The Late Night Chat

Life fell apart. Bad decisions on my part and some unresolved issues brought things to a screeching crash. I took things hard, and fear enveloped me. Worse yet, it strangled off what coping skills I thought I'd developed.

From the time I was a kid to now, my dad's been there. Even when he wasn't there, he wasn't far. Was he always perfect? No! Most of the time, he was as imperfect as one might imagine.

My old man was a young, single dad at a time when he would have been a unicorn. Guys didn't step up that way. Many don't step up and take the responsibility of a kid on themselves, even today.

But there he was, doing the best he could do with the parenting training he got. He'll tell you he learned more about being a dad from other influences than his parents. People don't get to choose who their parents are in this life.

Dad took his fourth session of chemotherapy this week. He took it on Tuesday, and it knocked him for a loop. After six months of the hell he's been going through, this one made him come home from work earlier than planned. It was the first day he'd been forced to do that.

Last night, I was feeling things I hadn't talked about. I've been staying at home lately because I've messed up some things in my life and need to get things back on track. It's not been easy. Not because of my dad, but because of what I messed up. My job, my relationship, and my home life.

Exhausted, my dad needed a nap. He laid down about eight and I didn't figure I'd see him again for the rest of the night. I forget sometimes that the cancer he's been dealing with makes him pee at 90-minute intervals.

Like I said, I've been going through a lot, and it's not lost on me that the timing of things might be hard on him. I told him to get some rest and that I didn't want him to stay up because of me. He was too worried about where my head was for him to go back to sleep.

The truth was, I needed him in the worst of times to need him. He's going through a horrible ordeal with the cancer, although you'd barely know it to be around him. We can see the exhaustion creeping over him more now than when it started. But he swears that's, "Just normal."

So there we were, just sitting, and him listening to my problems. We put on some music, and at one point, my old man's head bobbed to some death metal. I never, not in a million years, expected that I'd see that happen. He's a seventies child and probably was born past his time.

God, does he know how to lighten the mood? He somehow took me from feeling dark about the world to laughing, crying, and letting things out of me that I'd been carrying around for a while. The biggest one, at one in the morning, is how scared I am of the cancer that he's got to carry around and beat.

He swore he'd let me come to his next appointment with the specialists, so I could hear it all from the doctors directly. So far, even feeling as rough as he has on a couple of occasions, he's gone and faced it without letting it burden anyone any more than necessary. But it would be good to hear from them doctors and to get to repay him for always being there, even when he was distracted.

Then, the next morning, he was gone.

It's not what you think. He called me to check in with me, to see how I was. He let me know he made it to work alright, and that he wasn't doing too bad with the chemo symptoms. For all his masculine bravado, as he faces the biggest challenge of his life, I don't think he realizes how much I appreciate the little things like that late-night chat.