Family Matters

At a certain point in life – long past the chatting age of the teen years and beyond the nightly “checking-in” phase of a blooming romance – we begin to harbor dread when the phone rings late at night.

Unless we live many time zones away from our family, late-night phone calls in our grownup years forebode something urgent, most of the time unpleasant. Bad news.

Having parents in their late 60s is for me a constant reminder that I too could be the recipient of such a call someday. I go to bed every night bracing myself for such a call, and wake up each morning relieved when the phone shows no missed calls.

When the actual moment happened recently, I was still caught by surprise, perhaps because it wasn’t technically a late-night phone call. It was a little after 7 p.m. and I was watching the season premiere of American Idol when my sister called.

“Did you get our message earlier?” she said, her voice exhibiting the thinness of someone who’d been crying.

“What message?”

True, my phone operator had been unreliable of late. Some friends complained of never receiving my replies to their text messages, while I never received them in the first place.

“Papi’s in the hospital,” she said.

“We happened to visit the house when we found him in bed in really bad shape, barely breathing. He’d come home from work when his blood pressure shot up, but he refused to go to the hospital. We had to coax him and basically carry him out,” she said in rapid progression, almost breathless.

I turned down the TV volume, unexpectedly calm and strangely relieved. I’d never wanted to receive this type of news, but now that I did, I was glad it had happened at a civilized hour so there was no need for me to cope with the shock of waking up to bad news, and so I could immediately hop in my car and head there. And I was certainly glad it had happened while my sisters were visiting our parents’ home in a South Jakarta suburb.

It’s tough seeing a parent sick, more so if that parent is used to being the strong one in the family. My father always took pride in never having been hospitalized in his life and rarely falling ill. He never developed a taste for meat, and eats mostly fish and vegetables. He’s big into food supplements. He leads an active lifestyle, never staying put on weekends, and still goes on road trips to places in Java or Sumatra. We had no doubt he was healthier than his peers.

But we also knew of his stubbornness. When he sets his mind on something, he’s got to have it. Apparently, before he fell ill he’d been eating a lot of tempoyak, the fermented durian paste that’s a delicacy of his native South Sumatra. Though an acquired taste, it’s a tasty addition to sambal, omelet or other dishes. The downside, of course, is that durian is high in cholesterol.

His diet was one factor, but we knew very well what had also driven him to this state. Our family has been going through a rough time this past year – from wrong investment moves to business disputes with relatives that have led to some ugly family friction. My father has been very stressed, as has the rest of the family.

So for the next three days it was an exercise in persuasion trying to get him to stop planning to leave the hospital for work. He snubbed the hospital food in place of the fried rice smuggled in by my softhearted mom, and he unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with the doctor when she told him he would have to ride in an ambulance (“Do I have to? I’m not that sick.”) to take an MRI test at another hospital.

But he took it in stride when the neurologist told him she’d found blood clots in his brain and that he’d had a “mini stroke” that had depleted his strength on one side of the body. He can no longer ignore those symptoms of high blood pressure, and he should never be alone when that happens, the doctor told him.

I scanned his face; it betrayed no sadness or fear of his mortality, despite having just found out that he was no longer the man he was a few days ago. He responded to the doctor in the jocular way he always does when he deals with people.

Is this hubris or denial, or is he is just very accepting of his fate, I wondered.

Later he told us of his father and most of the men in his village who had died young.

“It’s in the family,” he said.

I told him it was that treacherous tempoyak in their diet that had killed them.

“You know, Pa,” I said, using the opportunity to exert a little authority over him while he lay in a hospital bed, “Everyone’s body deteriorates as they age.

“I know it’s hard to accept, having been a healthy person all your life, but there’s nothing wrong with it. It just calls for some lifestyle adjustments,” I said, recalling a similar story involving my father-in-law who’d fallen sick a few years back. I urged him to start watching his diet, cut out the durian, salted fish and fried food.

I’m not sure whether my words had any affect at all, but I had a feeling this experience must have had a humbling effect on him. As he lay in bed, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, I wondered what was going on in his head and also what my mother was thinking. I felt a pricking awareness of my own mortality, wondering what I would do if I were in their shoes (he left the hospital four days later and is now back at work).

After more than a decade of stamping my independence from them, avoiding involvements that could result in messy familial entanglements, I would now do anything just to see my father well again to make up for the lost time, the unspoken words and unexpressed emotions. This experience has humbled me as much as it has him, and brought me closer to my family again. And for that, I feel strangely grateful.

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