Here If You Need Me: Learning to Be Present While Fighting for Your Father

I run. Across the campus, where I’ve been teaching. Through the grit of the city, into the grit. Through the cavern of the train station, up to the wind-chucked platform, into the train. Now the train is bumping along its tracks. Now it has stopped. Now there are three long blocks to the hospital and then Reception, elevators, the ICU, where they tell me to stop running. I am to mask up, gown up. I am to drop the backpack of books I have been toting around like a turtle shell and adorn myself with nylon, paper, strings.

The nurse talks and then my father starts—a helium whiz of words, a steroid high.

“Hey, Dad,” I say, but he has his hearing aids out and his glasses off and there will be no reading my lips behind the mask that I am wearing.

“I’m here,” I say, despite it all.

“I’m here,” I say. For my sake.

*

When they lose my father’s medicines in the days and weeks, then months, to come, I demand emergency provisions. When it is clear that the wrong pills and the wrong doses have been slipped into the treatment, I am not easily consoled. When they accidentally bring my father someone else’s cure, I am aggressively self-righteous. When the meals that are delivered aren’t the meals my father wants, I knock to the front of farmer’s market lines so that I can hurry back to him with something he might like.

When there are bills to write, I write the bills; when there are calls to make, I make the calls; when the therapists and the aides and the nurses are kind, I bring them books, I bring them flowers, I bring them cookies; and when something goes wrong and then another thing goes wrong and when, now, no fault of his own, no forgiving this scenario, my father is newly quarantined, I declare, superhero style, To hell with quarantine. And show up. And do not don the quarantine gown, the quarantine gloves, the quarantine mask. And insist with my questions, until I get the news we must have, so that I can carry it back to my father, who lies in his bed and asks if, perhaps, I can just sit, if, perhaps, I can quiet now and be.

But this is his life I am defending.

This is his life, and I am turning:

Thin-lipped.

Grim-faced.

Narrow-eyed.

Drought complexioned.

When fighting on behalf of the father you love, who do you become?

*

Now it is decided that my father must move—from his spacious retirement village villa to a two-room fraction in Personal Care. Now I start the moving, winnowing, choosing, packing. I distribute and disseminate, negotiate the Steinway with the invisible cracked rib. I give my mother’s vases to the aides I like most. I leave an oil painting of my mother young to curbside strangers then carry my father’s future up the hill—lamp by lamp, suitcase by suitcase, salvaged plate by undispersed spoon, until the pressure is too big and I am far from big enough, and my brother arrives with a plan: We’ll hijack a dolly to transport the heavier things. We’ll get the heavier things transported. Then we’ll nudge the empty dolly toward the downward curving hill, take a running start, and hop a ride, skateboard style, back to our father in the nearly empty villa.

It will be funny, trying to keep our balance.

It will be funny, if one of us falls off.

I wish I’d thought of that.

Proficiency is not benevolence. There is an art to being present.

*

In early May, I get into my car, pull up to the village, and park. I wave hello to the ladies who sit like brightly colored birds on the benches outside the Personal Care wing and walk the long hall where my father lives. Knock.

“Hey, Dad.”

We head down the hall and slide into the sun. The ladies on the benches raise the wings of their arms inside their white and baby-blue cardigans. Their three-footed canes stand upright and steady—a miniature, silver, defoliated forest. Had I a bus I would sweep them up into the adventure I have planned.

I swap my car for my father’s car and drive it nice, slow—giving him time with the handsome Volvo he has been separated from. I keep my hands on the wheel while he tunes his radio and adjusts the interior air, as he watches the forsythia in the yards we pass, so intrinsically beguiling.

I tell him we’re headed to a garden. I tell him I’ll drop him off at the entrance circle and then we’ll walk not all that far and sit in the overlook for as long as he wishes.

I say it, I have planned it. Me. The daughter.

The rocking chairs are empty when we reach them. The garden hill decelerates at our feet. There is the green lean of particular blooming things, and we sit, doing nothing. If you'd look at us you might say we were perched on a low shelf of sky.

The clouds puff up like white balloons.

I take instruction from the hour.

*

When fighting on behalf of someone you love, the fight must end, the love must be the art of being present. I am slow to learn, but I am trying. Pastrami lunches. Riverbank afternoons. Conversations in the shade of village gardens. The art accelerates. I feel myself wanting more for him, more for us, more (the wanting hurts) for me. On a Saturday in July, I have a new plan, my best plan, I am certain. My husband and I will take my father to a hot-air balloon festival. We’ll watch inflated color take the sky.

Sure, it’s hot. Sure, it’s far. Sure, it is no doctor’s order. But look at us and look (this is me, wanting to see) at the love I give my father.

