Love as a responsibility: How I take care of my dad

Dec, 2024

After a blurry 40-some years, my dad had his last drink on Nov. 19, 2023. I believe he had a small panic attack that was perceived as a big heart attack that night, and it spooked him. But that’s his story. 

This is mine. 

Dad had achieved sobriety before, for a time in my childhood and sometime again in my adulthood, but only to be swindled. Sobriety might feel like a reprieve for the families of addicts, but it is never for the addict himself. Instead, it is to endure a merciless need of self-discipline and an omnipresent monster in the ear that’s mute to anyone else. My dad’s ears will forever be ringing. 

But his first day of not having a drink felt different to me. Perhaps a 64-year-old man could no longer exhale in the claustrophobia of his addiction, or perhaps he just got tired. Because after a blurry 40-some years, he coolly renounced a life of entrapment like the drop of a penny to the ground, not a meteorite to the earth. 

“Wow, Dad,” I said over the phone to him by Christmas. “I’m so proud of you! I think that’s really great.” I remained nonchalant. Encourage but do not create pressure, for pressure will create the meteorite, and the meteorite will leave a crater, and the depth of the crater will become the life. 

But everything was fine, he said. 

Come February, when a new type of claustrophobia ensued in the loneliness of his home and new monsters were screaming, I got a phone call on a Sunday morning.

“Don’t freak out,” Dad said to me. 

Meet me at the hospital, he said, and then he hung up. 

When you drink, the booze becomes the Band-aid, a tattered gauze bound tightly around fear, guilt, grudges, responsibility and pain. When Dad took off the Band-aid, his insecurities hemorrhaged. 

He still wasn’t drinking – it’s as if he forgot he ever did – but he was scared now and no longer equipped to face an unknown on his own. The hangovers were now anxiety attacks, but he couldn’t drink this one away, and Dad needed a new kind of help. I’m so proud of him that he sought it, and I’m so grateful he called me that day.

We admitted him to an in-patient behavioral health treatment program for three days. They were all so friendly, but Dad was terrified. He made the greatest choice of his life, a choice to actually live, and now he felt like he was dying. 

I visited Dad every day during his three-day program and then shook the doctor’s hand and the nurses’ hands and the hand of some new psychiatrist when it was time for him to go home. I was the daughter but Dad was the recovering drunk, so I had the paperwork now.

When you become a caretaker, you don’t deliberate one afternoon whether you should become a caretaker. You don’t even know what that means. You just do whatever may define the role on any given day until one day you realize you have your dad’s doctor on speed dial, his social security number memorized and can list his medications and each of their dosages by heart. 

“And who am I speaking with today?” the representative at his insurance company said after she finally picked up the line.

“Good morning, my name is Angela,” I said. “I am calling on behalf of my father.” 

“Are you his power of attorney, ma’am?” 

I am, I told her, and then she listed for me Dad’s options for a medical leave of absence when it became too difficult for him to work. 

My parents had divorced a few years prior, just in time for Dad’s drinking to defeat him. But that wasn’t my mom’s responsibility anymore, to help put it all back together, and I didn’t want it to all be his, so I made some of it mine. 

When I was a teenage cross country runner, Dad would run alongside me during the afternoon meets, shouting for me my splits before my coach even did. He was the first to the finish line and the last to leave his work each night. He ran his own business, gutted his own deer, cut his lawn with near obsession and helped to wrap our Christmas presents every year, all while being either a drunken dad or a sober one who wanted a drink. 

There were curious dents in his truck and empty beer bottles falling out the door like the sound of tin cans behind a wedding car. It was so much proof of failure. One spring his forehead was bruised from what he said was a bicycling accident. The blue and purple colors spread dreadfully from his eyes to his cheekbones to even his ears, like a lie slowly traveling down his face. 

Even still, his role as my father was constantly my reassurance, and now mine is his. 

“I’m going to bring you groceries, Dad,” I said shortly after he returned from treatment. I had a very vigilant eye on him now. I wanted to mother him.  

“I don’t need groceries,” he said. 

