Family and the four food groups
Family? Yeah, family.
So, we are born into these units called families. Some people think we choose which families we come to. But if we are going to be scientific, and I am in a scientific mood, then there is no evidence and most likely it is all chance and we, by chance, end up in this unit, this entity called a family. We maybe don’t gel with this unit, maybe we are at odds with it, or rebel against it, or join it or collude with it. But no matter what we do, it is in response to it.I’m at my father’s bedside in the hospital. Watching him fight and succumb by turns. Each episode leaves him with a balance in the negative or positive. These days the negative taking the upper hand, and always the possibility of tomorrow, with a little more of his fighting, ‘control freak’ spirit engaged, the possibility that he will change the tide of his ailing health. The health that he has lived in denial about for years. His smoking, his bad eating, his lack of exercise…Does the unit change its general nature when the relation of its members to each other changes? I think not. My father has just winced, his face contracting like a baby’s, as the nurse once again puts the needle in his arm. He is exhausted, I can see it. They have just bathed him, each roll over making him cry out, panting with pain.
What can I do? Nothing but just sit here and tell him I am here. Sometimes reaching shyly for his hand, sometimes talking to him like he is a child, sometimes being told- patronizingly- that I’m not helping at all. Amazingly he has tried to get me to join forces with him against the nursing staff. It is just like that film “All That Jazz”. You know, when Roy Scheider gets open heart surgery but in the recovery room sneaks in liquor and cigarettes, throws parties and harasses the nurses?
Well, it was almost like that the day before yesterday. But now reality has set in and he is just exhausted, delirious, and cantankerous.
But it is family. And this is where I have to be-glad to be actually.
Family. Yeah. FamilyWell, I am off to ingest one of the four food groups the good people of Nova Scotia use to feed themselves regularly: Salt, Sugar, Fat and Alcohol.
And they say good air is tiring?
