Lies, Damn lies, and The Burden of the Son

When shit hits the fan, it’s family that matters - and little else

(A photo of my father in the hospital, the last photo I’ll ever have of him)

I don’t want to write this. In fact I wish I wasn’t even having to think about any of this right now, but as the only child of my father it’s my responsibility and duty to.

As you may or may not know, on Thursday January 9th 2025, my father was involved in a very serious accident while walking near his home in Pittsburgh, PA. He was struck by a vehicle and was rushed to a nearby hospital in critical condition with severe head trauma, among other injuries. Since then I’ve been struggling to cope with the harsh reality that is my father’s likely outcome.

Today’s post is just me trying to collect my thoughts and understand why awful things happen to good people; why the cruelty and suffering is the point of life, and why the human condition leads us to persevere even in spite of a mountain of troubles, indifference, and callous disregard. It’s just my way of grieving, really, for the man who helped shape me into the man I am today.

On with it.

Over the past 10 days, I have been racked with guilt and depression, feeling like I should have been there for him, that I could have been a better son, that I should be doing more to help him as he withers away in a hospital bed some 2200 miles from where I now live. Obviously none of this helps anyone, but it’s the ex-Catholic in me that comes out in situations such as these. I’m a guilty soul, and I have nobody but myself to blame - even if someone else ought to be shouldering the weight.

Some of you may know that I’ve been stuck in a hole of my own struggles since the start of the year, namely that my house/car decided to pick that time to die and leave my partner and I stranded without shelter or warmth, just as the harshness of winter begins to set in around us. Not great, but we’ve managed worse. We spent a few months living in a tent and a few more months living in an abandoned house with no water, sewage or electricity. Thankfully we pulled through.

The car situation was obviously bad enough, having to manage a severe lack of money and a broken down car that was just barely providing adequate shelter from the elements. Then came the news that Michael, my partner, would be losing his job at Intel due to automation-driven layoffs, not the news we needed but still manageable. (He has since found work elsewhere in a different field.) We might be in a very bad position, but we still have each other, and that’s all that matters. We’ve made it through far worse with less.

Well, fate had one last kick in the teeth for me personally - as mentioned above, my father was struck by a vehicle and was clinging barely to life in a hospital, on the other coast of the North American continent, and had nobody beyond medical personnel at his side to care for him or look after his well-being. A calamity I had no chance of deflecting or minimizing - something I would have to face head-on and work through as best I could.

Initially I was told he needed emergency surgery to combat bleeding and swelling inside of his brain. He had a fractured spine. He was, for all intents and purposes, vegetative and not responsive to the medical professionals caring for him. The surgery was, by all metrics, successful - the bleeding was stymied, and he was critical-but-stable, meaning his condition was still deathly serious but he was no longer in imminent risk of death.

It was, as they say, “wait and see”. So for 10 days I called, day after day, asking for status updates. At first the news was cautiously optimistic. The swelling in his brain had reduced, the bleeding had stopped, he was comatose but had some signs of responsiveness - moving his arms and legs, things people take for granted every day but I counted as a miracle given my father’s uphill battle still ahead of him.

As the days crept into a week, the news began to stagnate. No change, no news is good news, though I was still begging for any improvement. The reality began to creep in - that if my father failed to regain consciousness soon, he may never regain it. Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) are some of the most difficult injuries to recover from, and it seems my father’s was severe enough to cause great concern for the likely outcome. Palliative care physicians called me, letting me know that my father may require a permanent feeding and breathing tube set, and that he may be comatose for the rest of his life.

I understood then that his prognosis was unlikely to improve significantly, even to a level of basic conscious function. My father is dying from injuries sustained in a pedestrian-car collision, and while I won’t ever write him off and will fight for every possible heroic and medically necessary measure he is entitled to, his chance of recovery is effectively nil.

I began to ruminate in my head, knowing that I never got a chance to say goodbye; that the last time we talked in person back in 2014 was the last time I would ever see him alive. I would never hear his voice again. I would never get to give him one last hug, or to tell him that for all his failings, I turned out okay, and he did the best he could by me.

I’d like to give some backstory to break up the melancholy of this story.

My father, Rick, was born in 1960, one of three kids to a marriage that would fall apart long after he reached adulthood. His mother, my grandmother Nancy, died when I was just reaching my teenage years; yet another victim of substandard nursing home care and indifferent children. My father and I would spend afternoons with her, my father begging her for money she didn’t have and I just trying to appreciate the little time I had with her. I loved her a lot, she was always extremely sweet and kind to me, treating me like a prince when most other people didn’t care at all. Still to this day I remember her calling me her “sweetsie pie”. I’ll go to my grave knowing of all my family, she loved me unconditionally and without hesitation. She also loved her son, no matter his flaws, and would have gladly bled for him if it meant giving him one more day on Earth.

His father, Edward, largely disowned him after he turned 18 when he decided to leave his strict home and join the US Army in an Airborne cook role, though I did know my grandfather for a few years as a child. I only recently found out that he passed away in 2023, having remarried following the divorce of Nancy and lived a full new life of his own, though after I was about 6 we had no real contact. My paternal grandfather never sent Christmas or birthday cards, never called just to say hi, never offered to visit and have lunch - he was in absentia, a man related in name and title only.

My father’s brothers, Ed Jr. and Jeffrey were never involved in my life, and kept no close ties to my father. I think I saw them once each as a child, and they did not keep in contact with our side of the family at all. Ed, from what I can research, continues to live in the Pittsburgh area, and I have no idea if he even knows if his brother is clinging to life in a nearby hospital. I have no means to contact him. His other brother, Jeff, has lived most of his adult life in Florida and I’m sure he has no desire to even know. He is someone else I am unable to contact, not that I’m sure it would help any.

