We Communicate this Way to Distract us From What We're Hearing

My sister Judy called last night. It has been since I lived in New York, and we were both in therapy to heal us of our non-dramatic childhoods, that we’ve spoken on the phone. I wasn’t sure if this was going to be one of those conversations that has no map and starts out tentatively to see if I’m in the mood, or if she was stalling on telling me something important, as a way of letting me know “this is important”, the way some people say, “Are you sitting down?” before they deliver big news.

“What’s up?” I say impatiently, hoping this isn’t a random out-of-the-blue lonely-around-the-holidays call and that it is a factual message.

She starts to build up to something and I interrupt.

“Dad. What happened.” It’s a statement. Not a question.

“You know?”

“No. What happened?” I just want her to tell me he’s alive. I was washing the kitchen sink when she called, and thinking about how much easier it was to find a good doctor when my father was the hospital administrator, which got me to thinking of all the times he carried me into the hospital when I was a kid, and too ill to walk. Then the phone rang.

“Dad had a stroke. Mom heard him coughing and went to get him a glass of water and found him in the dining room, hunched over in his chair, not responding. He couldn’t move his arm and his leg on one side and he couldn’t speak. Mom called an ambulance. He’s at Samaritan Hospital in Watertown now and he’s fine. He can move everything and he can talk. They’re keeping him for two days of observation.”

Judy is my only younger sister, the youngest of seven, but one who has always been able to handle emergencies, unlike me. She finishes telling me everything and we stay on the line in silence before we talk about what we should do and who is going to visit him and should I drive out or wait.

In the background, my husband tells the boys “Grampa had a stroke.” He calls them into the kitchen to rally around me. He takes on this very concerned “I’m here for you” posture. It unravels me. I prefer Judy’s stoicism. Her pauses between facts.

I ask her who else she called and she says, “I called you and Cindy. I’m not going to call anyone else tonight.” This is her way of saying this is a lot for her. “Mom asked me to call you.” There were no further directions of which sibling I should call in the lineup. If we were prepared for emergencies, Judy would call me, I’d call Janet, Janet would call Tricia, Tricia would call Karen, Karen would call Steve, and Steve would call Cindy, who would then call my mom, get more facts and then run them back down the birth order.

The offer to call Janet occurs to me but I’m distracted by Skye’s show of concern. He’s in position to hug me. I want him to walk away. That won’t be necessary. Stop that. It’s making me think I should fall apart and this isn’t fall apart news. This is wait for the next phone call news.

I have one foot in the kitchen and the other foot in the phone. I start to lose my balance between Skye’s family’s way of handling serious news and mine.  When Skye hears about a bicycler getting killed on the road he rides his bike on, it rattles him to the core. He doesn’t understand why I don’t react the same way right along with him. He doesn’t say it. But I can tell that I’m not reacting “correctly”. The way his mother would react. He thinks emotional things like this are shared in a group.  There is crying and hugging involved. Who cares that he doesn’t know this bicycler. A life was lost.

In my family, the group shares not being emotional. We share in silences and pauses. Maybe we’ll shake our heads no and say “that’s too bad,” then shake our heads no again. We’ll discuss facts. How it happened. The children left behind. If anyone is going to emote it will be Janet or me. We are the family’s emotion valves. It does not, in any way, make us need to say or hear I love yous. I love yous are not spoken. We do not throw hugs onto each other.

I’ve always thought our family was flawed that way, after seeing how other people act in tragic times but right now it is very comforting that Judy is not trying to play “there for me” but rather “just the messenger”.

I can see and hear Skye standing close by and expressing concern. But I can only hear Judy’s unemotional voice and her comforting silences that aren’t interrupted with “Well, I gotta go.” She just waits.

I can’t get two words I want to say out. She waits. I wait. I can’t get my voice back. All of the sudden it occurs to me that as the older sister I should be leading her in this. I shouldn’t be crying. I let that go. Maybe she doesn’t expect that. At the very end of the call I don’t say goodbye and I don’t say I love you. I hang up wondering if I should have said I love you. Maybe she wants to cry and not be just the messenger. She has had a rough year.

