Bringing dad back
My father was a journalist at The Vancouver Sun for 20 years, and with that experience carried a few vices from the old press world.
Life was full of everything the old Press Club would be proud of. Cigars and scotch, Steely Dan and steaks — big ones.
I adopted all the same vices over time, and it happened that all the most important and treasured father-son conversations were at the end of our garage where he smoked his Old Ports and I smoked my Belmonts. The cornerstone of our father-son bonding is an embrace of sickly vice, the likes of which the women of our family would no doubt disapprove. We are both stupid, careless punks in that way.
Yet in every one of our sessions, the menace of health concern over these vices is quietly looming. I know that one day, far down the road, I will get a phone call, and it will be the most damning phone call of my life. But it’s always down the road. Not when my father is only 64. Not when I’m in a classroom. Not when it doesn’t make sense.
It’s the final block of the day on May 1 and the class has completely lost interest in completing the task. There are those who have claimed to have finished their projects at home, and others who argue that previous arrangements had been made to allow for extra time. As a teacher on call, I have no way of verifying anyone’s substantiations, and I immediately revert to my default teaching discipline: Get them writing something, anything.
When I’m pushing this practice on a particularly lethargic student in the front, that’s when the phone in my pocket rumbles. I’m so used to telemarketers at this point of the day that I’m tempted to ignore it. The area code is local, and I briefly consider that it might be job-related, someone who obtained my business card from a previous substitute, or perhaps a district dispatch number that I never recorded.
It’s none of those things. The voice on the other line is my mother. She doesn’t even say my name. The words are broken up with breathlessness and what I can only describe as sheer, unbridled terror. “Your father. He’s had ... he’s had a heart attack.” Anybody who didn’t know my mother’s cadence would have missed the last two words altogether, because she’s lost all control with her words.
I’m immediately in a daze. I agree to meet her at the hospital. I speak to my class in a most unfeeling and distanced voice: “I have to go now. I’m sorry. My father just had a heart attack.”
Curiously enough, this is the catalyst that prompts the academic juices to flow as everyone is suddenly civil, writing and undeniably sweet. They offer premature condolences, helpful travel routes and reassurances that they’ll complete their tasks independently. Two things occur to me at this point: One, this is a terrific tactic to save for future unruly classes; two, my father is dying and I need to function through my own sheer, unbridled terror.
I’m in the hallway by the catheter labs at Royal Columbian Hospital with my mother and my sister when we hear the Code Blue on the intercom. Code Blue is now my least favourite phrase in the English language. It’s called a Code Blue, I think to myself, because his skin is going blue. His heart is not working. Whatever part of this that was supposed to be routine has gone horribly wrong somehow as his body enacts further revenge.
Waves of doctors pour through the doors. My sister collapses into me. The social worker places her hand on my mother’s shoulder … my breathing … now I’ve lost control.
Everything in this hallway is a nightmare, and no medical drama can capture the feeling of a real Code Blue. A Code Blue crushes you. It crushes everything in the hallway, and we’re suddenly looking death in the face. And then they bring him back. This is the miracle. An entire staff of scientific scholars using impossible technological tools repeatedly start him up again. His body decides that it’s not done yet. My father, the most gifted writer in the family, has not finished telling his story yet.
We meet him in the ICU. He’s out cold, but he’s working again. He’s hooked up to machines with a team of experts watching his every breath, for he is breathing. His heart is connected to every kind of electronic monitor, for his heart is beating. These machines will ultimately shrink to an unbelievable size and stay inside of him to keep his heart in check while he walks, for he will be walking.
My mother reassures us, as a mother will, that he’s surrounded by the best of the best. She looks at him on the bed. It’s true love at its finest.
My sister whispers something comical into his ear, something just between the two of them. I whisper something to him knowing that he will never hear it, but without any semblance of finality. Two days later I will be showing him movie trailers in his room and talking about Led Zeppelin and Steely Dan. Ten days after that we’ll be having dinner at his home.
There is an ongoing conversation down south about the standard of quality in a universal health care system. The politics of health care in the United States is a dollars-and-cents issue with enough people screaming that this is a system that can’t possibly work, that puts people in danger, that breaches below their standards.
This is a love letter to that system. I’ve never been so proud of our health care system from what I witnessed in Royal Columbian Hospital as they brought my father back to life. Everything at play, from the surgeons to the nursing staff, the technological feats to the personal care of the social workers, the medical equipment to the people who deliver it, everything right down to the lukewarm food they serve at dinner: The system is life itself.
Everything is a part of a beautiful, indescribable network that keeps our darkest hours at bay for as long as it can. It defies the natural order of what our bodies deserve, what they don’t, and it breaks the impossible every minute of every day. It’s a beautiful thing, a very Canadian thing, and something that leaves me with nothing but ecstatic gratitude.
I’m grateful we don’t have to have the same conversation as a country that lacks such a system. We live in a country that has a contingency plan for every one of us. There’s a team of people that are ready to do the impossible for you. There’s a system that cares that you live.
My family gets to move on in a tighter embrace, for such skirting of tragedy brings us all together in the closest way. We move on in love, pride, good health, and never, ever again looking at anything in shades of blue.