Hard Chairs

My dad is in the hospital.  After many years of wheedling and suggesting my sister and I finally convinced my folks to move into a retirement apartment where they have easy access to a lot of services that they need - meals, shuttles, medical care, etc.  Unfortunately, my dad continued to fall when they were still in their house, the by-product of a completely sedentary lifestyle and some surreptitious drinking.  He has been back and forth between skilled nursing care and a hospital bed - he's not doing all that well.  

My family has this weird habit of ignoring each other most of the time but demanding a heavy presence when someone is unwell.  My mom feels like she has to be at the hospital ALL OF THE TIME and because she isn't too swift behind the wheel of a car in the dead of a snowy winter and refuses to take a $10 cab instead, it has put a heavy burden on my sister, who's right there in town.  Frankly, I don't get it.  The few times either SuperK or I have been in the hospital the general attitude is: "Get the hell out of here.  Go home.  I feel like shit and having you sit there in a hard chair trying to cheer me up is frankly more irritating than not."

Now if I was at home - not 2500 miles away - I'd go to the hospital, muttering darkly at the injustice of it all, and sit there on the hard chair.  My sister I can't speak for - she's spending a bunch of time as a shuttle-driver and hard-chair-occupant and I salute her for it.  I assume she's being true to herself.  It's more than I would do.  Her behavior is probably more noble than mine, but I'm not all that uncomfortable with my behavior.  Somewhat uncomfortable, obviously, because I feel the need to write about it, but the positions I hold have been developed over a long period of time.

Ten days ago my sister and I decided that it would be more helpful for me to travel home after the busy holiday season than before.  There's a couple of weeks where the cost and inconvenience becomes prohibitive, especially since I just opened my wallet for a visit two months ago.  I continued to feed my sister updates on reasonable travel itineraries right up to the point when it was too late to do anything reasonable, at which juncture she and my mother decided that I should come home now rather than later.  

The cost to me would be significant.  I have taken great pains to assure people that cost is not paramount but that it is an important factor.  I'm not made of money.  So I have been trying to understand why they want me to come back now rather than in a month, using my already booked and paid for ticket.  I didn't get too clear of an answer besides some vague explanations of stress, which I think is somewhat self-imposed with all of the shuttling and hard-chair-sitting as a central feature.  I mean, he's in the hospital which is where sick people are administered to.

Here's the to thine own self be true part: I realize that my behavior may not look great on paper but I'm OK with it.  For the most part.  And there's a lot of history that goes into this.  It's like looking in on the Charlie Brown story where Lucy is trying to talk him into kicking the football which we all know she's going to pull away at the last minute so that he'll fall flat on his back.  If it was the first time she offered to hold the ball you'd think: "Yeah, go ahead and give it a whirl."  But you know it isn't.  Lucy has a track record that makes it inadvisable.

Which is kind of where I am with the whole thing.