Blowholes and Blowhards | roughy d 2

Yesterday's post has me wanting to explain the use of the word "retarded" and why I felt comfortable using it. It's here where I should talk about my father, and how he's inadvertently made it OK. You see, both he and myself could be considered emotionally retarded, and I say that with great comfort, and without once wincing over offending anyone, because anyone considered developmentally disabled who's more honest with their emotions makes anyone of a fuller capacity seem just plain, well, truly limited.

My dad gets dragged into this because, well, he's my dad. He dealt with shards of shattered things working their way out in random emotional outbursts. Do I know this for sure, or do I even know him all that well since I was a kid at home twenty years ago? Maybe not, but dads do leave one hell of an impression. I'd go back to a tired guy coming home, dropping his lunchbox on the counter, and just wanting to get dinner and make some headway through some bills. But only a few feet into the house he'd realize he was tracking mud, and just that tiny infraction would set him off, and I could feel his frustration shock wave throughout the house. The dogs would find their places to hide. Being one of the most sensitive humans on the planet, I'd absorb every last ripple. 

It's 3am and I can't sleep. 

I'm not going to drag my father or anyone else through this. I'll go to another place, with my mom at a stoplight in Fort Collins (and she'll not be dragged, but carried lightly on fond memory.) 

I cringe thinking back to my final months with my mother, and instead of celebrating life with the gusto of a thousand Ricky Martins, I drained my poor mom with droning on about how I wasn't doing enough with my life. Now this is possibly the last thing a mother needs who's counting on her son to take care of her. In an incessant cycle of complaint and apology, I'd remind her that my spending time with her was the best possible thing I could be doing, and then drift to some place where this white middle class kid believed he was suffering. 

So let me get literary here, or at least visual, instead of journalistic (or whatever I'm doing.) But I'm at a stoplight with this amazing woman and I've just stolen her from Poudre Valley Hospital. Stolen, yes, I took her. They'd left a hole in mom's head. It's one thing to give someone a blowhole, but another to treat me like an asshole when I tell them about it. So it was kind of personal but oh so grand when I cut down the hour drive to thirty minutes to show them the blowhole. We'd all lose in the end because they'd have to do another surgery to make sure their wasn't another infection. Still, though, they gave me the gift of empowerment: I learned that in many cases I could do better for my mom than a PhD. So after everything was sealed up again, I rolled my mother away in a wheelchair. She woke up and complained I hadn't given her anytime to tie her gown. "It's okay," I told her. "We're going to give someone else a chance." 

Swedish Hospital is only a few minutes away from our house. It would be where we'd go until the end. The finale was just over a year away. In cancer time, that would be about thousand millennium. 

It gets better.