On Sunday my step mother Mabel was reemitted to the hospital after suffering chest pains. In September she had a heart attack, but made a seemingly speedy recovery. But over the weekend she experienced chest pain, managed to take some nitroglycerin, and then she and my father went to Joseph Brant hospital in Burlington. Tests showed that she had significant blockages in the arteries leading from the heart. Bypass surgery was scheduled for Thursday. On Wednesday I flew from Victoria to be with my father, and with Mabel.
Hamilton General is a sprawling complex in a crack-ridden, down trodden neighborhood of the Steel City. But it’s home to a top-notch cardiovascular surgery facility, and staffed with the regions best doctors and nurses. While Mabel entered the surgical theatre, my father, Mabel’s children Pat and Alice, my sister Chantel, and family friend Andy sat in a room called “The Heart Investigation Unit and Operating Waiting Room.”
We talked about nothing. We drank tea. Ate ice cream.
Mabel’s surgery was successful – quadruple bypass – and by evening my father and Alice were able to see her.
Friday and we’re back in the hospital for the day, visiting with Mabel, and sitting in the cafeteria, watching the snow fall. Today it’s just my father and I. After a while we return to the ICU, mostly for a change of scene. Everybody in this room is here because someone they love is undergoing heart surgery. I look around the room: people sit in little groups and talk quietly. One man sits alone contemplating the pale wall across from his weary eyes. A woman next to me reassures her son via cell phone that her husband – his father - will be fine, after five heart attacks, and his scheduled quadruple bypass surgery.
It is a room full of hope and fear.
Fear that the failings of the human body, the choices we’ve made through our lives, and the genetic programming we’ve inherited have finally caught up with us, and with our kin.
Hope that tomorrow we’ll wake up and those we love will still be by our side.
Last night I went to bed at my father’s home, exhausted though I’d done nothing more than walk up and down the stairs to the cafeteria to find caffeine throughout the day. I lay in bed thinking about the people I love most: my father, my sister and my mother. My beautiful boys. My angel Jenn.
It was the kind of day at the end of which I wished I could curl up with my lover and feel the warmth of her next to me. We speak in the evening and I can feel her so close, even while she is half way across the country in the Alberta’s Bow Valley. I wonder what the hell I’m doing wasting even a single day not by her side? And where are my children? I’m thirty-seven years old and I still struggle nearly every month to pay the bills. What am I doing messing around like this?
(And I’m not talking about this trip to Ontario, which feels like the most important thing I’ve done in a long while.)
I lay awake for a long time, my mind rearranging everything from my parenting style to my living arrangements; my career path to my living room furniture.
I decide that what I want is everything. What I want is bliss in my relationship with my children. I want my life to be inextricably intertwined with Rio and Silas. I am their father: I will be a part of them today, everyday, always.
(bliss with boyz)
I want bliss in my work. Work is love made visible, says Kalil Gibran. If so, then work should flow as gracefully as love. Though not without rapids, for what love is, it should at least seem to emerge from a source and cascade towards a destination. I’ve been finding more rocks in the watercourse of late than I’d like.
I want bliss in love. I’ve never been in love as I am now. The feeling of boundless possibility is staggering. I feel as though I might give more than I ever thought possible now, and in return could receive more than I ever dreamed.
The barriers that keep me from reaping the effortless state of inseparability with my family, my work and my love seem trivial lying in bed, thinking of the faces of families in the ICU, wondering if their husbands, wives, fathers and mothers will be at their sides in the morning.
