Step-mother

When I acquired a father last Christmas, I didn't realize I would also get a step-mother.  How strange!  


My father is dying.  He was supposed to go to a bowling tournament halfway across the country this May, but now I hear he can hardly breathe and has difficulty even getting out of bed.  It's been a fast decline.  He needs a heart valve replacement, a serious surgery, and supposedly only two hospitals on the West Coast do this particular procedure that he needs.  He lives four and a half hours away from the closet one.  I can't imagine he can even make the trip.


My husband's relationship with his mother has always been volatile. She is not a kind person and yet Fred continually honors her by reaching out to her. On Tuesday last week I was thinking about this and my former decision to write my father off for his lack of response to every attempt I've made to reach him.  I asked myself if he died, would I have regrets that I never called?  No, I don't think so.  I did my part.  So why was I so troubled this day thinking about him?  I prayed about it, thought about calling, got up the courage to do it, lost the courage, and went about my day.


I was cleaning up the school room and under a pile of books I found a pink envelope with a Nevada phone number.  At some point I had looked up the number and scribbled it down.  There it was staring me in the face. Why I happened to find it now, I didn't know.  I will call, I decided.


After the girls finished school and the afternoon was quiet I called the home of my father for the first time in my life, my father lost to me for over fifty years.  His wife--my step-mother--answered on the first ring.  She is a quirky woman!  It was as if we had just talked the day before.  I said who I was and she immediately launched into a big update on my father's health.  It seemed she expected me to call and check on him.  She is quite the talker and I didn't need to worry about what I would say.  I realized why I felt the urgency to call.  She needed a listening ear.  I put aside any agenda I might have had to gain information and focused on assuring her that we cared for the two of them going through the challenge of their lives.  I just listened.  She would switch from stories of the past to her fears about their future.  The surgery is very serious and my father is in his eighties.  But he will die without it.  I did not ask to talk to my father. I enjoyed my step-mother, and in the end she said she was so glad I called.  She says she feels she knows me, which is very funny because I said absolutely nothing about myself or my family.  I just listened, and that is what she needed that day.  


*****I wrote this post up to this point last week.  Today, May 28th, I write this:  I came home on Saturday afternoon and checked my caller ID.  I had a call from Nevada.  That gave me a start, but I thought surely my step-mother would not be calling me. We had just "met"!  I could not find my pink envelope to match up the scribbled number to see if it was her.  And a generic voice answered when the number was called back.  I did not leave a message.  A little while later my son called to tell me that my step-mother was trying to reach me.  I then knew why, and my son confirmed it.  My father had died.  He died the very next day after I made my first call to him.   He died in the same hospital where I was born.


On Sunday, before I had the chance to call her, my step-mother called me again.  She said she wanted to be the first one to tell me.  She told me the details of what happened and also her anxiety of what life will hold for her now, losing her husband of 40 years.  She is not just an illusion anymore, but a real person.  And from her stories, my father became real too.