For Better or Worse

The first 2 weeks of May 2022

Sitting in a cold ICU room in a run down hospital in Mobile, Alabama is not how anyone plans to spend a day, but it is how my mom and I are spending every day this week. 

My dad is hooked up to every monitor and tube you can imagine. He has IVs flowing into the right side of his neck and into both wrists. There are just wires everywhere. A screen behind him shows nine or ten numbers with squiggly lines passing by. It’s just like on TV but without the dramatic dialogue. The dialogue here today is more utilitarian, nurses are only telling Dad what they are doing and asking over and over, “How is your pain?” Sure, they are asking in adorable southern accents, but still. It seems cruel to keep saying the word pain. 

When we first walked into his room after his open heart surgery, my Dad’s eyes were very cloudy but when he saw us they got a little bigger. Then he whimpered out the same word, “Pain.” The man has made his living as an orator for over thirty years, and now he sounds like Frankenstein: “Pain. Bad.” 

There are maybe six vials of medicine hanging on one IV stand, and various bags of fluid hanging from another stand. There are oxygen tubes pointed up his nose. The ventilator was removed before we arrived, and when the doctor comes by for a check in, he is very pleased about that development. No ventilator. 

The patient in the bay next to Dad is on a ventilator. She looks just absolutely horrible! It’s hard to describe how a living person can look so close to death. But that’s where we are, I guess -- the ICU. The point of this wing of the hospital is to make sure people do not die. End of story.

The sheets are as thin as those at a Motel 6, and every now and then I find a little spot of dried blood somewhere -- on the floor, on a call button. Maybe it’s my dad’s blood? Who knows? I get the distinct feeling that thread count and hypoallergenic pillows aren’t really on the radar here. Drops of blood are inevitable. 

As the first day goes by, I develop a headache that just keeps getting worse. We are cramped between his bed and the wall so I know Mom must also be pretty uncomfortable. I notice these things and just let them go. Because who would complain about jet lag and sore joints around a person who just had his chest pried open and sewn back together with wires? 

My parents live in Monroeville, Alabama, which is about an hour and forty minutes away from this hospital. There’s never any traffic of course, and the long drive is worth feeling the comfort of home each night. We take Scout, their golden lab, for a walk each night and then again each morning before we leave. 

The trees, bushes, and flower beds are all bursting with blooms and smells in May. The American South is a magical kind of place, plant wise, and pretty much the polar opposite of southern California, where I live. These plants are so abundant they are growing on top of each other! People don’t have irrigation systems in their yards, and spend a lot of time beating back the growth in contrast to my pitiful gardening attempts which inevitably fail the minute I forget to water something once! 

just a pretty church near the hospital

The houses here are mostly made of red brick. They are surrounded by shrubs and pine trees, with thick carpets of green grass. I grew up in the South until I was 11 and walking by the houses of this style makes me think of my childhood in an abstract way, like when I hear a song from that time that hasn’t been overplayed. It feels like I imagine it would feel to see a ghost -- a friendly ghost in my case because I had a happy childhood. 

I’ve been gone from this culture and this climate for a long time. I lost my accent in Jr high school in order to blend in with the other kids. Now our daughter, Darla, has made her decision to spend the next few years of her life back here, at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, the luckiest school in the world! They will realize that soon enough. We’ve been the luckiest home in the world for the past 18 years having her with us.  

Darla chose to go to U of SC because now is her time for an adventure; because she appreciates southern culture; and because they gave her a boatload of money!  She'll be a Capstone scholar there, and her major is business administration. She will attend classes in red brick buildings. Sometimes, she will go home for the weekend to friends’ houses surrounded by shrubs and pine trees. She will listen to country music and marvel at billboards about tractors and Jesus. 

Knowing she is leaving, and her brother, Zane, isn’t far behind her, I have been thinking of ways to force them to spend time with me plan fun things to do together. Last Thursday, May 5, was our wedding anniversary which seemed like a good reason to request the presence of our teenagers at the dinner table. 

