This has been one crazy emotional day. I feel drained and tired. Emotionally I’m not shut down but I know I’m keeping my emotions in check a lot harder than I might on normal days. I haven’t felt like this in twenty five years.

Twenty five years ago in February I got a phone call. I was working on something, I can’t quite remember what and from the answering machine message (yes, this was 25 years ago and we had answering machines for phones!) it was from my father. The message was vague, asking me to call him back, so I figured I’d call back in a day or two. That call was in the early evening. I remember that because the local news was on. I worked nights and just before I was supposed to leave for work, so it was about fifteen minutes before I was going to leave. I got another call. I picked up the phone and it was from my father. That was a bit unusual for him because my dad didn’t call me much, and definitely not twice in the same day unless it was an emergency.

That day my father told me my sister had some sort of accident at school at UC Davis, my mother was flying up to see her and they weren’t sure of her condition but he would keep in touch with me. One thing you have to know about my parents, and it is something I deal with them all the time. My parents have a way of not sharing everything they know, as a way of not dealing or ‘protecting me’ from hard news. Because of so many instances, especially after that day, I’ve learned to read between the lines of what they say to glean how serious something could be. Call it profiling my parents. While my father was telling me he wasn’t sure of how serious things were with my sister, the two phone calls in a day, my mother rushing to see my sister, well, it wasn’t hard to figure out things were kind of serious.

Hours later I got a call from my father at work telling me we needed to take a plane to UC Davis because my mother said things didn’t look too good for my sister. Man, do I remember the phrasing he told me because I learned later, and by later I mean from an article written in Glamour Magazine years later, that my sister was in a coma and brain dead hours before my father called me. I have mixed emotions thinking about that day and I remember trying to be the rock of the family. I remember years later, after that article made clear some things I was shielded from at the time, being very angry at being shut out from my parents. While I could rationalize why they did it (I was their son, they were losing a daughter and they didn’t want me to deal with the pain they were dealing with) I had some real anger issues I had to work through.

Here’s an ironic twist I thought about during today. The reason why I hate going to doctors is that when I saw my sister in the hospital, hooked up to tubes, machines helping her breath while she looked like death, doctors and nurses were pushing my parents to pull the plugs to harvest her organs. While my rational mind at the time knew why the rush was on, my emotions were trying to cope with the fact that a day earlier my sister was alive, we had had a typical brother/sister heated phone call about her suspicions my parents were thinking about getting a divorce, and now she was dying and no one was telling me why or how this happened. All I could hear were a bunch of strangers trying to convince my parents to kill my sister, at least that was my feeling at the time. So even now I don’t think too well about doctors except for the friends I have from high school who are doctors. A few days ago I set up an appointment with a doctor so I can get checked out on a few things. Hey, I’m 50 so it something I need to do, especially with the health problems for men my age and my family’s health issues.

Last night before going to work I got a missed call on my phone from my parents’ house. Since my mother usually calls me, I found it odd she called and didn’t leave a message. I had other things on my mind so I figured I’d call in a few days just to catch up, like we normally do. A lot of little things were going on with work and other areas which had me a bit down but it I was in my usual brush it off after a bit then move on mode. I was planning on a few things for my few days off, this was about ninety minutes before I would get off work and my phone rang. I don’t get many phone calls, especially at 7:30 am. I looked at the ID and it was from my parents’ home.

As I connected the call I got this sick feeling in my head. It was 25 years ago. I had this sinking feeling I was going to get some news and it wasn’t good. The voice I heard over the phone was my father. He told me he called yesterday and was calling to say hello. As I said earlier, my parents have a way of trying to lessen real issues with me so I knew something was going on. The problem was I was at work and couldn’t talk. I wanted to talk but . . . I don’t want to get into why I couldn’t talk but my father said OK, he had something important to talk to be about his health and to call him when I got home. There was more to the conversation, I don’t want to make it sound like it was some cold conversation, but in a two minute call my father told me he had some serious health issues going on, had been in the hospital for a week (something my mother neglected to mention in my conversations to her) and he would fill me in on the prognosis when I called back.

OK, you know a bombshell like that, especially with a lot of unanswered questions, allowed my mind to wander to all sorts of dark places. I contained myself the rest of the time at work but it was hard. When I got home, I made the call, talked to my father for about 15 minutes and to my mother another five. I found out my father has been in the hospital a lot in this past year. He has shortness of breath, to the point where he need to have oxygen. Parts of what I have to explain is hard to do because my mother painted a very different picture of how my father was acting. My father didn’t explain fully his condition to her. I don’t know if he didn’t understand the ramifications himself, if he was sparing her until he got more confirmation, or, as he puts it, my mother has a hard time of dealing with things and sometimes it’s best to let her work out stuff in her own way. Right now, the doctors who have been working with my father suspect he has mesothelioma because the symptoms he has are consistent with it, he was a heavy smoker for half of his life and while in the Navy he was exposed to a lot of asbestos. He says they want to do a few more checkups to be sure but reading between the lines, with my father telling me they have given him pamphlets and other materials about the illness and how he’s going to sit down and have a long talk with my mother, I think the doctors are pretty sure what’s happening.

The strange thing is about the talk I had with my parents is both of them, my mom visited me a few weeks ago, have this calm demeanor when they talk about the finality of life. They have been like this for years, and I have joked about their “Call to Glory” talks, but both my mother and father seem to think the train is pulling up to the station and their OK with that. I had to wait until a few hours ago to look up information on mesothelioma because frankly all I knew about the disease had to do with the lawyer commercials on local channels. I know reading things online, especially health issue, can be bad, but looking up this information was sobering.

You can say I’m in a bit of a funk right now.