I have these strange moments, particularly as things have settled after the holiday chaos, that I have something very important I am totally forgetting to do. It slips in around the time I fall asleep, around the time I wake up. Or randomly in the middle of another unrelated thought or conversation. I have a strong suspicion it has to do with the missing phone calls with my dad since November.
Those phone calls, with my mother, then with just him, were a bi-weekly touchstone since I first moved to the city and started working nights. The Wednesday night convos at 11pm. were shorter. The Sunday night ones around 6pm. longer. With my mother, there was the usual dose of family activity and gossip. Then sometimes my rants about work or other things. Then chit chat about movies or food. These continued, although perhaps with less range with my Dad, during the months she was hospitalized and then after she was gone. They were also tinged with anxiety once he was living alone as an older person--who I worried would fall or suffer some strange calamity, which more than once led to panics when I couldn't get answer. (somewhere, if there is an afterlife, my mother is surely laughing at all the years she worried when me or my sister missed a call.) The tables did turn.
Three nights before my dad was hospitalized, I had the last normal conversation with him. Or at least it seemed normal across the distance, though my sister says in those days physically he was worse and having a harder time than usual getting around (though he did put me on hold while he walked out the kitchen where they were working on a ramp solution granting access to the deck). The next night, the phone rang slightly before bed and he had a question about his laptop, which I think I successfully managed a work around to his problem, but my phone range a few hours later in the middle of the night, my sister letting me know he'd fallen and had to be helped up by paramedics but was ok. By Wednesday, the next night I was supposed to call, he was in the hospital with a pretty scary infection. Things got worse from there.
The weeks since are this strange span of time without those markers I've had for more than two decades. It's compounded a little by working on my own--having only limited contact in person with anyone but J--mostly text messages with friends and my sister, or maybe messenger convos, but I am not especially a phone person. And yet, those were sort of the recap and unload of my weeks, so missing them seems like a phantom limb that gone but still, nevertheless, aches. Like I haven't checked in with anyone. Like I'm just out here doing things, living a life, but there's no tether to something else, to a past, anymore.
It's not even as if I have anything important to talk about, just random things, like I was thinking about making chili. Or I watched a new season of something on Netflix. Or I bought some new silverware or a new tablet. Covid stats. That I started working a new writing job, or that I was applying for something that was really exciting. That I went out for New Years and the drivers and accidents were terrible afterward. This strangely mild weather for January and ordinary cat antics. I'll make note of things in my head, and for a second, remember there is no longer that check-in.
It's actually less traumatic than the wake of losing my mom, which mostly involved a lot of dreams, months of them, where both she and I came to the starling and devastating realization that she was dead. I'm pretty sure this had to do with not being there when it happened and never having seen the body before cremation (I would still make that choice, though.) I was there when my dad passed, which at least, seems to have kept him out pf my dreams, at least thinking himself alive.
