Words Fail

Or at least, they did for my dad. Plus, a pistol under the vending machine, just like Chekov's gun

Welcome. Truth & Dare is a monthly post that offers one Truth (a writing prompt) and one Dare (an artistic gesture in the world). You might also find: thoughts on writing, art, books and paying attention. You won’t find: a paywall or a thicket of hyperlinks taking you someplace else. Just a clean read, a cup of herbal tea poured over your frontal lobe. No noise. No distraction. Thanks for being here. Note: This Truth & Dare is the Mortality Edition

Two quick announcements: Our book, Loaners: The Making of a Street Library is now an audiobook, read by me and my co-author Ben “Hodge” Hodgson. You can buy it or check it out from the library!¹ If you are new to Truth&Dare, Loaners is the story of how Street Books² came to be and the friendship Hodge and I formed nearly 15 years ago.

Last call: If you’d to write letters during April’s letter-writing month, I’ll be sharing a version of my Art of the Letter workshop (details to be announced) in preparation for April letter-writing month. Email me at laura@ideacog.net to get on the list.

Just after the holidays, my dad, Roy, who is nearly 80 years old, went from giving my brother detailed instructions on fixing a turquoise belt buckle to speaking in jumbled sentences full of nonsensical words. He’d laugh a little, shake his head and try again. Still nonsense.

Before we go on, it’s worth noting that Roy is a guy who has always made a lot of sense. Maybe the most sense of all of us, a fact which irritated me when I was a teenager but has gone on to be something I appreciate, and in fact, he’s the one we all turn to when we need some steadying, solid advice or support. Roy survived contracting polio at age 3, and went on to raise a family with my mom, work as a virologist at the state health lab in Idaho, and run his own side business for years. Aside from post-polio syndrome a couple of years ago, when he had to go from walking with a cane to using a wheelchair, he has been an incredibly healthy person, motoring around on an old 3-wheeled scooter on their property, mowing his own grass, watering the garden, washing dishes and driving a car like a boss while using a handbrake. He’s the most solid, stoic force in the universe that my family knows, and his sudden health crisis left us as speechless as he was.

Roy at around 5 years old

An ambulance took him to the emergency room in White Salmon, where they administered a dose of TNK, a clot-busting drug that prevents strokes. Then he had a seizure. Because we were in their small Washington town, the doctor recommended Roy be transported to Portland. It was too foggy to go by helicopter so they’d have to drive him in an ambulance.

“We’ll need to intubate him for the drive, for safety,” the doctor said. The stroke drug had put him at heightened risk for respiratory problems and they didn’t dare send him with EMTs who might not have the tools to save him if he stopped breathing.

A word now about the Do Not Resuscitate order: Both my parents have an updated one, but while a DNR may give general end-of-life instructions like “No breathing tube, no feeding tube, or artificial means of preserving life,” it is unlikely to be helpful in certain grey-area scenarios such as the one we found ourselves. And the guy whose advice we most needed was lying on a table, unable to speak.

To intubate or not. Did that go against Roy’s DNR order? We talked to two different doctors we know personally and decided that we could say yes in the short term, just to get him to the hospital — we’d have a chance to say no later on, if needed. And that’s what happened: Once he was in the ICU at the hospital in Portland, they brought him out of sedation and let us know they were going to remove the breathing tube.

A new doctor said, “If he doesn’t breathe on his own, our protocol is to re-insert the tube. But you’re saying you’d like to decline that, right?”

Yes, we said, we declined. Then we stood in the hallway of the ICU and waited.

Reader, he breathed. And then so did we.

The chairs in the ICU waiting room were a rust brown pleather that reminded me of the piece of naugahyde from my childhood that we’d spread to cover the floor of the van when we transported goats to the state fair. My brother James bought a bag of almonds from the vending machine and we split it with my mom. Sometime over the blur of the next few days, James spotted a pistol under the vending machine but it turned out to be a toy.³ My brother Mark flew in from Utah and the four of us took turns going in to sit with Roy as he began to regain more awareness.

Poster on the Neurology floor. Weird, Mark said, I also took a photo of that

Early stages of the Return of Roy saw him telling us something earnestly, then looking puzzled, at himself and perhaps our confused expressions, then smiling and shaking his head and chuckling. The chuckle was reassuring. It was unmistakably Roy, so we knew he was in there somewhere. Soon the sentences began to take better shape and he would begin with his old authority: “I think what we need to do is..” but then it would devolve into words like “burleyburleyburley”). He said “the grumpula rumpula” more than once. He said “moktol time.” We hovered on every sentence attempt. And when one night I leaned in to hug him and told him I loved him, some automatic part of him said, “Love you too, Sis.” My old nickname and more evidence that he was somewhere in there.

“Do you remember who the president is going to be, Pop?” I asked.

He scanned for it. “No.”

“That’s okay,” I told him. “Why don’t you just stay in that place for a while.”

The further he got from the seizure, the more sense he made, even when the words weren’t exactly right. He was transferred to a hospital room and my sister-in-law, Erin, sat with him one early morning while he took in the new place. She turned on the television to a channel with relaxing ocean waves and sound. Roy struggled for the words to say he wanted a different channel, finally settling on: “This is not popular.”

More words returned, as did a new level of self-awareness. “This must have been really hard for you guys,” he told us. And, “This would have been scary for your mom.” He thanked us for being there and we told him we loved him and he told us he loved us too.

We took turns spending the night with him in the hospital and the night I stayed over, we talked in the dark about all the people who were rooting for him, the neighbors and old workmates from Idaho and the little kid next door who cooked pretend wooden vegetables that Roy would pretend-eat, his siblings, his children and grandchildren. You are beloved to so many, I told him.

