Waiting In Eternity's Parking Lot
Choices of putting things off are as valid as those for putting things in order
There is a line in my life, drawn 18 months ago when my father was laid to rest.
For 3 years before that line, life was about putting off all except taking care of Dad. I put off worries, regrets, and notions and delusions of reinvention for myself.
Nobody tells you “the when” but you know it will.
You’re riding in the cab of a 10 ton tractor trailer with an engine, which once started doesn’t turn off until some unknown unpredictable day. It can be for an amazing cross-country long-haul, where the final destination is a parking lot in eternity.
Nobody tells you “the how” but you hope for the best.
You do your best to drop a cinderblock on the brakes.
You think you can make it stop. You think you can grab the wheel, hit the gas, and veer off. But all you can do is slow it down, and it’s going wherever it’s going.
For a while, it seemed there were years ahead of a simple life of looking after Dad.
That changed during the week before Thanksgiving 2019 but we didn’t know it at the time. A mistake leads to sepsis, then the hospital, where they found a “mass” which became a monster after years as a benign nuisance nestled near Dad’s brain.
I hoped after the hospital signed off, that transfer to rehab would help Dad learn to walk again, and maybe that his mind would clear. It did not work.
For many, 2020 was isolation, pandemic, strife, and a new unreal unintended quiet.
For us, we managed to get Dad home from a rehab right before total lockdown. It felt like the last helicopter off the top of the last building standing before a takeover from forces unknown. He was home after so many months in strange rooms, fading away.
In isolation at home, we cared for him in a house I rushed to modify. Just weeks before, there was a home invasion, and a ransacking, but all we could do is clean up, file reports, and let the authorities do their thing. I put off thinking to the point of almost forgetting it happened, like it was a footnote about a minor point.
Priorities decide what comes first, including the order of procrastination.
The priority was caring for Dad, after the doctors and therapists did their part, did their best. They could not bring “him” back as he was just a few months ago. I was with him everyday but it wasn’t the same anymore, but nothing else was either.
A bathroom was stripped down, repurposed, with an entire wall removed. Everything was rearranged for caregiving with a transport chair, a stripped-down wheelchair, for someone who could no longer walk. A living room was turned into a bedroom. A rug was rolled up and put away. Glass furniture and fixtures removed. A bed was “rented”. A table was converted into a station for medication and medical equipment.
We did everything that nurse assistants did. This was our life for an indefinite period.
The priority was simple. Everything else was put off until “whenever”. One day, many months later, sepsis came back in late summer. He came back, even worse off. One infection too many. One problem too many.
The truck went off the cliff. There was nothing I could do to put it off or fix it.
The virus we shielded Dad from for nearly a year, was caught in of all places, in the hospital where he was sent. We managed to put off the pandemic but it came anyway. His final Christmas was alone in a hospital room, as plans were made for a hospice.
In January 2021, I laid him to rest. In the 18 months since then, I replay it over a lot.
Did I make the right choices, in deciding what to put off, and what came first, for him?
Did I put off the right things, and put right all the things that needed order?
Why didn’t I make some things a priority, years earlier, why did I put them off?
Why didn’t I put off other things as unimportant, why did they need doing?
Nothing is as convincing as having the roof of the world come crashing down to reset the order of things and our conviction about what needs doing and what to put off.
In the 18 months since that line was drawn, I picked up all pieces of the truck.
So many things, documents to get from another country, an insurance company to hound (politely), bills to pay. Then one last item, the sale of a property.
It turned out relatives I haven’t seen or spoken with in years owned a part of it, and wrote to me 6 months after I laid Dad to rest, asking about selling it. Their message was all about avoiding their problems, not one word about Dad. I wanted it over with.
I said yes to what would take a year to do. I would have put it off had they not brought it up, and it turned out to be the last right thing to put in good order.
The other week, the property was sold, at last.
People lived in that house for years, children went from toddlers to teens. I had to empty it, tenants, memories, and so much stuff left behind in the basement. The past had accumulated into a pile that I had to pick apart and put in good order.
That was one of his phrases, “good order”.
After solving every little issue under the sun about the property, closing day arrived. All the parties involved signed what they had to sign, and documents that were requested, at near the final hour, were supplied. I had the help of an old friend of Dad and trusted advisers to overcome months of surprises. Closing and closure at last.
I handed over a bag of keys, decades old. Another family would start their story in it.
Priorities were reset, something new was brought to the front of the line.
I began to write.
I wrote right before and after I laid Dad to rest. I needed to put off what was inside me by writing. It turned out that putting in good order piles of words led to much more.
One writing group gave me shelter, that writes in bursts of a few hundred words daily, 30 days at a time. I made friends. Some befriended me early on, read my early words, encouraged, and believed in me. I joined in these 30 day runs, over and over, and strung them into a story. The story became a book. I did it again and again.
Another writing community was also a refuge, founded by one of the most unique minds it was my good fortune to encounter. I look forward to sharing words and spirits with him, and thank him for it. That is something not to put off for too long, people are a priority, as are these books inside me which have been ready to come out.
I write about history and the unreal reality of the future, lyrical historical fiction, made of the past and the next present. The characters are human beings doing their best in an unreal reality, not unlike you and me. It all works out in the end.
I put off the final part of a new book, so I could sell a property, and settle the past.
It’s time to leave the lot, in a new rig. The next line looks far away, past the horizon.
We’re on the road again, and we’ll see how long this long haul of words lasts.
It’s time to finish this (2nd) book. The next 30 days are open, and I have had enough practice to know there will be no hesitation or doubt. It will be the twelfth time, but each time is the first all over again. I have an editor in mind for “book one”, and new titles for each book. There’s new things to do. There’s new friends and new places.
It’s time to put away what has been done, and to put new things into good order.
I share below two things I wrote.
The first one was written about the point of it all, after Dad was laid to rest.
The second one was written a year later, in January 2022, about Dad as a young man, at the beginning leading up to the years before he bought that property I had to sell.
Love Is Not a Single Player Game (Written after we laid Dad to rest.)
The Days Dad Started Over
(Dad’s life in the years before he bought the property which I had to sell years later).