The crowds are thick when we arrive. The sun is cruel. The fence where we are to stand to observe the grand ascent might as well be on the far side of the moon. My husband heads off toward the clash of vendor booths and singers of songs, while I walker with my father over the ruts and provisional plank bridges of the festival grounds.

We stop for minutes at a time so that he can sit and rest in his collapsible chair. It takes us an hour, maybe, to get from the car to the fence, but we arrive, we settle in, I un-collapse his chair, I stand beside him. We are four or five hours from the main event and out there, beyond the fence, there is nothing but launch-pad emptiness.

They call the hot-air balloons the gentle giants. These envelopes and baskets lifted by fire and by air, directed by wind and cables. These touches of genius more than 200 years old. Like everything that’s beautiful, they’re gored with danger, too, and I guess this is the part where I confess that the balloons are my obsession, not my father’s, that it is me, not him, who has spent four years writing a novel about them, lusting (that is the word) after hot airs.

I tell my father some of the history I’ve read, some balloonery stunts and heroes. I tell him what I hope we’ll see. I stand and he sits and we are side by side, squinting toward nothing, and my husband is wherever he is. He texts me sometimes, speaks of shade and a cool Pepsi.

When my father asks for water, I am glad to run and get it.

When my father remembers that he left his afternoon pills in the car, I run again, return.

When I run out of balloon exempla, I have nothing more to say.

The excoriating weight of the sun.

The excoriating waiting.

Three o’clock.

Four o’clock.

Five o’clock, and back at my father’s retirement village, dinner is being served in a well-conditioned room on clean white plates with proper silverware. Five o’clock, and the ladies on the benches might have sung today, might have even sung Sinatra, may be eating sugar-free ice cream in sugar-free cones waiting for the movie to start in the comfortable villa auditorium.

“Sorry, Dad,” I say.

He waves his hand, brushes away my apology. His hand, I fear, is burning.

When fighting on behalf of the father you love, who do you become?

Six o’clock, and my husband emerges from his tunnel of shade and finds us. The crowd behind us is wide, wild, festive—lounging on blow-up chaises, standing beneath big-lid brims, wearing rainbow-colored glasses. Six o’clock, and in the distance, a human cannonball is about to be shot straight from his cannon, and the crowd stands, it binoculars up, and we have no binoculars.

“Can you see him?” my father asks, for he’s standing, too, leaning all his weight onto his walker in the rutted earth.

“That way,” I point, and my father leans harder and squints more but cannot see him.

The cannon blasts. The man flies. He is saved by the nets strung up to save him.

“How’d it go?” my father asks, over the roar of the crowd.

“Well,” I say, and my father shrugs.

Now, when we return our gaze to the main attraction, the launch field is being recast as a theater. The ballooners are arriving with their Avis trucks, their pickup trucks, their stars-and-stripes painted trailers. Entire crews pile out of vehicles, clown-car style. Children run up and down the field. Tarps are snapped out, bundled balloons are unbundled, baskets are given a little shine. The fancy people who will be sent aloft are gloriously fancy, while the regular sky riders fix their caps. The empty field is now a psychedelic one. A fan turns on, a single fan, and the first balloon inflates. It lies on its side stretching its long stripes out.

We have front row seats. We avert our eyes from the sun on the horizon. We wait.

“Do you want to sit?” I ask my father, but he can’t hear me. He’s lost the batteries, he pantomimes, on his hearing aids. He will watch the spectacle of hot-air balloons like a movie with no sound. He will watch it standing.

The first balloon inflates. It bobbles. It lifts itself from its supine state and becomes a proper, upright teardrop. It tugs at its cables and the ground crew tugs back, and now into the basket its pilot climbs. I can hear the propane burner burn. My father can see the blasts of fiery breath. The ground crew gathers for one last touch of the basket, one last conference with the pilot, and then the cables are released, and the burns burn, and the balloon lifts, and something in me swells.

My father stands.

He leans across the fence.

My father is amazed.

The breathing lungs of the once-dormant balloons. The peaceable chaos of stars and moons, greens and yellows, weaves of primary hues, rip locks, parachute tops, insignia and brands, a panda. We never know, when a balloon begins taking its airy shape, what it will turn out to be, or how it will soar. Stripes and diagonal splits, an American flag, a blue dog, that panda, and the crowd is thick with joy, the crowd sings to the songs that the loudspeaker blares, the crowd is one single thing on the ground and the balloons are their singular things in the sky, all streaming breeze-ward in the same direction, over our heads, away from the sun, to a not-so-distant touchdown, and now even the official photographers have stopped taking photographs to watch. When one balloon nudges another during takeoff, it is not a nudge, it is a kiss, and we roar.

