When you hear very human stories, you listen. You nod along, and all the while you subconsciously shelve it away like This Does Not Apply To Me. 

When I was a kid, I won a bicycle in a school safety poster contest. The win was doubly sweet because my childhood’s crusade was to get my dad to quit smoking—and so, with that safety topic in mind, my poster was simple: I drew a big ear and a big lung. In tall, blocky sky-blue letters I wrote, « Listen to your lungs: Don’t smoke ».

On the day I won, my dad was not at the assembly. But my mother was. I remember my name being called and I came forward down the bleachers. They had me stand next to the bicycle already on display, one that was selected for an as-yet undetermined winner from my grade. I was kind of a tall kid, and so this particular prize was clearly too small for my skeleton. I remember looking at the bike, looking at my mom, and watching her crack up at the disparity. I felt dumb standing there, but I also understood her sentiment. We both knew that this was a joyous yet incongruent moment. 

My father eventually did quit smoking. After many years of me stealing his packs of smokes and breaking each cigarette in two down at the base of the filter. I stole them every chance I could and he never got cross with me for doing it. I don’t recall exactly when it happened but I do remember the relief I felt when he finally quit. The joy was greater than any bicycle I had won. As a kid the option was simple: I didn’t want him to die and so he had to quit smoking. He was too special to me—and I could tell that he had a magnetism that meant he was very special to others as well. 

My father is still around—through fortunate strokes of science and luck. I think I got a lot of my height from his side of the family; he himself measured about 6’1 or 6’2. Now in his mid-80s, he’s shrunk a bit for sure—but he has also lost a bit of weight. Quite a bit.

Yesterday he started the latest event of hospital visits for symptoms pretty much stemming from being old. My brother communicated to us the statistics as he got them. Symptoms: having trouble breathing. Fair amount of COPD and emphysema. Weight 144lbs. 

Emphysema? 144lbs? My Dad who I saved by hounding him into quitting smoking? The guy who makes his own butter and used to eat Grape Nuts with half and half and sugar on top? That can’t be right.

But it is. And to emphasize the stats that my brother was texting, he shared with a photo of Dad on a Boston hospital bed. No shirt on and pants pulled up to perform tests. “He looks like a fucking POW,” he wrote. And it was true. I’d never seen my father look so frail. But this is kind of life and this is what happens as you get older and continue to watch those around you age and wither away. Doesn’t make it easy, but it’s a reality you have to learn to adult through.

The bicycle I once won is long gone (and I didn’t even tell you that I did get to switch it out for a pink ten-speed Huffy bicycle that actually fit me). And even if I thought that I was buying my dad more time by getting him to quit smoking, emphysema still did its damage. As an adult I am not frustrated by this diagnosis because I understand that as we get older, something is eventually going to be evaluated as our definitive cause of death. But it’s still hard to work through. There is no safety poster out there that can warn you against the dangers of dying completely. You can only do so much to stave it off until it finally arrives.

And my father has not yet checked out yet. For right now he’s simply overnight in a Boston hospital not too far from the one he was born in. Like two of his sisters before him whom I loved very much, his time will come when it comes. And I hate that I am watching this unfold from afar—yet this is how life works and I know that I am in the majority. Families (both chosen and biological), as well as the friends that we have are all scattered across the map. There is no way to know when you will go from being the person nodding along, listening to the concerns of someone else….to suddenly becoming that someone else who is trying to manage nearing end of life stuff for their loved ones.

 We’re captive on a carousel of time.

I’ve got a lot of nervous energy right now as I wait for updates to chime into my messaging app. I don’t love it, but this is what things look at. I write because I don’t know what else to do. Maybe I just feel grateful that perhaps I helped buy a few more years of time with my dad. Or maybe I didn’t and this is how the road would wind through the years. I still feel grateful for what I’ve got, and I know that the rest of my family does too. For now and the days going forward, we’ll just continue to keep going One Day At A Time. I say that because that’s a sticker that my Dad had stuck on things of his too. His own kind of safety sticker- his own way to deal with life in the best possible way. As I’m older now with no interest poster contests, I find that this motto is the one that I’ll keep referring to.