"Even the birds miss him, miss," was what Olga Vega, my neighbor told me, walking straight up to our gate. Our friendship of one spring, one summer, and one autumn bringing us together.
My mother and I smelled like his hospital room, a thorough 12-hour marinade. I didn't have any energy to update Olga fully on all that's happened. And why, and when things will change. And when that day is, when all of our neighbors, who know and love him, would see his truck fixed and pulling out onto the I-45 again, by his own hand.
I came home on a Wednesday night. Houston shined below me. I felt both at peace, knowing it's home, and so hecking anxious. I sat squished against the window. I'm not a claustrophobic person but I became one, on Spirit airlines. Everything about its smaller seat space made me feel like there was never enough fresh oxygen pulling into my lungs. People are less patient. Unforgiving on the way out. There's little Ohio neighborliness, that I was spoiled with for 5 months now. There was little to look forward to, on my own way out of Bush.
I was simply glad that an old friend could take me home. One familiar face to ease my mind, before all the days ahead, which today, being a Tuesday night, a full week has passed.
I didn't expect my last words to be so true, to my supervisor. Who hugged me very hard and who I felt, understood me deeply, perhaps foresaw all the hardships before I saw them myself. "I feel like," I paused, her eyes keen on me and quickly ended the call she was on to see me out, my plane would depart shortly.
"I feel like everything in my life is preparing me for this moment. Everything I've learned, everything I've got. It's going to be for this," I finished, smiling slightly, while my eyes filled with water for a bit, before I bit the edge of my cheek. Telling all my soldiers to hold back, protect the barriers, the walls. It's work, it's not any other place right now. I'm not home yet.
She rushed in to hug me tightly and said past my shoulder, "You are going to be brilliant. You are going to be just what your family needs right now. Your positivity, your intelligence. All of it. They are in such good hands." She pulled back, smiling brightly, kindly.
I felt it then. I really am, exactly where I'm supposed to be, again.
But after landing in Houston, the pit in my stomach boiled, an omen or simply nerves. There can never be enough preparation for the long-term injury of a loved one. The old days are gone. Perhaps they were all gone, the moment I left for Ohio, toxically optimistic that my father will always be the picturesque color of strength. How could a man as fiery, stubborn, and careful, ever not be healthy? And of course, he's my father. It can't be him and it won't be any time soon. But the old days now, are certainly gone, after my father's hemorrhagic stroke, last Sunday.
Saturday night, he took a cold shower after spending so many hours gardening. We have a big beautiful garden in the back. My mother's and his. His certainty of what needed watering and tending to is instinct. All of my childhood, he'd note the dropping temperature. Anything lower than 40 meant that his precious gac and star fruits needed a warm lamp and a thick covering. He'd call for my help in bringing out giant wooden boards and boxing our precious trees in, protecting them from wind and cold. They were his children. And even at 80, he'd worry at least, over the watering, trimming, removing.
That's always been a lot.
So after all that self-sufficient gardening along with the immediate cold shower on Saturday night, he suddenly felt his brain burst for a bit. An unexplainable burst of pain. Perhaps it was a roar? But something had changed forever, and he knew it, couldn't put a finger on it. Slept on it, through Sunday morning. My mother was aware but thought it was simply a headache. Offered Tylenol for it.
In his last moments of full consciousness on Sunday morning, even when the back of his brain roared with pain, he still wanted to attend the Vietnamese Community Center gathering. A promise of seeing others, that's always been his joy, always to make a bet that someone who knew him was still alive and awake enough to attend these meetings, for him to simply talk to. Rediscover the days of his prime, back when he looked like a movie star, rode a motorbike like one, and smoked packs with his friends who would be more than happy to drive out hours just to hang at the spot: Loc's house. That mess of a house. That mess and madness of a man who's so easy to anger, so hard to not love because no one could deny that he was generous with his joy. The one to buy buckets of food, hunt and shoot the biggest buck, bring it home to his house and call on all his friends to deskin and cut into its thick, muscly flesh. I could imagine the stench of fresh kill, of a bleeding buck, of the barbeque grill which was something he even hand-made and hand-pulled for every sort of grilling. All the men would cut generously into the kill, joke, smoke, beer, and chat all throughout the evening and the night. Perhaps, they even stayed over and went straight to work the next day, because it was Loc's place.
