I hadn't talked to him in a few months.
I would say I've been busy; I started a new job, wrote a new book, and have been learning all about being a first-time publisher and a first-time employee. Zoe's nearly diaper-trained; Kayla's driving; Sage's mother's home life has been a hot mess, and mine hasn't been too peaceable, either. There are plenty of excuses. None of them are quite enough to mask the fact that, in my life, I haven't always been good at staying in touch with the people who love me, the people whom I love. Stuff hasn't always been great with Dad, but he's always been Dad. He's never been a stranger.
But I hadn't talked to him, probably not since the New Year, not until tonight. His sixty-fifth birthday was yesterday, and he sounded well, healthy. Kind of.
I am afraid that he's got early-onset dementia, or maybe an Alzheimer's variation of some sort. It's hard to say from talking to him, and I don't even really know if it's early-onset when you're sixty-five, but he's a lot more forgetful than I expect him to be. He told me that he had eleven grandchildren (including my five), and that all were girls, and can you believe that? Which was a reasonable thing to say, in that I was discussing some of mine, but two minutes later, he repeated it, and can you believe that?
I could believe it. I could also feel it in the pit of my stomach. A bit later, I said something in passing about having a sleep study done, and he asked why, then asked what sleep apnea was, then asked me to explain about the CPAP in detail, which I did. He sounded surprised that there was such a thing, and he wondered if he had it, too. I told him he should have my step-mother listen to him while he slept sometime to see.
I've been wearing a CPAP since 2011. It changed my life; I know I told him about it, and I know it's come up in the past four years. It's scary to me.
I've never been afraid of meteor strikes, ice ages, nuclear wars, or any of the other apocalyptic ways you can die; I've never even been bothered by germs. If I can't see it in front of me, I usually don't pay it any mind. But Dad is 65 now; he's 27 years older than me, and I can see that from here. I do get scared when I see a speeding bus heading my way, and I have noticed that, as I get older, my body is taking on the same shape as his, the same overweight, the same hair. I'm following in his footsteps in a lot of ways, physically.
I've understood for a long time that the corpus that conveys me around will fail on me eventually; it's been trying to, in various syndromes and complexes, for nearly 20 years. But it's always been a pretty abstract threat; I'd never seen it fail. I'm worried that Dad is going to fail, and I want to be very particularly specific about this part, I am about 1% worried for Dad. I'm writing much more out of a pure, sheer, selfish fear about what'll happen when it happens to me.
He asked how old Zoe was, having held her the second or third day she was alive on this planet, not quite three years ago. Birthdays are scary things. I always used to expect him to forget mine was coming. He usually remembered, but I was always afraid he wouldn't.
It would probably be better, at this point, if I spent more time worrying about his....