“That makes me feel good to hear that,” he said drowsily, with an openness that was uncharacteristic. Roy never did bask too much in others’ admiration, and avoided anything that would cause too much fuss about him.

Roy told us that he could feel holes in his memory. When my husband Ben brought him a bottle of hot sauce from home, Roy asked “Do I like hot sauce?” He said he just wasn’t sure what he liked. Sensing an opportunity I said, “Just so you know, Pop, before the seizure, you had committed to going mostly off screens to focus on practicing meditation and listening to birds.

“I think you’re lying about that,” he said.

One day when the neurologists prepared to move on to the next room, I said “Pop, do you have any other questions for the doctors before they go?”

Roy looked at one of them and said “Out of courtesy I should tell you that your fly is down.” The doctor flushed bright red and lowered his paperwork over his front. Roy turned to the other doctor. “How long have you been working with him today? A pal would have told him..” Roy and his deadpan humor was back. The awkwardness of the moment made me think that both doctors must have been caught inside a mix of embarrassment at Roy’s observation and thrill at the recovery of a patient who had five days earlier been incoherent.

The day Roy was released from the hospital, we caravanned to my parents’ house in the Gorge and helped him get into his own bed. There was still a lot of uncertainty as to his medical diagnosis. Was it a stroke that had been averted? A set of seizures that indicated late-onset epilepsy? The EEG had not been very definitive and the doctors were a bit baffled. James had his own theory. Roy had always been a big podcast fan, listening to them through most nights, and always had one handy to recommend to his children, our friends, his son and daughters-in-law, the neighbors, and to housepainters or landscapers.

“Maybe Roy is the first human being to actually ingest 1 billion podcasts,” James suggested. “And that last one just sizzled his brain.”

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At my parents’ place, my brother James and I watched “The Bees,”⁴ a truly terrible film from 1978 about killer bees from South America who apparently mutate into intelligent bees and kill everyone they come in contact with. There was a comfort in watching a disaster unfold on the television (mostly consisting of humans running around screaming and waving their arms in the air while covered with bees), after experiencing our own small familial disaster that continued to unfold in the bedroom behind us. So many unknowns: Would my dad come back cognitively or was part of him gone for good? Would he be able to transfer his own dear self in and out of a wheelchair or was that mobility impacted forever? When the questions felt too heavy, we turned on the Bees and watched people run around screaming.

“We should make our own disaster film,” I told James later, in the kitchen. “Like, pretend we live in a country that has elected a deranged man as president who builds a cabinet of anti-science types, who don’t believe in vaccines.”

“We’ll call it Bird Flu,” James said.

“Yeah, we can pretend that there’s already been bird-to-human infection and a person has died and that the government is hollowing out health and human services and the CDC.”
Then we ran around the kitchen flailing our arms and screaming.

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It’s now about 2 months exactly since Roy was released from the hospital and we continue to feel like he was granted some mysterious reprieve from the universe, time enough for him to tell more bad jokes and listen to a funny story about our kids, time to process the whole weird experience with him, rather than plan a funeral in his absence. Those first few days, as we sorted through what would come next, I realized it was time to downgrade the vigilance, and prepare to go back to our previous lives, already in progress. But this now seemed crazy: something could happen at any minute that could change everything! This was followed by a thud of recognition: Oh yeah, that’s called living. It’s what we already do every single day. We are all going to die. But we forget.

I told my dad that if we gave in to what we really felt like doing, we would fall down to our knees and bury our faces in our hands and weep, thank him for not dying, and thank him for coming back. But we are forever our father’s children. He has trained us well. So instead we refill his coffee mug. We chop kindling for the woodbox next to the stove and wash a load of dishes. We hug him goodbye and tell him we love him and then we go home.

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Now it’s time for Truth & Dare:

Truth: Last month I got to take part in the “When I Die” workshop with artist Amanda Evans, at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. We drafted wills and wrote about our lives and our deaths, using prompts like this one: The River of Time (visualize a page with a meandering line across it): How have you moved throughout time until this point? What have you done during your life? Where have you lived? Who have you loved? What are you most proud of? What do you regret? Write about your life up to now.

Dare: Think of a family member or friend and pretend that the last conversation you had with them is the last conversation you’ll have. Consider whether there’s anything you’d like to do over or any amendments you’d like to make.⁵ Send them a postal letter, a text, or a small lucky stone delivered by passenger pigeon. Double Dog Dare: “Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans,” (so says the quote Lennon put in his song and boy, didn’t he go on to illustrate that very sentiment with his own untimely exit). Pretend your death is imminent and then do a nice last thing for yourself or someone else (cupcake/brisk walk/picnic/trip abroad?/arcade/fine meal/you decide). If you suspect your death is imminent, please send me your postal address (laura@ideacog.net) and I’ll send you some mail.

1. Libro lets you choose an independent bookstore to donate proceeds to, Libby lets you check it out. Also: Apple Books. Hodge is a great reader - hope you enjoy!

2. Street Books is a street library that provides books, resources, survival supplies and community to people living outside and at the margins in Portland.

3. I know that “Chekhov’s gun” is the principle that every element of a story must be necessary (i.e. if there’s a pistol on the mantle in the first scene, it needs to fire sometime during the story), that all parts of a story should eventually come into play. But I don’t yet understand the meaning of the toy pistol under the vending machine in our story.

4. The trailer is probably all you need.

5. I also like this version, “Write the Phone Call You Wish You Could Have,” from the Learning to Love You More project.