I have today off. No alarm was set. I awoke to the phone ringing. I don’t get out of bed for the phone; I cannot get to it before the machine takes the call. It was my mother. As the record caught her call, she announced that Dad went back into the hospital. He has a blood clot in his lung.

I just got off the phone with Mom. Dad had been in a nursing home for physical therapy for the last two weeks. Bad choice of nursing homes it would seem. They didn’t do much except pass off everything under the phrase of “his bloodwork is fine.”

He hasn’t really gotten any therapy, since he has been coming up faint. Faint. Faint. Faint. Even being returned to his room in a wheelchair, he turns up faint. Then he passed out in his bed. Bastards.

So, he is back in the hospital. He is on Heparin in attempts to dissolve the clot. Unfortunately, he tends to bleed internally when he is on the stuff. Last two times, he began coughing up blood…

My mom and oldest sister are schedule to tour Italy and the surrounding area starting next week. They are moving forward, as I think they should. Two family friends will be visiting and monitoring Dad. Mom told me that herself and all three of us kids have medical POA for Dad, starting with Mom and going in descending order of age, which puts me last on the list.

I am just fine with that. I barely manage my own health drama.

That leaves the other queer child in charge while they are both travelling.

This has become all too real. I am a mess about this.

I have this thing. throughout my life, I have had experiences with people that insist that I couldn’t be prepared for whatever situation for which I said I was preparing. Only, as it most often turned out, I was prepared exactly as I felt I was.

In this case…? Not. At. All.

I have been preparing for my father’s death for over a decade now. He is 72, the age when his oldest brother died. Turns out I am not prepared at all for this… Who am I kidding. I am not even past the lost of my grandmothers and that was in the late 80s. It really sucks losing the last two grandparents in the same year. I hate that they are gone from my life.

It would seem that I am not ready to have only one parent. For all my talk and bravado about isolation and distance and separation from the world, moments like these lead me to wonder if I am all empty gesturing, posing from a place of comfort in a family that is whole and loving…

This sucks.