Life is messed up, y’all. I know I’m not the only one who feels it. The world has been knocked off its axis like a little kid thrown from his bike, with the wind knocked out of him, trying not to panic because he can’t take a breath. Incidentally, do you even REMEMBER the last time you got the wind knocked out of you? Back then, it was a regular occurrence. If it happened to me now? I would think I was dying. There’s a hilarious bit on this by one of my fave comedians, Ryan Hamilton, that you should check out HERE .

Ok, back to life. Who knew just a few months ago that we would be in this weird place? This bizarro world that is slowly driving me bonkers. We are all trying to figure out how to live with the plague, and it’s killing us.

There was a movie made from the book, Love In The Time Of Cholera, a few years ago. I think it’s an unrequited love story that is then renewed after the death of the heroine’s husband. Yadah, yadah. I’m sure it’s lovely. I’ve just been thinking a lot about that phrase—“love in the time of….”. Because whatever else this virus has done to our country, our economy, our livelihood, our individual freedoms, it has also affected the way we express love toward each other.

I’m not a super touchy-feely girl. I know. You’re going to die from that surprise. But entire continents have to change the way they greet each other! And states, even. I was born and partly raised in Hawaii, and everyone kisses hello and goodbye. I’m not going to lie. I’m ok with the expansion of personal space. In normal life, I feel encroached upon, often, but that’s just my weird hang up. But watching other people try to adjust is hard.

The hardest thing, right now, is that I think my father is actually dying. I mean, I know he’s been deteriorating for a while, but I had to go up to Idaho and help my mother take care of him while we made the arrangements for him to be admitted to assisted living. She was feeling very ill and we found out while I was there that she has diabetes, so now she is taking meds and trying to rest and still visit my dad. Because he is in a high risk environment, filled with high risk people, the only people allowed in are employees. And spouses of patients on hospice. Once I went in, (masked) and set up his room with some pictures, etc., that was it. I said goodby at the entrance and then went to his window the day I left and had some “screen time”.

Well, he is going downhill fast. Yesterday he didn’t want to eat and didn’t want to even get up until late in the evening, and that was to go to the bathroom. He sounds so slurry when we try to FaceTime and has his eyes closed most of the time. My mom had a sore throat yesterday and went to urgent care. They think she’s just irritated her sinuses by trying to flush them with a tea tree oil solution (seriously, mom? I can’t imagine HOW that could irritate your mucous membranes), but per CDC guidelines, she can’t unring the “sore throat” bell, and so now SHE is quarantined from my dad, so now nobody can visit him. Which might be less heartbreaking if he didn’t have dementia and isn’t always sure of what is happening.

INK IS THE CURE

That was all just a really long way to say that I’m finding this grieving process kind of difficult right now, especially since this death is happening in slow motion, and, you know, we’re in a pandemic, an economic free fall, who even knows if our kids will ever go back to high school/college, and my husband’s career looks like someone took a jigsaw puzzle removed half the pieces and then threw them all over the floor and told you to make a picture out of it. So I am taking some advice from one of my favorite people (I was going to say on the planet, but he’s dead) EVER, C.S. Lewis, and write my feelings. Because I’ve already been eating my feelings, Netflixing my feelings, shopping my feelings, and this might be the most constructive. We all know I’m not super great about TALKING about my feelings, but I seem to do much better putting them down on paper/screen.

I was looking at a study someone did on grief and storytelling. It seems that telling stories about both their grief, i.e. death of a spouse, and the life stories of their loved ones were therapeutic. I can’t tell the story of my father’s death. It’s still happening. It’s horribly slow and torturous. I know he wants to die. WE ALL want him to die. But I am still sad. And I don’t know how to talk about a lot of that.

I do, however, know how to share some stories of his life. No one was a bigger bookworm than my dad. Except maybe me. He read voraciously. And he remembered everything he read. (I know it’s weird that I’m talking about him in the past tense, but he can’t read anymore. I don’t know how else to compose this) He LOVED stories. Especially life stories. He loved family history and genealogy and really got to know all of those people he had on his family tree.

So I’m going to share a couple of stories about my dad’s life that make me smile. I hope they make you smile, too.

SPANKED!

