Topic: A Scar

 A Scar

I have this shiny white scar on my left kneecap.  I got it over 30 years ago and it’s still there so I think they will bury me with it.  How I got that scar is not the story I want to tell today.  But I do want to talk about how the skin has kind of a rubbery feel to it and how if I were to sustain an injury again to my left knee in the same spot the flesh might not break open quite as easily as it did in 1988.  You see when your flesh scars the thick fibrous connective tissue makes your skin thicker, tougher. 

This morning I sustained a blow to the same spot where I had been struck only 2 years ago.  I found myself in my parents’ living room waiting for the hospice nurse to come out and confirm what I already knew, that my father had died.  It wasn’t the exact same hospital bed parked in front of the upright piano in the living room but it might as well have been.  It wasn’t my 74 year old mom’s lifeless body this time.  That time my father had sat on the opposite side of the bed from me as I told my mom it was okay for her to go, that she had done a good job, that she deserved to rest from her labors.  She had not fought death like he would.  As I told her to go dad had exclaimed, “No, no, don’t go.”  But she left quickly and the loss left me scarred.  

When my dad was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer in 2016 I thought it would progress quickly like mom’s cancer had done.  She had lived only 5 months post diagnosis.  Dad had held on for over 2 years.  She signed up for hospice care and died 2 days later.  

Dad fought death with a ferocity I have never witnessed in my 27 years as a nurse.  Thanksgiving morning it took two of us to help him walk the five or so steps from his bed to his lift chair.  But he ate a cheese danish from the North College Hill bakery and the first words out of his mouth when I woke him up were, “Sometimes life is so beautiful.”  

But while the turkey was still roasting his marked decline came on-he could no longer walk and I feed him his turkey and dressing.  When the hospice nurse told him he had started the dying process he refused to believe it, and asked if there wasn’t some physical therapy they could offer.  He couldn’t understand why he was so weak, why his legs had stopped working for him.  He stopped eating or drinking.  And then he stopped speaking or looking at us.  Dad clung to life with ragged breaths and long periods of no breaths at all.  We had at least half a dozen false alarms in his final week in which we gathered around the hospital bed in his living room and held his hand and said our goodbyes.  But in the end he waited until we had all gone to sleep to leave us.  He didn’t want to go.  

My voice broke a little when I called hospice to tell them he was gone.  Saying it out loud meant it was really happening again.  I had made sure the hospice nurse had brought me a syringe so I could remove his catheter.  I know they could have done that, but I wanted and needed something to do while we waited for the funeral home to come and take him.  

And now struggle with how I live without him.  I went to the grocery store yesterday night and cried in the bread aisle because I saw the loaves of Pepperidge Farm Hearty White, his favorite brand that I’d been bringing to his house once a week for the past two years since my mom died.  I tried to play Words with Friends and got weepy because he was at one time my best opponent in the game.  We usually had at least 25 games going at a time between us.  I’m not sure when I will be able to safely wear eye makeup again.  It took weeks after my mom died.  I never knew when some subtle thing would set me off and tears would flow washing all my makeup down my cheeks.  But I know life will go on.  I will go on.  I’ll wear mascara again.  I’ll shop for bread.  And I will kick ass in Words with Friends.  How do I know that I will heal?   Because I have the scars to prove it is possible.