My parents met sometime in the late 1980s in the west Keys of Florida, my mother having moved there after high school and the tragic loss of her own mother and nephew in a house fire in 1986. I was supposedly conceived around this time in 1989, and after they returned back to Pittsburgh I was born. I’m told I was the glue that kept them together, the only bright spot in their lives and the biggest pain in their asses to ever roam the planet.

I have fond memories of my childhood, alongside some really painful ones. Growing up my father struggled with a crack cocaine addiction, the result of his go-go 1980s life I’m sure. It put an impossible strain on not just our family but the relationship between my mother and my father. I remember nights where my mother would call every hotel looking for him, just to beg him to come home. One night would turn into days, wondering if my father was even still alive; only to have him return like nothing had happened and my parents having knock-down, drag-out fights until the cycle would repeat.

During this time my father worked between two different industries; flipping between working in various restaurant kitchens as a cook/chef, and various car garages/dealerships as a mechanic. He was always consistently working, even when the hours sucked and his hands were full of grease and gouges. His addiction didn’t define him, but it didn’t help him any either. It simply put an undue burden on our family, and was largely the undoing of the entire thing.

My family lived with my mother’s father, Carl, from my birth until his death just a few years ago. My parents never really had a house of their own, living their lives on the grace of family and sheer luck. My grandfather always knew my father was a bit of a deadbeat in that regard, too deep into addiction to admit it, too proud to change it, and too callous to admit that it was tearing his family apart. Carl spent many nights comforting my mother and begging her to get rid of him, to never let him back into our lives, to call the police and have him arrested. She was afraid of what would happen to her, to me, to all of us should she pull that trigger.

My father would eventually leave us in 2003, claiming to be going out for cigarettes and coffee, never to return. I know, it’s a bit of a cliche, but it’s what happened - and it’s still something I blame myself for to this day, even if I deserve little to none of the blame. “If only I’d been a more well-behaved child, if only I had better grades, if only I wasn’t a slob, my dad would still be here”; the simple thoughts of a child who just did not know any better.

After he left, I tried to maintain some level of contact with my father. I would see him occasionally, he would stop by the house to drop off a small amount of money or to take me out to lunch at a nearby Burger King just to catch up and prove that he wasn’t a total absentee father. I’m not sure if he was trying to prove it to himself or both of us, but it was a strained relationship to put it mildly. It was still a highlight in my life though, to know that a man who was struggling deeply with his own inner demons would try and make time for me when he could. He was, of course, still my dad, and I still loved him - even through all of the pain of losing him from our family.

I would call him at work occasionally, and once I got my driving license I would visit him at work or his residence just to check in on him. The last time I did this was thanksgiving 2014, when I drove down from Erie PA (where I was living at the time) to have dinner with my mom - I wanted to make sure I visited him as well, though it was just a brief exchange in his driveway. Little did I know this would be the last time I would see him alive.

Alright, enough backstory. You sort of get the picture of the man he was. Back to today.

This morning I got a call from the hospital informing me that my father’s condition is worsening; that he had developed severe pneumonia in his lungs to the point of being a struggle to breathe, causing him to breathe rapidly over the ventilator. His white cell count is extremely high, some brain bleeding had returned along with new swelling. He is, effectively, dying. I was told he is now a “code patient”, meaning they’re watching closely to see if his heart gives out. They also asked if I wanted to use heroic measures, or not. I told them my father would be the type who would want every possibility in fighting for survival, that his condition was seemingly transitory and he had only been out of surgery about 10 days. I want to give him more time. I know the end is fast approaching, but I just don’t want to give up on him before he has a chance, no matter how slim, to wake up.

I was told they understood this, and would call me if anything changed. “Please keep your phone on and near you for the next 24 hours”, was the last thing the doctor told me before hanging up. Ominous words that no child should ever have to hear, but many do every day.

So now I sit, ruminating again in my head, wondering if I could have done anything differently - if I could have been a better, more proactive son; if I could have done more to be there for him before all of this. Wondering if he’ll make it, or if I’ll be planning a funeral instead of just a lawsuit. Wondering if he thought of me in that split second before he hit the ground. Thinking about the terror he must have felt in that moment. Wondering.

I just feel like I’m swimming against an ever-increasing tide, a relentless wall of uncertainty and suffering, and then it hits me. This is the human condition. The pain. The malaise. Grief. The what-if’s. These moments, the lows, are what make the highs that much higher. The joys that much more joyful. The happy memories that much more happy. Sometimes it takes a tragedy for one to understand the way things are. You need a little rain to appreciate the sunshine, a little cold to appreciate the warmth.

I’m by no means an eternal optimist, I typically find myself more on the realist/pessimist side of things on a given topic. In this moment, I’m still just trying to be realistic. I know my dad has basically no chance for survival. That I can do nothing to change it. That no matter how good I was as a child, he would have faced the same situation that cold January morning. My father is going to die, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I can only hold his memory in mind, pray for a miracle, and wait by the phone.

RS

I’m adding a link to our GoFundme in the hopes one of you out there will take pity upon us and drop a few dollars in the hat, or at the very least share it among your friends and family who may be able to contribute.

My partner Michael and I are still waiting to hear back from a homeless shelter and have no other options. The van is still not in a condition that can support us living out of it, and we’re running out of time on our motel trip (we’ll be out of here this coming Friday morning), meaning we’ll be right back where we started, freezing with nowhere to go and no one to rely on but ourselves.

If you can, please consider contributing. It would mean a lot to me as I struggle to get through the worst period of my life.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/michael-and-i-need-help-fixing-our-homeonwheels