I Shouldn't be Writing This

IT WAS A SLOW DECLINE, IT WAS A FAST DECLINE

I shouldn’t be writing this in the fever of Covid. To be honest, the fever is gone. The pain in the eyes is gone, the headache is gone, the sore tonsils are gone, the nausea is gone, and my sense of smell is gone. My cousin Sue, whom you’ve all met more than once, also has Covid (with a little AFib). Her sons, Edward and David who both had the first round of Covid, lost their sense of smell and taste. It’s fairly common. Sue told me it took them both a long time, months and months, before the senses returned.

I talked to my father about Covid Tongue. There is a swelling that accompanies the loss of smell and taste. I stick my tongue into the mirror and see that it’s thicker and wider than usual. I am fascinated by this new symptom. I ask my father, whose speech has become impeded by Parkinson’s Disease, what it’s like for him to have lost his sense of taste and smell. He surprises me. Oh, I’ve gotten used to it, he says.

I am amazed by him. I tell him so. My father’s mind is strong. He manages a positive attitude in his daily life. I have watched his body succumb to this unforgiving disease. Although there are many, many miles between the two peninsulas in which we live, I have seen him struggle. In THE LEAVES OF GRASS, Walt Whitman documented that which he witnessed as a Civil War nurse and wrote:

I am the man

I suffered

I was there.

If this was a sonnet, the Volta would be here. My father suffers therefore I suffer. The implied guilt. Who has the right to write themselves into another’s suffering? An ambulance chaser? Attention seeker? Narcissist?

I shouldn’t be writing this.

My father’s mind is strong and he is extraordinarily positive in his daily life. He no longer has the ability to walk, or stand, or bathe himself. His voice has become soft. His hands are deformed. He no longer has the ability to read. My father is also more

withdrawn, and quiet. Remarkably, his intellect is incisive, and his sense of humor is sharp, which he seems to rely on more than ever.

My father was a gifted athlete. He skied, golfed, hunted, and fished. At the onset of Parkinson’s, at 68, he knew something was wrong. My golf game is for shit, he told me. It was a slow decline, it was a fast decline. Fifteen years later in July 2023, my father celebrated his 83rd birthday. I was determined, surrounded by his care workers who work around the clock, to steal a private moment, to whisper in my father’s ear something real, something that would mean something to him other than our thin conversation.

Who will I be without you? Who am I because of you? How can I repay you?