On Being Human

I sit to write this, tequila in hand, my throat swelling with the emotions of the day. One year into this devastating pandemic, my father lays dying in an ICU bed from an awful virus that precludes my holding his hand during his final days. As my world gets smaller by the minute, I fight off my tears. I’m afraid to let the feelings of loss seep in, as if my sorrow itself has the power to deliver the final, fatal blow. I still hope, though I don’t know what I am hoping for. I work because it’s who I am and what I do. It is my responsibility and it is suddenly my refuge when my thoughts circle around moments with him that will never be repeated and the red-eyed despair that I see in my 89-year-old mother’s face.

Unlike my father, my mother is safely tucked in her home but I can feel the sour breath of death surrounding her as well. Today, mother is difficult to recognize. Once beautiful, with auburn hair and flawless skin, she has shrunk with age and become hunched over from grief and pain. Her voice, always warm and upbeat, is now shrill and filled with bitterness. My mother was the pillar of emotional consistency throughout my life; she was the calm and steady counterpart to my father’s volatility. But now, with my father’s death looming and her own health failing, her back pain is unbearable, her checkbook is all wrong, the neighbors are nasty and her aide has an accent that is far too heavy for her weary ears to understand. I hear the devastation in her voice and find some reprieve in the concrete details of her never-ending complaints. Consumed with sadness for her and my own feelings of loss, I find myself reliving past moments with each of them in the dark, still hours of the night.

I sit in session with one ear trained to hear the quiet pinging of my phone. At the same time, I struggle to listen closely to my patient Lydia, to track her words and feel the grains of sadness, the measure of anger in her voice. She so wants to love her husband, to forgive his abusi