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Page 1 of 2  My 86-year-old father has a 50-50 chance of having lung cancer, or so the doctor says.
For the past three years, my father has resided in a Dallas nursing home not far from where I live after he sleepwalked in the middle of the night and smashed his skull against something. Subsequent injuries meant he would never return home to live by himself. My mother—his wife—was in the hospital at the time after breaking her ankle, and she subsequently died in March 2005. This past Thursday, an x-way showed a “nodule” that wasn’t there 15 days ago. The doctor said it could be anything from calcification from his current battle with pneumonia to lung cancer. A still, calm voice inside of me says it’s the latter.
Recurring bouts of aspiration pneumonia kept my father on a seemingly continuous round of antibiotics and breathing treatments. Every time I visited him, which was about every other day, I always excepted to see him hooked up to the oxygen device that would pump medicine in the form of mist and steam into his battle-scared lungs. Smoking like a chimney My father also smoked like a chimney from the time he was a kid until he quit cold-turkey in the 1980s to “save money” on cigarettes. As a kid, I remembered him saying to my mother, who constantly nagged him about his smoking, “Go get me a cancer stick.” Other times, when my mother was within earshot, he would say, as he lighted up another Camel, “Get ‘em, cancer.” Little did he know . . . Right now, the hardest thing facing me is the bitter feelings I have toward my father, because of his alcoholism, out-of-control rages and his emotional abuse of my mother. Oh, he never beat the hell out of my mother or me, but, lemme tell ya, words often hurt more than punches. And wounds to the heart sometimes never heal, unlike black eyes and broken limbs. However, I remember how my father would take me to rasslin’ to watch The Sheik, Fritz Von Erich, Bobo Brazil, Kurt and Karl Von Brauner with their manager, Gentleman Saul Weingroff, Johnny Valentine—and he always bought ringside seats. He stood in a line a mile-long outside the Grand Ole Opry in the boiling sun to buy tickets just to make sure I saw Marty Robbins on the 11:30 p.m. portion. He tried to teach me how to read. He taught me to “pull my finger.” My father—always a hard worker and provider—loved to take me riding in his 1953 Mercury and watch me, dressed in only diapers, stand in the passenger seat and make like a fire-engine siren out the window. He also took me riding on his Harley.
The great elixir
It took me years to realize that my father didn’t set out to harm me, and that he did the best he could with his parenting knowledge. After all, his father was an alcoholic, and his mother abandoned him when he was just a baby, leaving him to grow up around the worst role models you can imagine. Forgiveness is a great elixir. One of my best friends buried her mother a little over a year ago. Her father had died some years before. “I can relate so well to what you are saying,” she said. “Both of my parents were alcoholics, but it was my mother who was so very unkind—both drunk and sober. I'm still working on forgiveness with her. It may take more time, but I understand about how you can look at your father and be grateful for what he did provide and the environment from which he came. “It sounds like both of our parents parented the best they could based on how THEY were parented when younger. Hang in there.” Yes, I’m hanging in there, and I know I’ll make it. It’s tough watching your aging parents get older, seemingly every time you turn around or go over to visit them. I’m going to visit my father this afternoon and sit with him, try to convince him that death is a blessing, not a curse. Any healing, as my pastor says, sometimes occurs on the other side of the Jordan.
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