I don’t want to throw any shade on people getting married, but maybe on the extravagance of weddings. Any ol’ yahoos can promise to love, honor, and cherish until the cows come home. But how many people want to renew their vows after loving, honoring, and cherishing for twenty years already? I was thinking about this alot in deciding how to adequately celebrate our 20th anniversary. 

We had a small dinner party with our dearest friends, who incidentally have all been married longer than us, and who have been involved in our lives for decades. We all sat around one long table, including Zane and Darla, and after dinner Jeff and I renewed our vows. (It wasn’t as fancy as you may be thinking. We wore jeans and said the vows while we were still seated.)

Our tradition has been to read our vows to each other in private every year of our marriage. We fell off the tradition during the 2020 lockdown because, well. If you are married you know why! 

So this year we renewed the tradition, but I rewrote my vows entirely. After twenty years, my priorities have changed a little. What I need from my life partner has also changed. (hint: more alone time) 

We had Ben n Jerry’s for dessert, just like at our wedding.

For his part, Jeff talked about reading through his old vows which, when he wrote them, he found to be heartfelt and moving. He said when he read them now they seemed inadequate.

“This isn’t the stuff that makes a marriage work!” He said. And “How could a person know how they will react to having children?” 

He also said lovely romantic things. Don’t worry. But his point was valid. Vows are just a bunch of words. They only mean something if you are lucky enough to say them to someone who has the emotional fortitude and integrity to follow up on those words. 

Spending this week with my parents has given me another level of insight into the vows couples take. 

My mom got married, almost fifty years ago (she was a teenager) to a very handsome, charming young man who weighed about a buck seventy. Now she is spending all day, every day in this hospital with a man who can’t sit up to pee. He doesn’t have the strength to say more than two words in a row. He has gray hair, and needs a hearing aid. 

The words “in sickness and health” are so easy to say. Right? But can you handle the ICU for a week? 

What if our culture practiced a different type of pre-marital counseling? Young couples who want to get married have to spend time individually in a care facility, standing in one room for hours watching the interactions, observing the stress of squeezing your last ounce of compassion out over and over for a person who probably does a few things everyday that drive you a little bit bonkers! 

How it happened

Last Wednesday night, my dad went to the gym to work out. He’s a healthy fella! When he came back home he told my mom he was having chest pains and they went to the local ER in their small town. It was a mild heart attack, not as bad as his first one years ago. The doctor sent him via ambulance down to Mobile, the closest cardiologist. Once there, they sent one of those tiny  cameras into his chest and confirmed he needed surgery. Once they sawed his breastplate open Monday morning and dug around for a while, they realized the extent of the blockage. He needed a quadruple bypass! 

The surgery took over 6 hours. Machines pumped his blood. Machines breathed for him. He was unconscious all day long, and Mom and I stayed home that day and tried not to think about it. 

For the next 6 days we woke up early and packed a few snacks for the day into her red car. We listened to country music, music from the 60s, and other happy playlists on Spotify. We sometimes got behind logging trucks on the back roads. We passed the cotton gin in Uriah, and a logging plant in the middle of nowhere. There was a detention center on the way and miles and miles of tree lined road. I never thought I would know the way from Mobile to Monroeville by heart. But I do now! 

The day I flew back to California was the first day Dad could hold a conversation. Two days later, this Monday, Mom drove him home. Doctors say he’s recovering very well. I’m sure he’d appreciate a call from you if you have his number. And when you call, ask him if he’s using his fancy, new headphones, because when he talks on speaker phone it drives (me and) my mom crazy! hahahaaahaaa

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Here’s a video of Jeff performing with Michael Buble last week. (look for his white beard on the R side of your screen, front row)

And here’s another article I wrote for Apartment Therapy: 3 Organizing Hacks You Can Probably Skip (and 3 You Shouldn’t), According to a Pro

Tell me what you are up to. I love getting mail!

And I appreciate you reading this letter.

Love, Nonni