Okay, I know not everyone is on the corporal punishment wagon, but we believe in spankings. Actually, we hardly had to do any. And for sure, my dad believed in them. He was super strict and very stern, but sometimes really fun and playful. (If you’ve read some of my other posts, you know that he had undiagnosed Major Depressive Disorder most of his adult life, until I was in college, when he started meds). I vividly remember the ritual of the spanking. My dad would come home, and get the briefing from the North Korean National Security Advisor. Just kidding. My mom is from South Korea. But it wasn’t any less scary. I would try to make myself as invisible as possible. “Maybe if he doesn’t see me, he will FORGET to spank me.” Ha. Nope. Where’s dementia when you need it?!! My dad would call me and usher me in to the bathroom. He would have me sit on the lid of the toilet while he washed his hands. Like a surgeon. Getting ready to do a transplant or something. That 30 seconds or 49 million years it took him to wash his hands was the WORST. I could feel my heart beating in my throat. After he carefully dried his hands, he would administer the spank, which was always SO MUCH WORSE IN MY HEAD THAN IT WAS ON MY BOTTOM. I was then ushered out, and able to cry in private.

Now let me be super clear, I wasn’t beaten. I always knew what I had done and what the consequences would be. I didn’t feel like my parents were unfair. (About the spanking. Grounding me in high school for an ENTIRE month for backtalking my mother…? I have teenagers and I still think that was excessive.) But I was fascinated/horrified by the whole ritual hand washing process. It built up the tension and drama to the point that I thought I’d pass out, sometimes. After I became a mother, and had to spank a couple of adorable children on their bottoms, I congratulated my dad on his flawless, Machiavellian technique by which he drug out the sentence of the spanking. I said it was brilliant the way he prolonged the agony with the dramatic hand washing. He looked at me and started to laugh. “I just washed my hands because I had always been out in the garage working on cars or something!” “Wait, you didn’t do that ON PURPOSE?!” Seriously? Just remember, even without intending to, you can totally end up with your kids going to therapy for completely different reasons than which they SHOULD be going!

BONNIE AND CLYDE 2.0, aka THE KIMCHI CRACKERS

I don’t even remember how many months ago this was. Maybe a year and a half? My sister called to tell me my parents were on the lam. Sort of.

Some youth from our church went to paint the fence at my parents’ house. My mom is still 100% Asian, and so she was going to feed them. But she also had her hands full with dad, so she decided to go pick up some pizza. He rode shotgun, because he was out of his mind with boredom and then somehow talked her into letting him stay at the CAL Ranch store to just look around while she dropped off the pizza. Mom went home, fed the starving teens, and went back to pick up Dad…who was nowhere to be found.

Did none of us see this coming? Well, WE all did, but my mother still, at this point, was in EXTREME denial about my father’s mental status. So meanwhile, back at the CAL Ranch, my dad had gotten hold of a store scooter and asked some poor, unsuspecting young boy if he could drive it to Wendy’s. I’m sure that kid thought my dad was kidding. He thought wrong.

Dad merrily drove along the pavement at the blistering speed of about 3.5 mph and escaped not just the confines of the CAL Ranch store, or the Wendy’s parking lot, but that ENTIRE retail complex. Soon, he was buzzing down the highway to DI, his beloved thrift store, where he loved to buy books, old ski poles, and for some bizarre reason, old styrofoam coolers. (I don’t know, either. He just kept bringing them home after his little outings and we’d toss them out. And he’d buy some more. I can’t wait for the back story on that whole thing)

So, back to Mom. She has now scoured both CAL Ranch and Wendy’s and has deduced, correctly, that he might be heading toward DI. She arrived there to find the scooter parked half on the sidewalk, all gangsta, and my dad happily wandering around inside.

Now, this is where it gets good: instead of calling the store and explaining what happened and then driving her husband home, like a normal human being, my mother is worried that the police will trace her cell phone. And take them to jail. Because it’s not like the cops are going to just ask them what loony bin they escaped from. Because they have a RASH of scooter thefts to deal with. SO SHE MAKES MY DAD GET BACK ON THE SCOOTER AND DRIVE IT THE HALF MILE BACK TO CAL RANCH. And then, the SLOWEST getaway in ALL of crime ensues. Because it takes my dad, and I’m not exaggerating, about 8.8 minutes to get into a car. Never mind tracking the cell phone. I’m sure everyone in the store was watching these two masterminds trying to flee the scene in real time. They probably had snacks and everything. And I bet money they played it at the store Christmas party.

So what have I learned from this little writing exercise? It does help to write down part of my story, and part of my dad’s story. He isn’t gone yet, but he will be one day. All I will have left are the moments that tumble around in my mind. If I can sort through them, I feel like I can begin to sort through not just the grief, but the love, the sacrifice, the laughter, and everything that wove itself through our relationship. And I can pull things out and look at them again and remember that even in this crazy, upside down time, my dad was still able to make me laugh. But I’m still throwing away all the styrofoam coolers that find their way into my house. Wait—I will donate them to DI. That’s love.