Notes from Maine - 2020/05/13

It has been a weird week/month/year. I’m sure it has been for everyone. This is going to be interesting going forward. I don’t know if there has every been an event that has captured the whole world’s attention for this period of time. For months, we’ve all been experiencing the same changes and challenges. We’re all tuned into the same news to some extent.

In my corner of the world, the pandemic has been the backdrop to a lot of unrelated challenges. My father entered the hospital at the end of March for a spinal issue. He’s now in a rehab facility. Every step of that process has been difficult. His first surgery caused a leak of his spinal fluid that brought headaches and pain. The second surgery revealed life-threatening infections. Treatment of all that took away his cognition to the point that it didn’t seem like he would ever really be the same person. We had to explain everything over the phone to each new group of providers. Dad is very sensitive to anesthetic and opiates. He’s a different person on those and recovers more slowly than most. So every time they put him on drugs, they would decide that he was incapable of making his own decisions (rightly so) and we would have to take over by phone to consent to treatment.

After a few days in the rehab facility, I got them to take him off the hard drugs and today he was both pain-free (for the moment) and aware of his situation—where/when/why. Good news for him.

I think about parents, children, and family bonds a lot when I’m writing. They’re the relationships through which we form our understanding of the world, right? The book I’m sending out today is very much about those bonds and their limits.

Some of us break free from home like a panicked horse charging through burning barn doors. Others are launched by careful, guiding hands. I suspect that there must be a lot of kids who are currently ready to lose their minds right now. Being a teenager with limited freedom is hard enough. I can’t imagine being sent home from college to be incarcerated back in my home town. I probably would have burned my house down.