My Father (Poignancy Alert!)
The story of Dad's liver transplant, and how it has changed me.
My father and I have always had kind of a difficult relationship. When I was young, he had some personal struggles that I begrudged him -- he was a pretty serious alcoholic and drug user. I said things about it that, while I meant them at the time, hurt him quite a lot. Children lack tact, and sometimes empathy. It's part and parcel of childhood. Things were just never right between us. In the naivete of youth, I really believed that if I was perfect enough, good enough, smart enough... somehow that would make him choose me over the chemicals. It never worked. So I would try other things. Begging. Screaming. Vituperation. All I wanted was a dad. All he wanted was his next drink.
As I aged and emotionally distanced myself from him, his health deteriorated. I could see the onset of hepatitis in his eyes, and knew he was ill long before anyone else figured it out except perhaps his doctor. I watched him lose his wife in a tragic way, I watched him grow steadily worse, and I was really prepared to get a call from my grandmother saying, "your father aspirated on his vomit and died." But then, as I grieved a failed marriage and a career that wasn't working out as I'd planned, something happened in my dad. It was put up or shut up time; either he started getting his act together, or he wasn't going to make it. He had such serious cirrhosis that he needed a transplant. He wasn't even fifty years old.
Quietly, he started the process of getting onto the transplant list. He was required to be sober for 2 years before he was allowed on the list at all. I never thought he'd make it, but somehow, he did. Then, of course, there were the varices, which are weak blood vessels caused by portal hypertension in the liver. If one of those blood vessels pops, you've got about a 50/50 shot to live at all -- they bleed incredibly rapidly. He burst four. It seemed impossible that he would make it. Somehow, however, the night before Mother's Day in 2005, a liver match was found.
The months have flown since my father's liver transplant. Those were terrifying days through the winter and into spring as we prayed he'd get well. I grieved him. I protected my heart by letting him go, and giving him up for dead. I admit it -- I didn't think there was any way we'd be spared one more time, after all the times it seemed like death was coming knocking. When he got the liver, I was shocked, frankly. He seemed so ill. Sometimes I still don't know what to do with his survival.
From a distance, I've watched him transform in the months since the liver transplant. He never complained to me about the nausea, the opportunitistic infections, the healing process, the tons of medicines he had to take. He gamely pulled up his shirt once and showed me his enormous scars, and joked, "they gave me a Mercedes scar. I would have rather had a Lincoln." How can anyone maintain such humor in the face of a huge thing? It boggles my mind, and humbles me.
I feel like I'm getting to know a stranger, which I think is perhaps part of the explanation for my distance from him in the last year or so. He is so different. His family remembers this person that he is now, but I don't. He wasn't this person when I was a kid, or even through my 20's. He was a deeply wounded person then, who would call my boyfriends by my long-gone ex-husband's name because the poisons in his bloodstream would confuse him. He was a person whom I idolized, but who just, for whatever reason, held me at arms' length when I was a child, even though I knew that he loved me so much. He was a person who couldn't tell me the things that he really thought -- I never really knew he bragged about my sister and me, I never knew how much he worried about us, I never really felt like he missed us that much. The only reason I ever knew was because my grandmother would quietly snitch.
But those things seem like a distant bad dream, now. You can't understand how astoundingly proud I am of my father. He has come away from a precipice I was absolutely sure that he'd plunge over. He's stronger and healthier than ever. He's humbled, and filled with a sense of peace that kind of befuddles me and makes e envious all at once. Who is this funny, thoughtful guy? What the heck do I DO with him?
When I went through my own personal crisis at the very end of 2005 and into 2006, there were a few thoughts that held me together and let me come through it. One was how much my mother would be devastated if I just gave up on life (there is a piece on her that is in the works). The other was how much farther I think my dad came than I personally had to go. He kicked addiction, and went through the dizzyingly complicated process of getting a transplant. He did it. He survived. He even thrived. And over the last year, as I've put the pieces of myself in order, I've been quietly inspired by Dad's fortitude. I'm not angry about the past. As I told my grandmother, all I wanted was a sober dad who was interested in me. I got my wish. I couldn't have made 2006 happen without the example he set for me. College would still be a distant, painful wish. Dating? Hah. I still would never leave my house. I might not have found Mr. Right yet, but geez, at least I try! Weight loss? I'd be shoveling Ben and Jerry's into my mouth every night, wondering why no one found me attractive.
He did what I thought was impossible, and through this experience I learned that sometimes, impossibility is defined by your own heart, courage, and will. I've read so many inspiring tales of people accomplishing the "impossible". But come on... those aren't people any of us actually KNOW, right? Those aren't people we have watched fail and hurt and struggle only to finally be free of their personal ghosts. I think it took this collection of decades of sorrow, of love-hate, and of struggle for me to see the culmination of it all and appreciate it for what it is. It was a turning point and a benchmark. He could have given up. I don't know why he didn't. My last year has been a collection of little steps toward becoming that person *I* want to be, a small echo of his own journey.
Some day my father is going to walk me down the aisle. It's one of my fondest dreams, right up there with making a home, and tending a garden, and raising a family. And that day will be a turning point for me, my own benchmark, my own success -- my culmination of all these little steps. I'll be glad to be able to share it with him, and hope that as my father watches my progress through life, he's as proud of me as I am of him. There are many lessons that our relationship has taught me, among them the notion that it's only too late to heal if you say it is. It wasn't too late for us. I love him. Welcome back, Dad.