But today, at 80, there are hardly any other South Vietnamese Veterans left. Who wouldn't want to relive their prime? Who wouldn't want to be surrounded by people who came for you because of who you are? Because of the stubborn, possessive personality you had above the rest?
You were always so stubborn. So proud of who you are, that you glowed brightly, so sure of who you are, that anyone who stood up against you for even a sentence would feel unsteady. The red in the whites of your eyes always bulged when you sensed a challenge or a challenger. Indiscriminate to friends or family. Which is why... maybe it is why you were too sure of yourself, too proud. Your strengths that gave many the instinct to instantly believe in you and your leadership in all situations: whether it was the open boat of 35 Viet boat people you steered using the stars to get to Thailand, or the surety you had the night that the fish you've been feeding and the little tree you've been growing is big and ready for you to chop down and eat and escape the concentration camp with, or it was when you were sure that you could save another captain's family in enemy territory being the only pilot bomber brave enough to fly in and pick them up in just a minute, or when you were so sure that because Yen and I are your daughters, that we must be great or will be, one day, beyond imagination.
But it is your absolute surety though, that proudness, that ensures you'd never waver. You'd never concede. Even if you knew you were wrong. Your biggest weakness was never conceding, not one sorry in your life, after your own outbursts, true or not, of anyone who cared about you. So over the years, our house got quieter and quieter. Less and less people came to our gatherings. Your nickname amongst your friends, which started out as a joke, became the general accepted truth in all your circles: Loc Dien. Crazy Ass Loc.
You were crazy because you were always the bravest, the loudest, the most ready to defend what you believed in was truth.
And then you became crazy, in the eyes of people who stood there, loved you, cared about you, who only dared to voice a slight opposing opinion, and to them, you would always be ready to bring up the worst, invent the story, invent and re-invent and until the reds in your whites became redder, eyes that you promised me you had practiced harnessing their chi to make all enemies fear you, which is what you did. You said the worst, and made the kindest fear you. Shake their heads in disappointment. He is lost in himself, in his own truths.
And so our house, which once was the beacon of Vietnamese festivity, saw itself shrink in the number of voices, the plates of food on New Years day, the amount of gangsta Vietnamese who even cared for your name anymore. Until there was no one. Not even your closest friends. Peoples fucking left Asiantown to come to a mainly Hispanic community to celebrate New Years because of you. But not in the end.
In your last moments of clarity, after the stroke of the night before, you wanted one thing: you wanted to see if you could be seen again. As you were, in your greatest. So you attempted to drive out to the Vietnamese Community Center for the weekly Sunday flag raising ceremony. That unexplainable ache in the back of your head.
It's not a light 30 minute drive. And in the truck that's failed him at least once a month, on something, he only made it out for 2 minutes before he crashed into a big something above the curb. Bent the front of his car silly. It must have been loud. It must have been awful, scary, disorienting, and loud again. The craziest part isn't the crash, but the fact that he made it home in one piece and calmly.
My mother was worried about insurance premiums on the phone for most of the day, while my father, had all the signs of someone who experienced something life-altering the previous night, that we couldn't connect the crash to. All the dots were there.
But the biggest dot was when, during Sunday lunch time, after the crash, even as the chopsticks laid out perfectly in front of him, he didn't recognize them for what they were. Denied that they were chopsticks and stood up to grab two strainers and attempted to use them as chopsticks.
The most logical man that I knew. Give him any tool and he could figure it out. A self-made construction business, the first Viet to do so in Houston. Give him anything to figure out and he would, suddenly thought the restroom was our shoe closet, and relieved himself there.
He believed the faucet was pouring fire, not water, as my mother helped him wash his hands.
My mother cried hard, calling me quickly, "I am calling 911. He doesn't believe he's unwell, but something's so wrong. It must be a stroke. It must be the shower." She cried for the same reasons I cried, hearing those words: the end of the patriarchy is here. Like the book "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by Gabriel Ma'rquez, his grasp for his own power has sunk with the ship.
