Extracting Beyond Capacity

 

He had been carrying his frame well beyond capacity. We all knew it. He knew it on some level, but would never admit it. A week before the fall, I watched him transfer from a wheelchair to a chair. It was hard to watch. He had circulation problems in his legs — diabetes and such. He had smoked a pipe for years. Wounds on his feet that wouldn't heal, that kept him from walking, from exercising. He carried all of it and kept going.

He and my mom were at a closing for some property they were selling when he missed his wheelchair and fell straight to the ground. Someone came by and helped him up. He went in and finished the closing like nothing happened. Then stopped at the clinic next door, got an x-ray, interpreted the results as meaning he was fine. Called my sister. Wanted to get home before the game.

My sister called me and asked me to come help. I rushed over. By that time it had been hours since the fall. He was in so much pain, and still wanted to go home. I sat next to him and we talked — about how getting around had become so difficult, how he had even admitted it himself just the week before. That he needed to go to a hospital, at the very least to manage the pain. We talked and talked. It was finally my mom, who had been processing silently the whole time, who told him the ambulance was coming. He looked at her face and understood. They are a unit. That moment drew it into sharper focus than ever before — how they think and manage things together. One of them can change the heading for both, when it matters.

How much pain he had been covering up became clear when they moved him to the stretcher. The nurse in the ER was quietly surprised that he hadn't asked for anything. He finally got morphine. A shattered pelvis. A shattered hip, on the side of his good leg.

He has made a lot of progress. The pain is mostly gone. He is getting close to standing again. It isn't fast enough for him — he wants to go home. But my mom understands that their lives are changed now. She and my sister lined up new arrangements. My dad, who trusts my mom, is adjusting his heading again, slowly coming around to the plans she made and committed to. Arriving, together, somewhere new.

He saw the signs and ignored them. At 89, maybe he has that right. But it didn't have to be this way. Weeks of pain, and a rebound that has surprised even him.

I had been thinking and writing about extraction — about extracting beyond capacity — around the time this happened. And it stopped me in my tracks. The parallel was too close, and my parents need me every day right now. Some writing has to wait while life catches up to the ideas inside it.

That's where I am.