When Life Hands You Other Plans

     If you want to hear the most heartbreaking sound in the world, listen to your father cry. Fathers aren't supposed to cry, at least not when you're an adolescent and they're the rock that keeps the family in a solid place. When your mom is chronically ill, and in and out of the hospital, all you have is your dad. To hear him sobbing behind his locked bedroom door is, to say the least, bewildering.
     My mother isn't even forty and the doctors say her kidneys will fail within years and she'll eventually need a transplant if she wants to live. Three days a week she depends on dialysis and her hope is that a suitable donor will be found. Still, she refuses to even consider her doctor's insistence that one of her three children be tested to see if they can donate. My father's healthy kidneys are not a suitable match.

     Fourth of July, 1974, my mom is in the hospital yet again. I don't even know why this time. It's become so common place to not have her in the house, I don't even ask. I'm afraid to ask. My grandmother is over, giving my dad a hand. We've finished dinner and all I want is for the sun to go down so I can go outside and light firecrackers and sparklers with my friends. I want to have fun. I want life to be normal, but normal in our family ended several years ago.
     I go upstairs to ask dad if it's okay to venture across the street but mere inches from his door, I hear him on the other side, even though his sobs are low and muffled. His face must be buried in a pillow, maybe two. I press my ear to the door, yet I cannot knock, scared to disturb him. He would be so embarrassed, deny that he is crying.
     Is he envisioning my mother's possible early death like I have so many times in my worst nightmares, seeing himself as the young widower with three children to raise on his own?
     I can't think about it anymore, have already spent too many hours worrying about my life as a girl without a mother. I run down the stairs, pretend that all is well.
     My grandmother is in the family room watching television. Bob Barker is helping contestants with Truth or Consequences.
     "Where are you going?" she asks.
     "Across the street."
     "Did you tell your father?"
     "Yeah, he said it was fine," I lie.
     "Don't stay out too late," she says.

     As I run to join the other neighborhood kids, I notice dad's bedroom light has been turned off. Perhaps he's waiting for my mother to join him in his dreams.


(In loving memory of Alex G. Keurejian on this day, 9/22, his birthday. You should have been eighty-one years old, dad...but life had other plans)