"Jan needs to let your father go". So said Peggy (Pei-shien) Wong when she came to visit my parents. Nothing could be truer. She needed to give my father permission (and the courage) to face his condition; to face up to the fact that he is reaching the end.
My parents have decided to take a cruise to the Caribbean and back. In the days before, my father's blood pressure rocketed sky high. He has become his anxiety, and neither he nor my mother can adapt to their new reality.
Meanwhile, my family and I are taking our first vacation in about a year! I have never needed a vacation like I need this vacation. Reconnecting with Caroline and our kids, and having them forefront in my heart and mind is so restorative!
Over the course of my father's illness, I have become increasingly dissatisfied with American cultural values: Consumption, focus on the self, small families, proxy competition using your children, money as the one and only marker of success. It's so hollow. Contrary to American culture, I am 100% convinced that a life spent putting career before family is a life wasted.
It is a shame that my parents are so totally unequipped for what they are facing. And that they are so totally resistant to other ways of evaluating what a good life means. They have become consummate consumers, and cannot comprehend death as a part of life. My father has only fear and pain ahead of him, but he cannot admit this to himself. He still wants to live, and he still wants to live like he's always lived.
Me myself: It took a while, but I have come to accept and love my parents for who they are. To understand that for all of their studies, they are limited in the ideas that they will consider. My job now is to support them - the only way they will let me help them - and to focus my emotional energy on my kids, my wife, home life, and getting the family (and hopefully my resistant mother) through this in one piece.