I agreed immediately with her decision. Moments before she would call 911, I spoke to my father on videocall for the last time that he had all of himself, in a way. The last messages of the once healthy neurons in his brain, firing for old time's sake. He firmly told me, as I muffled my own tears and cries into my hand, which he clearly saw but continued on strongly that, "Don't worry. Please don't cry. I will be okay. I will be well and you will see me well. And then we will all eat together at Ocean Palace." Which made me cry harder. Fuck. Ocean Palace sucks, he knows this. We've told him countless times. He'd never quit, but I nodded. The image of our last fancy dinner together in my head, at Kim Son in downtown. It was my Christmas family dinner idea. And it was the best meal we had together, and as reluctant as he was on the way in, grouchy that it wasn't Ocean Palace but this "shitty place", he still sat down and bit into the dishes. And maybe he didn't like the food, but seeing how happy Yen, Mom, and I were, in our red dresses that day, smiling into our bites, I think a part of him eased that evening. And was happy because we were happy, and that we were a family, his family. His place of belonging.
I would get a phone confirmation that the first hospital believed he may need more advanced care. Perhaps even brain surgery. And so I panicked and couldn't sleep all night. I cried all night.
With my face pushed into my own pillow and my brain running without pause into wall after wall, it felt like the worst heartbreak of my life. For the life that he may never have again. For our family. For the two timelines to converge: the timeline where I knew him at his best, his strongest, and the timeline of today, at his lowest, his weakest and most painful. In a night, I attempted through my tears to converge two timelines into something I could work with.
And try as I might all night, that was impossible. And I only felt one thing which was this immediate instinct that my father was not doing well. That he must be scared, displaced, and that he might need help. At 3 am, I called my mother for the hospital's number to double check how he was doing. If the surgery went through at all? And it didn't.
And in my head then, I was convinced that it must be hospital neglect then. And I called her an Uber at 4 am to take her there to check on him, and it was her arrival that helped him ease to any sleep at all. My poor mother ran ragged all night and every night until my arrival in Houston.
We would be on the phone with any loved ones who knew anything about this. While my Mum called loved ones, I took over all calls with our case managers, doctors, social workers, nurses, and long term care facilities. I received information, gathered more information, shared information amongst Yen and Mum. I simply went into my automatic settings and accessed everything that I've ever learned about wording, asking the right questions in a limited time, advocated for my father's needs, helped create a long-term vision and defend that vision on my family's behalf.
Our most important conversations weren't just ones where we were moving the needle with someone at the hospital, but were ones we had with each other. Solidifying our vision. Over dinner, in the car, every second of every day for the last 1.5 weeks has been about what we should be doing and why, and why not.
Yen has a very strong vision of what she'd prefer, for the sake of Mum's safety and her quality of life, it's best we take him to a long-term care facility. Mum has a very flexible vision, finding herself capable of maybe even taking care of him long-term, which, oh my gosh, is impossible. We can't have her do that. And I see something else. My own return to Houston, not any time soon, but soon enough to be a part of our family in a way that strengthens the foundations I grew on. I cannot simply leave my mother here, to caretake mister man. I cannot.
I am a part of something. Always.
And for all the love that I have for my new job and all the people in it, I have to find a compromise between being a part of Peoples Bank and being a part of my family in this time of need.
This forever time of need. My father's loneliness, only having been in the hospital for only 1.5 weeks, an echo in my head. I see his loneliness. The full realization of his loneliness. It was no one else but me who sat next to him for all of 12 hours for so many days, as he tried to get up out of bed, as he squinted at his phone, hard, not understanding what the numbers on it meant, for days. I saw his pain and displacement and seeing in real time, his attempt at reconciling a new normal that he doesn't understand. Or may never understand. "Why? Why all of this?" he would ask us, and my mother's, Yen's, and my response to him that we've already converged and reworked together, "Whatever the doctors say is best."
Because the truth is, we cannot bulletproof our home. We cannot supervise him 24/7, which is necessary for his care from now on.
We cannot trust ourselves to protect him from himself. I would fear the second that we didn't pay close attention enough.