I touch my father’s shoulder so that he can watch my lips.

I touch his shoulder so that he will turn, so that I can see his face.

I touch his shoulder and the balloons are in their floats—their fires hissing, the pilot hands waving, the music playing, the breeze behaving, and up they go, up higher and breeze-ward, like musical notes, like a harmony sung only in soprano.

I feel the heat of a tear in my eye. I feel myself exhaling, and beautiful is the only word I have, beautiful, and my father has seen this, he is standing right here, he is at the fence looking up.

Nothing tethered. Everything released.

*

We stay until the very end. We stay until Elvis himself, in fabulous shades and a durable belt, wobbles up, stories tall, and cants and tilts then lifts then drifts into the sky, follows the waft, the glide, the effervesce. We leave only then, and it is almost nearly dark, and there are ruts and planks and wobbles and crowds between where we are and where we must be and only so much time if we are to take my father out for the meal we promised him.

My husband goes off ahead with the heavy things. I stay behind with my father. For every step he takes, he must first find solid walker ground. For every step ahead, there is a step or two to the side. The entrance gate is now the far side of the moon, and the crowd rushes past, and my husband is far ahead, and the night comes on us fast.

“Dad,” I keep shouting, so that maybe he can hear me. “It’s okay, Dad. You’ve got this,” because what other choice does he have, what other choice have I left him with? You’ve got this, you’ve got this, you have come this far, but he is exhausted, his legs are folding, he is pitching back—leaning away from his walker and now all 107 pounds of me must be his bulwark, his defense against a fall, and I am not big enough, I am not big enough for this thing I made out of the love I keep transmuting.

The balloons are long gone, the effervesce. It is my panic, rising.

“I need some help!” I begin to call. “Help! Help me!” Until my husband, far ahead, somehow now hears me. He circles back. Catches my eye. Sees the sharp anxiety. Calm, he talks to my father, then walks ahead, marking out the best, least bumpy path, showing my father how it gets done, showing me. We go sideways, backward, forwards. We arrive, at last, to the fairway and the vendor booths, and it’s not that much further now, I think, you can do this, Dad, I think, but he stops. Just stops. Begins that awful pitching backwards thing, like a tree going lateral. There is a crowd behind us, pressure. I turn to apologize for the obstacle we have become.

“No, ma’am,” one man says to me, a sturdy man, the closest one. “Don’t you be apologizing, ma’am. We’re here if you need us. We’ve got his back.”

Here if you need us. The art of being present. My eyes grow hot with gratitude, while, up ahead, my husband finds Security, Security calls Medical, a lady at a booth lends us her hand. We uncollapse my father’s chair and he sits with his collapsing legs and we wait until the medical people in their golf-cart truck come, their flashing sirens on. It takes many of them to lift the one of him, and my husband runs ahead toward the car.

“Hold on,” the girl in the makeshift medical transport says.

“Hold on,” and she’s talking to me.

*

The hour is dark. The moon is full. The moon is nearer than it’s been. In the back of his Volvo, my father watches the roads, the world now asleep, all the restaurants closed. He cannot hear for now, and so we do not speak.

Here if you need us, the man said. Here if you need us. Such a simple thing.

It is so late at the villa that they’ve locked every door but one. The cafeteria is dark, the halls are empty, the ladies who like to sing are sleeping. It is so late, and it is so bad with my father that a wheelchair is now needed. My husband parks and I dash inside. I find what I need in a closet of emergency provisions. I wheel my father down the many halls, unlock his door, push him in. The only food in his place is a tub of sugarless cookies. He clings to his last bottle of water, his empty yellow bag of pills.

“That’ll do,” he says, when we‘re in. “I’ll take it from here.”

“Dad,” I say. “I’m sorry, Dad,” and give his burnt cheek a kiss.

Here if you need us, the man said. Here if you need us. Such a simple thing.

The next day, early, my father calls. The next day his hearing aid batteries are working. I answer the phone with an apology, an apology that I have prepared during the night of my not sleeping.

“No,” he interrupts. “It was beautiful. It was really something to see.”

“But, Dad,” I say. “Your legs, Dad. The heat. I shouldn‘t have . . . I thought maybe . . . I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“I don’t know how they do it,” he says. “Do you? I don’t know how the balloons don’t get in each other’s way, but I’m glad I went.”

There’s silence, then. No questions and no answers and no good words to say. Love is not strategic. Love shouldn’t be.

“Maybe you can send me pictures,” my father says then. “So I can show all my friends over here.”

“Pictures?” I say.

“Yes. A lot of pictures. Wait until they see.”

• 0