TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 97

[Tobie Shapiro]

December 22, 200000006


Dear You plural,

	I am still wading through the letters and 
documents from villainman's lawyer.  They are so 
insulting.  I want it to wash off my back, 
leaving me whole and healthy, happy and ready to 
do the day.  But they trip me up.  How do you 
banish thoughts from you head?  I've gotten good 
at banishing thoughts from my head on Shabbos.  I 
reserve Shabbos as a guilt free, dour free, hurt 
free day.  When offending thoughts come my way, I 
send them off, telling them that they can always 
come back when Shabbos is over, if they're 
important enough.  Why can't I apply that skill 
to this circumstance?

	In other news, it's strange watching 
everyone else rushing around buying presents and 
getting ready for the big day, when our big day 
has been over almost a week.  I feel strangely 
tranquil in the eye of the storm.  On Christmas 
day, we'll go to our local Jewish book and supply 
store.  They have an all day program with music 
and wine tasting, story telling and other events 
to keep the Jews occupied when everything is 
closed, and everyone else is busy with Christmas. 
There's always going to a movie.  We'll live I 
think.  No, I'm sure of it.

	And thank you for your comments.  Every 
once in a while I get a letter from someone in 
the tree who has read one of the life stories and 
has a reaction or a secret to tell me.  I love 
this.  I don't feel so all alone, hacking out 
these episodes of my life to an eerily quiet, 
totally darkened chasm.



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Discovering Safety

	My father's father, David Shapiro, was a 
doctor.  Came to this country speaking no 
English, penniless, a teenager.  And in less than 
a decade, he was a physician: eye, ear, nose and 
throat specialist.  Now, of course, specialties 
are more refined.  You might not take on the eye, 
ear, nose, and throat, not all of them.  You 
might rather be a left nostril specialist (unless 
the patient is left handed, in which case, you 
have to send the poor blighter to a right 
nostril specialist.)  My grandfather was a good 
doctor, but he could do nothing to save himself 
from his own heart disease.  He died at the age 
of seventy, of a heart attack.

	My father inherited the heart condition, 
angina, and started having episodes at seventy 
five or so.  But this was the new age, and in the 
new age, you get a triple by-pass which keeps you 
up and complaining for another five years, ten 
years, or more  --  kind of like Mrs. 
Winchester's mystery house, where she was told by 
a medium that she would not die while she was 
doing construction on her house, so she kept on 
building  --  staircases going to the ceiling, 
rooms where none was needed, more stairs, 
hallways, closets, more rooms.  So as long as my 
father was complaining, he wouldn't die.  He 
complained mightily about his angina, and he 
never stuck to a diet or took care of himself. 
He ate the 100% fat diet, with heavy cream, 
animal fats, butter, ice cream; whatever his whim 
decided on, was his to eat.  And it was no 
surprise that in his seventy eighth year, he was 
scheduled for triple by-pass surgery.

	My mother needed a lot of support, and I 
gave it to her.  I went with her to the hospital 
to wait during his surgery.  We set up shop 
facing away from the television in the family 
waiting room.  Both of us brought books to read, 
and we talked, too.  The expected wait was around 
about four hours.  But four hours went by and 
there was no word.  We'd call, and they'd report 
that he was still in surgery.  Other families who 
had come in after we did were being approached by 
their surgeons with happy news.  They gave great 
sighs of relief, and were given well deserved 
permission to rest and relax.  But no surgeon 
came out to relieve my mother.  We knew something 
had happened out of the ordinary, and we just 
didn't know what.  If he'd died on the table, 
certainly they would have told us.  The no news 
was distressing my mother something fierce.  The 
worry machine was cranking up in high gear. 
Still, she wouldn't let on.  She was silent about 
it.  It was the unspoken secret shared between 
us.  We both knew that not all was well, but we 
didn't dare talk about it.

	Finally, eight hours after he went in for 
surgery, the surgeon came out to talk to us. 
Evidently, when they got inside him, they 
discovered that the heart and other local organs 
were all made of spongy material, and as they 
tried to do their jobs, tubes poked through the 
wall of the heart, and when they tried to repair 
that, the stitches wouldn't hold.  They'd just 
tear through the spongy muscle, leaving more 
injury.  The heart started to fall apart in the 
surgeon's hands.  So she improvised with some 
materials meant for mending arteries and used it 
to mend the heart.  They pulled him through.  Now 
he was in recovery, but in the intensive care 
unit.  He was not conscious.  His body had taken 
on a grave trauma and he needed to recover from 
that.  The heart pumped all the liquids into his 
tissues and he was bloated.  When he'd started to 
come out of the anesthetic, he thrashed around 
violently, tearing his I.V.s out and endangering 
his life, so they tranquilized him.  He was on 
life support.  We could go in and see him now.

	My mother needed my strength to go see 
him.  I had mixed feelings.  I couldn't quite 
bring myself to rejoice that he was going to 
live, but I couldn't wish he'd die either.  If 
only for my mother's sake, I hoped for his 
complete recovery.

	We were allowed into the intensive care 
unit, and shown to his bed side.  I stood at a 
distance, but my mother went right up to him. 
There he was, bloated and misshapen, like an 
inflated doll, strapped down to the bed and 
velcroed in to keep him from harming himself and 
pulling out the tubes.  His skin was stiff from 
stretching over this vast balloon of a human 
being, his features were blown up, and his hands 
were puffy.  Out of his mouth came an accordioned 
tube taped to his face.  He was being monitored 
for oxygen level in the blood, for heart rate, 
blood pressure, lung activity.  The machines 
around him beeped and hummed and showed graphs 
and wavy lines, jagged lines, straight lines, 
repeated patterns, little dots dancing across the 
screen, leaving a trail of incandescent green. 
And there he was, an enormous, beached whale, 
tied down and immobilized, under heavy sedation, 
unconscious, being carried forward on life 
support.

	My mother leaned on the railing of the 
hospital bed, gazing at him with such devotion in 
her eyes that it made me ill.  I contemplated 
what sort of love she felt for him, after almost 
fifty years of abuse, arguing, herding  him 
through the social maze, bearing his sadistic 
schemes, watching him disassemble his own 
children, being disappointed by him in every way. 
What kind of love was it that caused her to lean 
her head on the railing of his hospital bed and 
pine, staring longingly at his swollen face?  Was 
it habit?  Dependency?  Familiarity?  Sickness? 
I couldn't imagine that it was pure love.  That 
was not a possibility in my mind.

	And there I was in the corner, on the 
floor, my journal open in front of me, writing 
about some strange feeling that had come over me 
--  something entirely unfamiliar and foreign.  I 
couldn't figure out what it was.  Then I realized 
what it was.  I felt safe.  For the first time in 
my life, I felt utterly safe.  My father was no 
threat to me in his present condition.  He was 
nailed down, gagged, hooked up to machines, 
heavily sedated, in an induced coma, swollen to 
three times his size, dependent on a pile of 
expensive machinery for his existence.  He 
couldn't move or speak or respond.  He couldn't 
harm me.  I felt safe.  And I didn't know what to 
do with it, but weep.


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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net