His confusion will be a constant. It will only worsen. The freedoms he once enjoyed, the garden he nurtured so much, the picture that he always pointed to, a newspaper article with a picture of his 30-year-old self swimming in the angry ocean, above sharks, to hail down a U.S. cargo ship towards an abandoned island off of Thailand, containing 30 Vietnamese, running for their lives from the newly Communist Vietnamese regime, to the white Honda Ridgeline that he would spend $200 per month fixing something on, even as it failed him forever and ever, because this one truck afforded him the greatest thing in the world: the freedom to exist.
Gosh, if there's one word to describe my father it would be freedom. It is my word too. I understand it so deeply, that to see him lose all of it, in an instant, and to see him struggle with listening to doctors and nurses and having to take medicines that sedate his mind, restrict his movements, risk mitigate, because it is their responsibility to keep him safe. I feel his pain as it were my own. Nurses have found me crying, a nose-slobbering session, alongside my father who is heavily sedated. Because he wouldn't stop getting out of bed. No one can blame him. My case worker, Emmanuel breathes out a compassionate, "Oh gosh," as I recalled that he is convinced he is at home. That the hospital window is actually our window at home, overlooking his tended garden. That my mother has renovated this new home so much that he can no longer recognize the walls and ceilings he once built, as if overnight, without his input. It would make him both so indignant, so mad, and then incredibly sad. He'd miss the house he once built, convinced my Mom's rebuilt it. He believes that his black shoes, with the special heel inserts made for his gout are right beneath this bed. That he is well. Can go home. Doesn't understand the restraints on his wrists and ankles. Why is he tied up, in his own home?
So he will claw his way out and has.
The only freedom he has now is to live in his own head. And when he's fully there, it is the scariest place. I saw him with my own eyes, that first night there, clawing the air above his bed, in the darkness, as if he were still driving his truck. My mother gripped onto his hand, attempting to remind him of where he was. He is not in his car. He is not driving. "You are here Dad, with Ngoc, your daughter, and with Lan, your wife, Dad," I cried to him.
His eyes were glazed over, his face shaking with fear, searching the ceiling for answers for why his truck was driven into the river, and he would move only more frantically as water filled up his truck. He was drowning in his truck if we didn't get him out. All of this happened while he is in bed. My own eyes in disbelief at seeing my father fully delirious for the first time in my life.
Unprepared. I was unprepared. I'll always be. Disbelief. Every door closed now. I was staring at the forever, starting today. There is nowhere to escape to, but to be with my father, all of ourselves held there in the grip of his delirium. Stories he would continue to make at night, when Sundowners syndrome would hit. Where his own mind hurt itself and was cruel.
My mother would later share that that was a lot better than the previous night. I didn't believe her almost.
But I knew it then, as unprepared as I was to see my father fear the invisible scene playing out above his head. Gosh, those eyes, were truly glossed over. But as I saw that, I knew that there was only one road for me, as my father drowned in hallucinations.
My sister will continue to pursue her education. My mother will continue to be alone in the caretaking of a man whom hardly will get visitors. My career keeps me in Ohio right now.
I truly cannot let this be the vision of my family. A scattered pack in the midst of a forever need. To be what we need for each other. To take my mother home. To take my father home. To take myself home, while I give myself the room to thrive of course. But it is inevitable, especially when I have an elderly father, from the start. My fate was written.
My story was predetermined the moment my father realized how grateful he was to receive a daughter at 56 years old. The moments of sleep when I had a fever, that he would check my forehead hourly throughout the night, owning my discomfort as it it were his own. The moments of anger, him calling me the worst of names at untruths he believed in his head. The rice cooker and oven that I broke on the floor after it. The flames that he ignites in me.
It is crazy how someone so cruel could be someone I love so much. He really is Loc Dien. Maybe because he makes everyone around him go crazy, haha. He is so possessive and easily jealous of my mother. He must know her whereabouts every hour of the day and if she strayed from anything she said, he'd be convinced she's cheating on him. So she must answer that phone or receive hell on the way home. My sister, who is the kindest, bravest person I must know, is sensitive to loud noises. Her mind blaring out sirens like mad, because of everything. And for me, it's how I'm sensitive to emotional changes in anyone. I believe that I could convince someone to hate me, in just one second. That people can do that to me, that nothing is promised. Not even friendship.
