Heart Attack
You get home around 6:00 PM after running around town all day getting ready for a trip to South Dakota. It is spring, and time to sell the cheap jewelry to the tourists headed to Mount Rushmore.
You start the rice for a stir fry and the phone rings. You reach over and pick up. “Hello.” You say.
“Hello.” Your father says. “I’m in the hospital. It looks like I had a heart attack last night.”
You sway; sit down on the kitchen chair. “Oh no. How are you doing? What happened?”
“I was lying on the couch about 7:30 and started having chest pains. I realized what was happening and called 911. The Paramedics came and hauled me to the hospital right away. I’m in the cardiac unit here.”
You say, “Are you in pain? What do the doctors say?”
He says, “I have to be here a few days while they run tests and decide what to do with me.”
“I’ll come over there in the morning.” You say, stomach already upset from the acid dump at the words “heart attack”.
You don’t want this to be happening. As if getting ready to go to South Dakota for another season with that fat little hater of a partner isn’t enough, now your father is sick. You call the partner. “My dad had a heart attack last night and is in the hospital. I’m on my way there in the morning.”
“I’m sorry. You do what you need to do and keep me posted. We still have some time.”
Next morning you throw your backpack in the cab of the Toyota and head over the hill to Grand Junction. You are a bit scared, but mostly feeling the familiar numbness of a life that seems to be mired in a stagnant backwater. You reflect that you seem to be repeating your father’s life. Both having a routine marriage that ended badly and slipping into a progression of days filled with familiar activity, but nothing meaningful.
At the hospital, you see a man who is obviously afraid, speaking tentatively, “Well, I wasn’t planning on this happening. I’m not sure what happens next.” You see that he does not want to say how he is really feeling and you don’t want to either. What a pair.
The next two weeks are no different. You say, “What does the doctor want to do about recovery activities? We need to get you going again.
He gives a noncommittal shrug, not wanting to tell me much at all. You give up pushing, go buy him a throw for the couch he spends most of his time on. He seems shocked I would buy him a comforter, but says nothing.
You take him on drives out into the country. He used to like that when you were a kid. You see him sneaking a nitroglycerine pill from time to time, but he won’t admit he is in pain.
One morning two weeks after he came home you hear clattering in the kitchen. He is opening cupboards, closing them, getting pots and pans out, putting them back. You say, “What’s going on?”
He looks up, says, “What’s the deal?” His look is confused and genuinely scared.
You think, say “I think you are having a stroke.” You get him in the car and go back to the hospital. After two days he seems to be thinking better, but he conceals his physical weakness.
That afternoon, the floor nurse calls. “Your father is having another of his fainting spells.” He has never had a fainting spell. You walk through the open door of his hospital room. He is dead. No one is around. No shroud, just a dead man with no false teeth in his mouth.
(This is about my father’s death. He died in 1978.)