The Aerie

The Emergency Room

The whiteboard at the nursing station in the Emergency Room bore his
name in the entry for stall ten. But when I looked in the stall the
wrong man was in there.

"Excuse me," I asked politely, aware that courtesy is the only way to
accomplish anything in an E/R, "where is Mr. Alberti?"

The nurse looked at the whiteboard, and then at stall ten, "Isn't he
in there?"

I looked back in. The man in stall ten was sleeping fitfully, one hand
pawing at the side of his head. He was pale, with white hair and a
white scraggly beard. His face looked soft.

My father's hair was gray, not white, wasn't it?

"That's not my father..." I began, but less certainly.

I walked into the stall. He lay breathing heavily, his skin so pale,
so cold beneath the thin hospital sheet.

I looked back at the nurse's station in confusion, seeking guidance,
but my misapprehension was as nothing to the hardened veterans of a
million crises.

What was wrong with me that I couldn't recognize my own father? I
still don't know. Maybe it was denial so profound that the mind
refused to believe the eyes.

My father is not soft. Not pale. He does not sleep quietly, he does
nothing quietly. He is loud. He is opinionated. He yells.

But six weeks ago when my mother told him that he was yelling all the
time, he stopped. Even as his confusion mounted, and his short term
memory failed, and his coordination slipped away, he kept the notion
in his head: "Must not yell: hurts wife's feelings." Oh he still
yelled, but only when appropriate.

To not yell would have been frighteningly out of character. Like now.
Lying soft and pale and fragile in a gurney in E/R, his clothes cut
from his body, covered only by an impersonal, professional coarse
sheet that has covered gangbangers and grandmothers and softball
players and drunk drivers offering no more comfort than the veteran
nurses at the station.

Tonight he sleeps and breathes still, but I do not know if he remains
my father, or if I will ever again recognize the man in the bed.

[1]Last

Posted by Albatross at December 7, 2002 12:00 AM