But to see the same man who never asked for hugs, cold like the father figure he admired and who loved him harshly, leaving bleeding lashes on his young back after my dad pranked the neighbors again, so in his sickest state, need hugs? It broke me. It shattered my walls. He raised both arms up, asking if we can hug him, like a 4-year old well-loved kid. It makes a daughter weak. So when I do, and I wrapped my arms around his thin jacket, the cotton all worn down, I could even feel his hospital gown beneath and beneath that, was nothing but a thin layer of skin above bone. I felt his smallness. And that made me cry too. He used to be the biggest thing I knew, you know? When Yen was just born and was teething and crying every night, I slept with my Dad. For years. Every night, I would lie on the crook of his armpit. My face to his chest. His scent of the full working day, the sawdust, the sun, the metal tools or the concrete, all of it, a comfort of the hard work he does to keep our family safe. My fingers tried to pull out the long hairs growing out of his nipples and if I'm ever successful, he would yelp. Every night was a new or old story of Viet Nam's history, our ancestors and what they did, the battles we won against imperial China, the use of music, a soldier playing his flute beautifully, to make the enemy cry and miss their families and turn back home, the story of the two Trung sisters who freed Vietnam from imperial China for all of 3 years -- the first to do so. Every story led to the same ending; he wished so deeply that one day he could fight for Viet Nam all over again. "If I could, I'd be reborn as a pilot. And re-win all the wars we ever lost." And he wished in the same story, that his daughters would bring honor to Viet Nam one day. That we would come to love the country we hardly knew about, except for the proof of its existence in his absolute, unwavering love for Viet Nam and the stories that must all be real, because he told them.
And the birds. I didn't forget the birds. They miss him terribly. "Chim oi, chim oi!" The birds not understanding Vietnamese, but know that at those sounds, it must be a little old man who's about to throw rice. As do the homeless folks along Pease and Jefferson Street, around the downtown Metro hub. Every time his white Honda appears, he hobbles out of his truck, that gout haunting every step but not making him any less eager to hand out water bottles, freshly-cut cold watermelons, bags of chips, bananas, whatever else he got from the food centers to bring and share to immobile homeless folks, lying on the hot concrete.
If there's a hot day, he's out there.
If there's a door, he's holding it open for everyone.
He is a man of great generosity after all. It is the easiest thing to come to him: to give. And not think on it.
Or to, without question, attend every orchestra concert in my middle school career, every soccer game in elementary where I dodged the dang ball and he bawled into his hands, every late night pick up -- even prom, at midnight, even if he was really tired.
I could count on him.
I could count on him worrying about me. Or Yen. Or Mom, over anything. I could count on him to measure my fevers, even if I am a big 22 year old now, he'd still touch my forehead at 3 am, before making his early morning coffee.
I counted on him to be there, and maybe tend the garden forever. I counted on him to be well.
I only wish for him to be happy. I wished for him to have friends, even as they dwindled. I wished for him to not cling onto his greatness of the past. I wished and always will wish for him to find happiness in the present.
So when I hugged him, in the hospital bed, in the misery of his mind, the ache of his brain, the stench of cleaning agents and feet and unwashed bodies and floors that have never been mopped, I hoped that he could feel what I felt then.
In the embrace of father and daughter, in the man that she could count on for all 24 years of her life, I hoped that he found the happiness he wished for: that he could have gotten to hug his own father a second time.
So how lucky I am, how lucky he is, to have hugged each other then. I felt the heat of his balding head, nuzzle against my head.
He was a very disoriented, little bird in that hospital. And later, the nursing home.
All of his freedom, his past greatness, stripped away from him. Now chained to his bed or chained to nurse's orders. There is no "I". As if he had nothing. Nothing to look forward to, nothing to count on. His eyes were too unsteady to see words or letters, everything was shaking. Nothing to see here.
But in my arms, I could hold him still.
So then, I was exactly where I needed to be then. Just as the birds who wait for him. Or the neighbors who know him even better than his friends by now. Or my Mother, who pushes herself both working and caretaking him, a martyr. Everyone's figured out where they need to be.
I want my father to find his peace. To be at peace.
And I want to be where my family needs me.
In a hug, holding each other still, to silence the demons in our minds. And to remember how lucky we are that we haven't lost each other and never will.
For, even the birds miss him. For, even the birds love him.
And wish imperfect, silly men like him, well.
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