Speculative Memoir

Prologue

I’ll start closer to the end than the beginning.

My father’s wife called me today. She’s someone I probably never would have met if it weren’t for her connection to him. And yet, here we are, bound by this strange intersection of histories. She is clearly trying to reach out, and I am trying—really trying—to see through the reflex I’ve developed over time, the one that flares automatically, protective of my mother.

She never wanted children, yet still went after my married father. My married father with two (maybe four) kids. It was a relief when he finally left for good, but her presence, her choices, and the fallout they created—what they did to my mother, my brother, and me—left marks I’ve never fully named.

She isn’t unkind to me. I think she’s doing the best she can. But sometimes, when she talks to me, it’s as if she forgets that her husband is, in fact, my father. He never parented me, but I am his daughter, and as a kid I was close to his side of the family. My mother was an only child, so all my cousins are on his side. That connection has always mattered to me, even when I’ve felt peripheral to it.

She called to tell me he’s in the hospital. A little over a week ago. She said she heard movement after he went to bed—thrashing legs under the sheets—but she went back to sleep. The next morning, he still hadn’t gotten up. When she finally entered his room, he was curled in a ball, silent, and there was blood.

It took her nearly thirty-six hours to tell me. I want to believe she waited because she was overwhelmed, because she didn’t yet have answers—but the delay scraped against old wounds, the familiar feeling of being left out of his life until after the fact.

Eventually, the pieces came together: he’d suffered a  stroke. He must have gotten up at some point, fallen into a filing cabinet—the gash on his head, the cuts, the bruises—and somehow crawled back into bed. When she found him, he rolled over and just looked at her, eyes blank, words thick and incomprehensible. She called 911.

By the time I heard, he’d already been in the hospital for days. Tests, MRIs, specialists. The MRI confirmed the stroke. Since then, things have spiraled. True to form, he’s been an oppositional patient—pulling out IVs, trying to leave, falling, agitated enough that they stationed a 1:1 sitter outside his door. That lasted a few days. Now he’s developed pneumonia. He can’t eat or drink by mouth. He isn’t speaking anymore, just staring off into space.

She says hospice is next. She’s already given them his living will.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Since I was very little, he always said he’d rather die than lose control of his body. At seventy, he called and announced, almost cheerfully, “Hey kid, welcome to the last decade of my life. I refuse to be eighty.”

But here he is, eighty-three, having spent his birthday in the hospital a few days ago—stuck in the exact condition he swore he’d never tolerate. Hospice makes sense.

I’ve decided to go and see him. To tell him that there are no hard feelings. It’s largely true. But this whole thing puts a neat bow on my position in this family: I am a problem-solver. I was always one of the grown-ups. I don’t like the person my father was when I actually knew him many years ago, but I feel compassion for him. He probably lived most of his life miserable and confused, never understanding why people were upset with him, never figuring out how not to piss them off. Whatever caused that in him mixed with always alcohol, sometimes drugs, and always women who weren’t my mother.

I am his second-thought daughter. To him. To her. Sometimes even to my cousins. I’m spoken to not as a daughter, but as if I were some distant relative—second cousin, twice removed. My guess? She’ll put him in hospice and mostly walk away. He is difficult. She is tired. But I can’t entirely fault her. She didn’t sign up for this version of him. None of us did.

And besides his wife and a couple of friends, he’s burnt bridges and managed, somehow, to out survive his family of origin. He is the eldest of his siblings, and the last living. Besides his wife and those couple of friends, there’s no one else left to visit him.

Link for Chapter 1 is below.

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