“I’ll Be Right Back”

Dearest Rachel –

I promise you, this letter has nothing to do with that Black Mirror episode I keep referencing (and would still kind of like to live out, just to see for myself as to whether it’s as truly awful as the show makes it out to be). No, this is more along the lines of apparent promises made and not kept – at least, from a certain point of view, as an old Jedi master might say.

You see, Dad’s recovery is going slowly these days; it’s not so much the pneumonia (although it’s still there, keeping him from being able to breathe with any significant depth) as much as it is his strength and endurance, or more to the point, his lack thereof. He’s not one to use such Southernisms generally, but he claims that the best phrase to describe his condition is “plumb tuckered out.” In such a state, it’s hard for him to perform the sort of exercises needed for the rehab center to agree to release him to live on his own at home.

Shortly after I arrived to see him yesterday afternoon, the attending nurse helped him into his wheelchair, in preparation for him to head to his physical therapy session. However, once he was in the chair, she left with a cheery “I’ll be right back,” and disappeared for the better part of an hour.

For a man ruled by the clock like my dad – and who in turn instilled in me an ethos of “if you’re not fifteen minutes early, you’re late” – the phrase ‘right back’ means something, even if it’s in practice an indeterminate amount of time, like a ‘moment’ or a ‘jiffy’ (although I’ve recently learned that a jiffy actually is a specific length of time, and much shorter than you’d expect – between 1/60 and 1/100 of a second. It has to do with how fast light travels over a certain distance, so… yeah). So when someone says they’ll ‘be right back,’ in his mind, it shouldn’t take long before they return. Compound that with the fact that, while he’s not in excruciating pain or anything, he gets exhausted just sitting up, and that wait time feels that much longer; much like how Einstein explained relativity by pointing out that a minute spent sitting on a hot stove feels like an hour (he also stated at the same time that an hour spent talking with a pretty girl would seem like a minute, but that’s rather beside the point for now).

So even as he’s waiting to be taken to physical therapy, he’s getting more and more tired, to the point of dreading the therapy itself, since he’ll be completely tired out even before the nurse returns to take him there. That assurance that she would be ‘right back’ feels like a betrayal to him, or at least a straight-up lie.

The thing is, Mom left the room at some point during this interminable wait cycle – I forget why, but it doesn’t really matter – and encountered the nurse in charge of therapy along the way. Upon mentioning to her that he had been waiting, sitting up in the chair for nearly an hour, she was astonished by the nurse’s response; a gleeful smile, and a clapping gesture. His sitting up had been part of his physical therapy all along.

You see, while it may be possible that the staff gets distracted going from patient to patient (and they can hardly be blamed for that – the staff-to-patient ratio is enough to keep them busier than they seem to be able to manage from time to time), it’s also a deliberate choice on their part. As part of the recovery process, Dad needs to be able to just sit up for extended periods of time. He can’t be allowed to just lie down for the rest of what life remains. If nothing else – and we know this from prior experience – he would collect bedsores like Pokémon cards, thereby speeding his decline, which is completely against their purpose of allowing him to recover.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, it would be preferable to have that explained to him from the outset: “We’re going to take you to the gym for some physical therapy, but for now, let’s get you into your chair and have you sitting up for an hour or so in the meantime.” It would keep him from growing ever more irritated, wondering what was keeping them from collecting him and taking him to do his exercises if he knew he was effectively ‘exercising’ right then and there, even in such a sedentary state.

On the other hand, it’s possible that, if they spelled out the length of time they would be leaving him in the chair, he’d spend that time watching the clock, waiting for that hour (or however long they’d specified) to be over. Granted, he has his iPad, which he could use to play solitaire or scroll through his own newsfeed, but for some reason, he hasn’t wanted to use it as much as he does at home. I’m not sure why, but I would think it would pass the time that much faster for him.

As I pondered all this, it occurred to me that this is similar to how we humans must react to God. Whether we’re waiting for an answer to prayer, the chance to return Home (like Dad, and to a lesser extent, myself, since I’d like to be reunited with you), or the general hope of His return, we get impatient. That last one in particular, since we’ve been told by Him that it was imminent for the last two millennia. And we get tired of waiting sometimes, and wind up reacting like the Israelites at Mount Sinai or King Saul taking over Samuel’s duties before a crucial battle – which, of course, you’d think God would anticipate and have something in place to mitigate such possibility.

But it would seem that whatever we have to do while we’re waiting for Him is actually part of the strengthening process. It feels like detention to just sit around and do nothing, when it’s an exercise in and of itself, and we tend to forget that. And while Dad might benefit from having it pointed out in this specific case, it’s something for all of us to bear in mind in general, including (well, especially) myself.

To that end, I’d ask you once again to continue to keep your eye on me, honey, and wish me well, as I’m still going to need it going forward.