Happy Father’s Day! I hope all the fathers out there who are reading this are having a great day (and I for one consider someone a father even if their only “children” happen to have fur and a tail). I don’t normally post on Sundays, but this special occasion seemed to warrant it.
However, a word of warning first: somewhat morose musings to follow. Hey, my blog does have “weird” in the name.
For me, this Father’s Day is different from every one that’s come before. This is the Father’s Day that almost wasn’t to be. Late last year, my father lie in a hospital bed, dying. His lungs were filling with scar tissue–for no apparent reason and much to the doctors’ bafflement. Later, they declared it “idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis,” but that was mostly just to have something to fill in on the health insurance forms. Truly, they have no idea what happened to him or why. Simply bad luck, one of those crazy health things.
As he bottomed out and went into full-time hospital care, I thought a lot about what the world would feel like without him. I considered how I would pass important days–Father’s Day, birthdays, Christmases, and most importantly, our family’s favorite holiday, Halloween. Would I commemorate him each and every time with pictures posted to social media of happier days and silly anecdotes about a time before his illness took hold? Or would I just use the occasion to live, to be happy, to do my best to be a person who would make him proud? Part of me felt like it almost didn’t matter how I chose to remember him because I already knew it would never be enough. The thought of how empty the world would be without him completely overwhelmed me.
But then something happened. Something that seemed too good to be true, like our lives might suddenly turn into the real-life equivalent of an uplifting Hallmark movie-of-the-week, made all the more maudlin because it was Christmas, the perfect time for the proverbial “holiday miracle.” The doctors added my dad to the lung transplant list. This was a major move because we had earlier been told he was probably too sick to survive, and doctors won’t perform a transplant on someone who’s too sick. But even so, people can linger on transplant lists for months, can’t they? Everyone’s heard those horror stories, and my father didn’t have months. Without the transplant, he had less than two weeks. But seven days later, we got the call. After a complicated procedure (complicated even by transplant standards), my father came through the surgery. It’s been six months, and the doctors have declared him a success story.
However, transplants are a tricky business. You never know how long the new organs will sustain. My father’s lungs could go into rejection anytime, and the doctors might not be able to bring him back to us again. But then, none of us knows how long we have on this Earth, so in that regard, he’s no different than the rest of us.
With great irony, he and I aren’t spending Father’s Day together. Separated by over a hundred miles, he’s in Ohio, and I sit at my computer in Pennsylvania. But it’s okay we’re not together today. After all, we have tomorrow.
So in addition to all those fathers out there, I want to give a shout-out to the sons and daughters who lost their dads or maybe never got the chance to know their fathers. Today you’re fighting the bravest battle of all.
Happy hauntings, and happy Father’s Day!