in the front of my wheelchair and dialed the police. There was nothing else I could think of doing.

When the police got there, I explained our predicament, and they helped my dad up and escorted him back into his house. They then picked me up and put me back in my chair and made sure I was OK. Physically I was scraped up a bit, but mentally and emotionally I was a wreck. I couldn’t believe he did this to me! Why was I taking care of him when clearly, I was the one who needed to be taken care of? We obviously didn’t go out to dinner, and I got in the car and drove out to David’s (mom’s boyfriend) lake house where my sister and her friends were gathering.

Eventually my father had more strokes, and he was no longer able to live on his own, drive, or hold down a job. My mom had moved on with her life, and my sister was too young to help, so it was left up to me to take care of his finances and place him in an assisted living facility. I became power of attorney over his medical care and finances. I had to sell his house, his car, and get him moved to a place where he could get full-time care.

During this time, I was working full-time and going to school full-time, and caring for my father. My plate was beyond full, and I was absolutely miserable. I felt like I was juggling 3 balls in the air and doing everything I could to keep them from dropping to the ground. I was depressed and miserable. I was so busy that I hardly had a social life, and I had no outlet for my grief over my father’s situation and everything I was going through.

I remember this one time, I took my father to the movies to see Love Actually, and there is this part in the movie where Laura Linney’s character is caring for her disabled brother, and it just hit me hard. I started crying and couldn’t stop, because I recognized myself in Laura Linney’s character. I was in my mid-twenties, and I should have already graduated college, been dating my future husband, and focusing on my career. But I was stuck caring for a father that hardly cared for me when I was young, or even when I got hurt. I owed him nothing and he deserved nothing from me. But there was something inside me that wouldn’t give up on him. I guess I believed that I personally would never want to be alone without anyone caring for me, and I didn’t want my father to live the rest of his life without anyone caring for him.

My dad could still walk, but was not allowed to drive, so he would rely on a disability program through Austin’s public transportation to get around. He would have a driver pick him up and take him some place and then would call the transportation company to come pick him up when he was ready to go back to his assisted living home. There were quite a few times that he would get stuck some place and call me to come pick him up. I would have to leave work or whatever I was doing to go get him and take him home. During this time, I was still taking him out to eat at least once a week and handling any medical or finance needs he had.

When I was 30, my father had a couple more strokes, and landed in the hospital, where the doctors told him that the strokes had affected his swallowing and that he should be on a feeding tube. My father had so few pleasures in his life, and eating was one of them, so he refused the feeding tube. He went to rehab for a week or so, and then went back to his assisted living home.

For my dad’s 65th birthday I picked him up and took him to Texas Roadhouse for a steak dinner. When our food arrived, my father took his first bite of steak and began choking. I started yelling for help, and other patrons nearby came over to try and give him the Heimlich, but he had slumped onto the floor and was not responding. Someone called 911, and I sat there frantically watching as a stranger performed CPR on my father.

EMS got there very quickly and got him on a stretcher and started working on him. Prior to sitting down at our table I had seen one of my high school friend’s, David, at the restaurant with his mom. When all the commotion was going on he found me and consoled me as the emergency crew worked on my dad. They got my father breathing again and loaded him up into the ambulance. I got in my car, I was shaking and crying, and David drove me to the ER behind the ambulance.

Once in the ER, they whisked him away and told me to sit in the waiting room. I started calling my mom and my sister, and my mom got in her car and came to the hospital immediately. Soon after my mom arrived, the doctor came to talk to us and told us that he had lost too much oxygen to his brain, and was basically brain dead, and that they would keep him comfortable until he passed.

They had put my father in a room, but he wasn’t hooked up to any machines other than a heart monitor. I was numb and in shock. We called my sister and put her on speaker phone so she could tell him goodbye. My mom and I each said our goodbyes to him. I told him that I loved him, because even though he was not the father I wanted in my life, he was still MY father. I couldn’t sit there and watch him pass away; I just didn’t have that strength in me. So, one of the ladies at the assisted living home came up to be with him, and I went home with my mother.

To this day, I wish I would have stayed with him until he was gone. He deserved to have a family member with him, but I was so upset and even scared, and I just wanted out of that hospital. I went back to my mother’s house where I tried to process everything that had happened that night. I was so upset that I was shaking, and I couldn’t sleep. The next few days were a whirlwind as we planned for his funeral.

After my father passed away, I had a lot of mixed emotions. I was obviously sad, and I felt very guilty for taking him to eat steak when we both knew that the doctors had told him to be careful with what he ate. But it was his choice to go out for steak, and he had so few pleasures in life, that I wanted to do whatever I could to make him happy. However, a week or so later I started to feel relief, like this huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. And that caused me to feel awful about being glad that he was no longer my responsibility. It’s like I finally felt alive and like there were so many possibilities in my life now that I didn’t have to care for him anymore. It’s hard to explain, and my therapist has told me it’s ok to feel relief; that I shouldn’t feel bad for that emotion. I’m learning to accept the emotions that I feel when they come instead of stuffing them down and not dealing with them.

My father’s legacy lives on in every push I make of my wheelchair.