September 25, 2007

Night. The most beautiful golden moon hovers at the top edge of my study window, waiting to sail invisible over the roof.

I shuddered with exhaustion as I made my way to the car in the parking lot tonight, after twelve hours at school, ending with a rehearsal which would have been profitable had my spirits been other than they were. I can be a sour and difficult man when I am tired.

My father had his tests, and the way my sister explains it, it is in fact cancer, at a place–if I am understanding it correctly–touching on the aorta, which means that some night while he is asleep, the aorta will puncture and he will bleed out without ever waking up. That’s what we tell ourselves, and it is a comfort. Father refuses to believe it’s cancer, and complains that after all those tests, the doctor still doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. That too is a blessing, for as long as he can believe it.

I’m amazed at times like this by my apparently grotesquely high threshold of crisis. My sister has already phoned hospices and been in touch with doctors and made plans for this and worried about that, and it is not that I have merely failed to do those things, it’s that they simply did not, and would not, cross my mind. Dad hasn’t complained. He seems chipper and pretty much the way he always has been. If he hadn’t gone for the tests–as he almost didn’t do–his life would have been the same as it was a week ago. What is more, it’s hard to see how he can profit by his life changing the way it now must. I am perplexed and bewildered by it all. What is it that I fail to see? I think there’s a crisis when somebody cuts himself; others enter crisis mode when they see a knife in the drawer. I believe this is somewhat gender-linked. Women seem to know their duties when somebody is dying. Unless he is a preacher or a gravedigger, men don’t. I suppose they are right, but that does not keep me from a sense of confusion. I’m really quite good in emergencies, I think, but at times like this I wonder if I’ve turned my back on some of them, waiting for them to be yet more dire before I answered the call.

I cancelled my trip to Ireland. Clearly it was the right thing to do. I will got to Akron and visit my father while he is still to be visited. A thousand dollars of unrefundable cost is lost, but that is not an actual issue. I am so wasteful it would be hypocrisy to note that long. But Ireland has been to me respite and hospice, where my sometimes shattered spirit can mend itself. There will be no mending this time. It is an irony. I abjure this respite in order to help in a situation which might be bettered served if I were a wholer man, if I were gathered to myself the way I seem to be returning from Ireland. It cannot be helped. It is a trip that would seem heartless now, even if I think it is a way of gaining heart for whatever lies ahead.

I wonder what my father is thinking tonight? I hope he is fussing that the TV sounds bad, and wondering if he should eat the cookies secreted in his TV tray. If I thought I might die tonight, what would I do? I’d stay awake as long as I could watching the moon traverse the purple last-of-summer sky.