Row 23. On the aisle; nothing to lean against as I try to sleep, unless you count the fat salesman in 23B with the Bloody Mary and the Tom Clancy paperback. So sleep isn't going to happen. Great.
The flight's a little too short for a movie. If I was going to move so far from home, you'd think I'd have had the good sense to move far enough for in-flight entertainment. A few years ago I'd have been able to distract myself with a crappy meal on a flight like this, but those days are gone for good; enjoy your pretzels, sir. The crossword puzzle in the airline magazine is already filled in, and I packed in such a rush that all of the paperwork I brought from the office is in my checked luggage. Idiot. So I'm pretty much left with the SkyMall catalog. (What kind of people buy Gollum/Smeagol bookends for $195?) Great company I've got: SkyMall, and my own damned self. And 23B, of course; can't forget 23B.
Third flight in two weeks. No wonder I'm bored. Couldn't he have died a little faster?
Okay, that was uncalled for. I can't blame him for clinging to life for a few extra days, even in a coma. I can't even blame him for all of the crap that he laid at my feet before that; combine Alzheimer's and pancreatic cancer and you get one messed-up dad. Can't blame him for anything at all.
Maybe I'll blame 23B; he's big enough to take it. He[nf]ll, he looks like the kind of guy who doesn't even mind being blamed for stuff. Another Bloody Mary for the ba[nf]stard in 23B who destroyed my life, please.
Dad went through a lot his last month. Diagnosis, prognosis, probably some other -osises I don't know about. Diabetes, surgery, dementia, coma, death; the five stages Elizabeth Kubler-Ross left out. (Did somebody forget to tell her about these? Did she experience them herself, in the end?) But damn it, the rest of us went through he[nf]ll too. Would it have been asking too much for his last words to me not to have been the delusional ravings of an angry, senile old man? If we couldn't have closure, couldn't we at least have had a rational discussion about the benefits of hospitalization, instead of a furious rant about being betrayed and abandoned by his wife and child?
How much of his anger came from senility, and how much from awareness of his senility, from knowledge that he was slipping away from us and from himself? Was he as angry at losing himself as I am at losing him?
23B's asleep now. I wonder if his wife can sleep through that snoring. I wonder if he has a wife.
Almost missed this flight, this opportunity to get up close and personal with apnea-man. I should've just kept a bag packed. The hospice said it could be a week or six months, but still. And then, after getting my stuff together, wasting ten minutes looking for my key to my parents' house, when it was right where it's always been: on my keyring. Forty years old, over a thousand miles away, and I carry my parents' housekey around with me everywhere. Am I ever going to grow up?
Descending. 23B is still snoring. I think: does he mind being blamed? When his own father's dementia takes over, will the hostility flow past 23B like water past a boulder, as my own hostility does now? Or will it eat at him, pull him apart piece by piece, not even pausing for the funeral?
I bet I could see something pretty, if I wasn't on the aisle. The coast range, maybe the ocean.
I'd like to see something pretty.