Accepting that nothing lasts forever

Hopefully he's far from dead but at the moment I'm five feet away from my father who is asleep in a hospital bed. He has a strange medical condition that seems to have worsened in the last few days. 

I'll back up. For 43 years, my mother and father lived in a house in Campbell County, Virginia. I had wanted to buy the house and live there while they moved to a retirement home. I wanted the family to keep something, keep a piece of land, for there to be some sort of a homestead. After all, my mother and father and sister moved over from England in the 1960's.

I didn't buy the house. Shortly before they moved, my mother looked me square in the eye and said they were not going to let me buy the house. She said it with quite a bit of glee, as she has always liked to deprive me. 

I wanted my parents to grow old and pass on in Lynchburg, the place they lived from 1980 to 2023. There was much there that made up their lives, but circumstances brought them up to Pennsylvania, where I sit now, sitting with my dad in a hospital along U.S. 1. I don't live here, but for the past year and half I'm been coming up here as much as I can. I've put a lot of my life on hold, but I'm able to work and probably am more productive here. 

I learned to work hard because of my father. He showed me that hard work might lead you somewhere if you were persistent and could get through self-negativity. 

Something broke in him the last time I took him to that old house, after most of the furniture had been removed. It was my job to get everything out so the house could be sold quick. At no point was my constant desire to buy the house taken seriously. My plan would have been to sell my house in Charlottesville and transfer all of those funds to the house. I wanted the woods, too, and had an idea of one day turning them into a park. 

I'm no longer mad that my desires and wishes were listened to, because I've accepted the role I have in this family. I am the one who gets things done and doesn't brag about it. I am the one who took in all of the family items into my house, the house I'll now stay in because I want a home. I have turned my house in Charlottesville into that place, even though as I type this I have an instinctual feeling I need to be here even more to advocate for what I feel my father needs. 

That might mean ending what I do back home, because I would like to experiment with being in a different place, and I enjoy being up here. No one knows who I am here, and that anonymity creates a sense of possibility. 

I look at him in the hospital gown, arms folded, wires connecting him to a cardiac monitor, chest rising gently, glasses on, a video of Garston's history playing, the other patient speaking with his wife, and me sitting uncomfortably but making do so I can look at my father every few minutes to make sure he is breathing.

I keep my thoughts along a narrow pathway so that I do not stray for this is not a story about my emotions and my feelings about what could have been. I simply sit here now because this is where I am at the moment and I feel this is where I am supposed to be.