Judy says, “I’ll call you back after I call Mom’s cell.” It strikes me as odd that the cell phone is being referred to as a reliable source of contact with my mom, who is at the hospital. I question the cell phone. “Really? Mom has the cell phone? Is that because she is worried?” It’s hard to read my mom because she does not show emotions, so I read into the use of the cell phone. “She’ll have the cell on for two days.” There are two minutes of silence and then we hang up.

Last April, my father and I went on a cruise together to the Caribbean. We met each other at the airport in Puerto Rico. His plane from New York would land shortly before mine from Ohio. We would meet at baggage claim. I’d call him on his cell when I landed and, together, we would find the driver of a van, holding a sign that read “Princess Cruises”, and he would take us to our hotel. We’d stay overnight in Puerto Rico and board the cruise ship in the morning.

I’ve never traveled with my father, apart from the rest of the family. In fact, this would be the first time I’d spend time alone with my dad, other than the silent drives to and from college.

My dad is getting on in years. He is 81. He wants to take each of his seven children on a separate trip while he can still get around. I’m the fourth kid with whom he has taken a trip and I feel guilty for going before the others because I was a much more problematic child than the remaining siblings. They deserve to go before me, I think, especially because a little voice in the back of my head is fucking with me. It is saying, What if this is his last year? And the others don’t get a turn? And you, the black sheep, the one who caused him the most stress, gets to go but the other well-behaved, straight A siblings, who never crashed his car, or got in trouble with the law, or snuck out and in the house at night, never get a turn?

Never a man for drama, I start to wonder if he knows something about his health that he isn’t telling anyone, either because he doesn’t want us feeling sorry for him, or he is in denial.

When I couldn’t find my father at baggage claim I called his cell. He didn’t answer, because he is 81 and isn’t accustomed to cell phone usage. By accustomed to cell phone usage I mean, he keeps it on and in his pocket, on vibrate, so when I call, he can answer. Accustomed to cell phone usage means if he gets a message, he listens to it and deletes it afterward.

When he doesn’t answer and I get his voicemail with no outgoing message, just the sound of someone fumbling with the phone, I think his plane is on the runway, maybe, or was delayed leaving New York. It turns out I am waiting at the wrong baggage claim. When I find the correct conveyor belt I also find my dad, standing shorter than me, weighing less than me, and a little hunched at the shoulders.

“Hey, Dad!” No response.

“Dad!” Nothing.

Maybe it isn’t my dad. I get right behind him and place my palm on his back after I recognize his hearing aids and his haircut, closely shaved around the neck, as he has worn it since the Air Force.

“Oh, hi, Amy! You made it!”

His plane landed first. He has been waiting for me for a short while.

I talk to him in the loud airport, facing him, so he can see my lips. “I called you on your cell phone. Did you not hear it?”

“Hmm? Oh. No. It’s in my suitcase…” He points to the large one, not his carryon.

I finish his sentence, “…where you wouldn’t lose it.”

He laughs. I let it go. If he were my son, I would say, “can you keep it on and in your pocket so if we lose each other in Puerto Rico, we’ll find each other?” But I don’t. I vow to just never let him out of my sight, re-hearing my mother’s last words before I left Ohio, “keep an eye on him, Amy!”

I call my mom on the cell phone. It goes to voicemail after six or seven rings. The outgoing message is still the sound of someone fumbling with the phone. Then a tone. I leave my mother a message that will stay on her cell phone indefinitely. I’ll call the house phone and tell her it’s there.

I call my father’s hospital room. He answers. His voice is quiet so I put the phone on speaker. He denied having a stroke the day before but the doctor has since shown him the results of the MRI. Now he realizes. He just doesn’t remember it. He continues the phone call with a myriad of unrelated stories, including his construction plans underway for a house on Grindstone Island. It baffles my 13-year old, who is on his back on his bedroom floor, with his feet propped up on the edge of his door, listening.

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