“Well you can’t just be drinking chocolate milk over there.” 

So I would bring him bread and sandwich meat, vegetables to heat up in the microwave and fruit to spoil on the counter. He liked the Dinty Moore beef stew and the protein shakes for breakfast.

“Is this a banana or a plantain?” My dad texted me one night, including three photos of the same fruit. “Whatever it is, it tastes like shit.” 

I would sweep his floors, fold his underwear, vacuum underneath his couch and encourage him to feed that neighborhood cat that would walk through his front yard every day. 

“We should get you a cat!” I said. Or maybe a dog? Just a fish?

“I can’t even take care of myself, Angela.”

A lot of Dad’s anxiety manifested in his lower back. So by late spring, there was physical pain on top of emotional trauma. At first I hoped the back issues would distract him from his anxiety, but this only compounded it. He was afraid to even turn on the TV in his home and now didn’t even have the physical capacity to leave it.

There was first the echocardiogram in April – maybe the fear was just stress? Nope – then peripheral nerve pathology in May – why are his legs numb? – then a spine MRI to approve a back injection by summer. Yup, that would help. 

The orthopedic doctor brought out a diagram of the spine to show us exactly where the injections would go. Ok, yes that makes sense, we both shook our heads in understanding. 

Dad was always so studious in this year of healing. He talked to anyone who could teach him something, actually called the helpline numbers I wrote down for him, showed me screen shots of self-help books he wanted me to order for him, read his Bible constantly, kept a calendar of his moods, and listened to what he called “tapes” every day, over and over: CDs with calm, narrating voices that would talk him through panic attacks and better define his anxiety as something real, like addiction, not as something he should have controlled by now. They equipped him, which thereby helped the both of us.

I drove him to many appointments, before one of which he threw up in the passenger’s seat because he would get so worked up, his fear had no place else to go. He would cry a lot, too, fed up with being somebody who was scared. Underneath the battered alcoholic was an innocent father who just wanted to fight and be better. 

I am so honored to love someone like that, someone who really, really wants to live. 

After all those appointments, his back improved, but his legs were still dragging so he went in for Cortisone shots in his knees by early fall. Another step, and it helped.

“Nice to see you again, Angela!” the receptionist would say. I sent my dad’s nurse a birthday card. 

Lastly, we went in for a brain MRI because he was becoming forgetful, confused, scared in his body. We sat in the private waiting room with his gown not tied right, and we watched HGTV at 7 in the morning. 

“What is this shit?” he said. 

By November, Dad’s one-year anniversary of his sobriety came and went. 

I wanted to celebrate somehow, but it was merely a mockery to him. He glorified Nov. 19 as this day he would suddenly “be better.”

“I will not go through this hell for another year,” he said. 

But then month 13 came along, and he was still going through it.

“I can’t … do this … anymore,” he said, as if scolding me. He was hysterical and angry in these moments, an overtired child in my arms, but he always made room to say he loved me. 

“You have saved my life, Angela, I need you to know before it’s too late,” he said, still wailing. “I am so grateful for you.” 

“I love you, too, Dad. I promise it’s going to be ok.”

When he’s having a bad day, he’ll grip his leathery hands tightly together, as if to lock himself up away from everyone, and will only look up to wipe his eyes, like a farmer in the dust. But when he’s having a good day, he’ll sit upright in the counselor’s office, resting his right ankle over his left knee, maybe even going so far as to lean back, be open. “It’s nice just to visit and BS for a while, isn’t it?” he would say. 

Dad went back to work in December. I can kind of see his eyes again.

I think he’s ready to start the year anew, sober and breathing on his own and maybe even recognizing a speck of confidence within him. 

But I’m still here, for the groceries and the doctor appointments, to count the meds and answer the phone and to tell him it’s definitely a plantain. 

Maybe it was too aggressive to call myself a caretaker, insulting even? So I’ll just say I am grateful to take care of my dad. 

He will outlive me, I tell him, the way a child usually outlives a parent, but I’m lucky to be next to him while he’s here, forever on the mend.

“Good morning, Dad! How are you feeling today?”