Seeing the Shadow of a Parent’s Mortality

There is an oft-repeated story in my family about the first time I saw my father on television. I was still a toddler and didn’t understand why he wasn’t waving back at me as I waved my hands frantically at him. He seemed to be looking right at me, trapped there in that small box, but he wasn’t acknowledging me.

The story is that I was inconsolable and my mother was at a loss to explain that, while I could clearly see my father, he could not see me. The story came back to me yesterday--feeling almost like a memory, it’s been told so often--as I stood in front of the television and listened to the news conference in front of St. John’s Hospital, after surgeons mended my father’s broken hip.

In the Great Divide between the public and private aspects of a very public life, there’s that strange, embattled territory--the one staked out by the media. There is an assumption that people get used to it. But I don’t know anyone who has gotten used to it. I haven’t. It’s still surreal.

This time around, it feels even more surreal, perhaps because this isn’t an extraordinary circumstance like the assassination attempt on my father in 1981. This has nothing to do with the presidency, or fame, or politics. This is the turning of life’s wheel--one of those constants that unites all of us as the fragile yet surprisingly strong human beings that we are. The one thing that connects us--presidents, celebrities, waitresses, office workers, homeless people --is our mortality. It’s the winding down of years, the inevitability we can’t get away from, no matter what we do, or how much money we have, or how famous we might be. It’s a parent getting older, changing before our eyes, slipping and falling, slipping away from us in other ways, leaving us to wonder how the years could have gone by so fast, how we could have been so reckless with time, with words, with our hearts.

It’s the heart that seems to bear all of it, creaking under the weight of memories and regrets, aching more than we ever thought it could when we were younger and believed we knew what heartache was.

Before I drove over to the hospital, I received a phone call from a friend who flew to Florida a week ago, after her father was hospitalized. Like my father, hers is 89. His ailments are different; his heart is getting tired, seems to be giving up. He is now on a respirator. There are no news conferences for him, no press vans parked outside the hospital; you can’t find details of his condition on the Internet. But those things aren’t the real story. The real story is the one that links all of us.

The real story is how the tug of mortality makes us hold hard to life--how, even though we know we’ll lose loved ones to time, or illness, the experience still feels unique, dazzling, terrifying, and utterly lonely.

Since my friend has been in Florida, we e-mail each other and occasionally talk on the phone. Our e-mails are remarkably similar--they ramble, collages of facts and emotions, attempts to reconcile ourselves to the truth: Our fathers are nearly 90, not well, and life is short even when the numbers say it’s been long. Our voices on the phone have a distant, soft-edged tone--the tone of people who have retreated inward to try and grab onto something mysterious, something that won’t unravel, something that will help with what’s happening outside.

*

When I got to the hospital and saw the news vans outside, the camera crews and newscasters standing around, some broadcasting their reports, I thought of all the times I’ve felt so enraged at the intrusion, the scrutiny. And I thought of how my father just seemed to float past life’s irritations, how puzzled he always was that I made such a big deal out of things I couldn’t change.

I found a parking place and then walked past the news crews into the hospital. None of them noticed me. How amused my father would be by that. I hid in plain sight. I don’t know anymore why I made such a big deal out of things I couldn’t change.

I am not a psychologist; I’ve made no study of people’s inner shifts when they get the phone call that will whiplash their lives. Or when disaster has already happened. Or when a doctor closes the door softly and meets their eyes with a look that says they have no hope. I’m just a writer who lives a lot of her life inside--in imagination, dreams, stories--and outside, in what I see and hear and memorize. I am a daughter whose father is in a hospital because he broke his hip. I leaned over his bed and took his hand and remembered how his hands once chopped firewood and assembled Christmas toys for his children. When, I wondered, did his fingers lose their calluses, when did they become so delicate?

This is what I think: We are all the same at these times--these times that twist our souls, make us ask the deepest questions, pull us far from shore where the movement of tides and the silence of the sky holds answers we so desperately need. All of us, when we go to the bedsides of parents who once put us to bed with younger hands and wider dreams, have parallel journeys. We grab onto the sweetest memories, the ones that rise to the surface, the ones that have been embedded in our hearts, our spirits all this time. My father taught me to get back on a horse after I fell off, or was thrown off. That says more about him than almost any other story could.

I’m writing these words as the sun is sinking in a blaze of orange and pink, gilding the edges of a few renegade clouds that stayed behind after the storms moved on. My father would love this sunset. That is, also, what I believe we all do when we are wrenched by the turns life takes. When a parent or loved one is absent from a sight they would love--a brilliant sunset, or a shiny moon dangling over the mountains--we love it even more . . . for them.

We are grasping, not only for ourselves, but for someone whose hands have loosened their grip.

*

My father is in the news because of what he accomplished in his life. But he is in my heart because he took up residence there before I could even form conscious memories. When I was still a toddler, when I waved at a television set and couldn’t understand why he didn’t see me.

It’s the same story that we all live out. The scripts, the casts, are different. But when we stare into mortality’s face, we grasp onto the moments that are flying away; we reach out for hearts that we once took for granted. We reach into our own hearts for sustenance. And we hope that there is a place where they both can meet.

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Patti Davis, a Santa Monica freelance writer, is the daughter of former President Ronald Reagan.