THIS IS GETTING DEPRESSING

18. August 2009 by Frank.

Today is the 2nd anniversary of my mother’s death.  I spent most of the weekend sitting in small examination room #22 with my step father.  He called me at 1 AM Sunday morning and told me he needed to go to the hospital in a hurry.  His heart was racing, he felt like he was going to pass out, and his vision was severely blurred.  We got right into ER, they don’t waste time when you’re having any kind of chest pain.  He had the doctor and four nurses hovering over him.  They had him wired and injected with an alarming array of tubes and sensors.  But they got his heart to slow down and beat right.  Then they left us alone until 10 AM when they announced they had a room ready for him.

Having this happen on the same weekend mom died was definitely a strange coincidence.

I went for 29 hours without sleep because of this.  My wife and I were watching LOST on HULU when he called.  I had just drank three big cans of beer and was in a relatively mellow mood ready for bed.  Lack of sleep, sitting for hours on end in a cramped little room, and a nice buzz turning into a vicious headache is not conductive to positive thinking.  I had already been thinking about mom’s death and this was eerily similar.

(Dad’s OK, they released him today.  He has to go see the cardiologist again on Thursday.)

So I found myself in a rather bleak mood.  I got home around noon and fell asleep before my head even hit the pillow.  But first, I called my sisters in Louisiana.  They had also been thinking about mom so the news freaked them out, too.

Talk about hearing it through the grapevine.  The news spread through them calling everyone under the sun.  When I got my dad home today his neighbor came over because my sister had called him!  When dad was in the hospital yesterday he got between 30 and 40 calls from family and friends.  Of course his whole seniors group knew about it in short order.  This was not my doing, I only informed my sisters.  They made me promise to let them know if anything at all happened to dad after mom died.

This was indeed very serious but they over-reacted.  Because they’re so far away and can’t do anything.

Naturally, when there’s an emergency there’s well meaning christian friends and a lot of praying going on.  After 11 years of non-belief, it never even crossed my mind to pray.  I never had a flashback to my praying days.  What I heard and saw was some really good nursing staff and a doctor that obviously cared about this total stranger suffering.  They did their jobs very well.  I thank them.

I am a listener and an observer.  When other people are around I usually shut up and let them do all the talking.  During the course of dad’s church group visit I heard examples of racism (against other church members with different skin color), bigotry against other church members with different views on church music, the desire to have someone removed from their position, total misinformation, and praise to god for making everything all right and being the only reason dad was OK. 

I’m glad I don’t go to church.

Pandora is playing COMFORTABLY NUMB by Pink Floyd right now.  It suits my mood.  “Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying.”  If only that were the case.  I heard all those people loud and clear.  I wonder where all the right wing hysteria comes from that you see in political news all the time.  It comes from people just like these, the backbone of most small town churches and denominations.  Racism, prejudice, antipathy, resentment, hostility towards fellow believers.  This is against everything I believed in when I was a believer.  And not a one of these people thought anything wrong with any of it.

There is something very wrong with the world when the ultimate in high moral standards and values so casually dishes out hatred for others of their own kind.  It is depressing.

On the way home from the hospital my dad wanted to go to the cemetery to visit mom.  He doesn’t do the talking to her routine like some, he’s more concerned with the flowers looking nice.  But obviously, she was on his mind this weekend, too.

Sometimes life really sucks.

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