Vacation: Interrupted

I took a couple of days off work this week so I could have 4 days off in a row that did not involve death or illness.

It’s been a hard year on that front.

It was about a year ago that Shannon went to the hospital for the first time. Psychosis isn’t pretty and time off to care for a psychotic patient is no vacation.

We also spent Christmas and New Years at Seton, Shoal Creek and then Seton, again. That time it was 14 days.

In February, Pinto, our 18 year-old cat, died. I took time off to help ease him into the next world, take him in to be cremated and then, later, pick up his ashes.

July came, and I got a call from Shannon at work. “You need to call your mother. Your dad’s in the hospital.” I pulled my boss out of a Board of Director’s meeting and told her that “I have to go, and I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

It was about 2 weeks later.

The day I got back from burying Daddy, I found out that a close friend’s mother-in-law had been killed in a car accident, so I took off an afternoon later in the week for her memorial.

Then, the next month, I went back to Tennessee for several days, a trip I had already planned and paid for before Daddy died. It was a good trip, but the sub-text was always death.

Last week, or the week before—I’m not sure, one of Shannon’s closest friends called to say that his mother had died. And, oh, his apartment had caught on fire. No time off work, because the services were in Waco, a little farther than Shannon can travel these days. We sent flowers and a plant.

Today is the first of my two paid days off, and the phone rang a little after 7:30 a.m. I very often don’t answer the phone. We get too many spam calls. But at that hour of the morning, a call is not just a call. It’s probably important.

The long and short of it is that John’s in the hospital again. I have no details except where’s he at. But I don’t feel good about it.

John has Parkinson’s and has been hospitalized before. The last time was for a month. He got better for a short while, but all the progress with motor skills disappeared almost as quickly as they had come.

The Parkinson’s has been advancing steadily over the last several months. Like Sherman’s march to Atlanta, it has been deliberately and methodically practicing a scorched-earth policy. It destroys so thoroughly that there is little, if anything, left to build on.

So that phone call this morning quickly became ominous.

Maybe I’m over-reacting. In fact, I hope I am.

I should probably take comfort in knowing that we have the resources, both financial and in time off when I need it, to respond appropriately.

But I’m tired of death and illness.

I’ll soldier on and do what has to be done, make no mistake.

And it’s probably just as well that we couldn’t afford to go to Bastrop this weekend, to our little “Hobbit House” in the pines. They don’t have phones there, so I wouldn’t have gotten that call that I didn’t want but really needed to get.

God has either not been in a good mood for the last year or I don’t understand the reasons for his or her decisions. At this point, I’m left without insight. Just pain and trepidation.

And, like this piece, no satisfactory closure.