On the Brink

Snippets

For the entire time I knew him, my father would always claim he was on the brink of something terrible. Mostly related to his health, he was a hypochondriac but yet I never recall him going to the doctor or actually taking his health seriously. He never exercised and never did anything to mitigate his unhealthy life choices. He was always looking for shortcuts - like liposuction - instead of making meaningful changes.

I don’t know think he was actually ever concerned for his health. If he was, he would have seen doctors, tried to make lifestyle changes, or done something. I don’t think a month went by when he didn’t tell me at least a few times that he would be dead soon. But this wasn’t what he really believed. It was all for sympathy. He would tell you some elaborate story, look for your empathy (which was ironic because he was not an empathetic person himself), and then ask you for something. 

Looking over old emails and letters from him from the past 20 years, it wasn’t surprising for me to see that the things he was telling me 6 months ago were the same things he was telling me 20 years ago. I won’t make it to next year! I’ll be dead in a few months!  Someday it would be true, but he was the classic person who cried wolf a million times with the only reason being for personal gain.

Over the last few years, things got worse. At one point in 2020, he claimed to have all of the following happen in a three week period:

  • He was in a car accident.
  • Both his kidneys were crushed and he was in end-stage kidney failure.
  • He contracted the second rarest strain of E.Coli.
  • He was the first person in the US to get COVID-19.
  • He broke his left hand.
  • He broke his right hand.
  • He broke his elbow.
  • He broke his leg.
  • He had second degree burns on his leg.
  • He stepped on glass and needed 50 stitches on his left foot.
  • He could not move his neck to the left or right more than 1/16th of an inch in either direction (oddly specific and a number that always changed).
  • He broke his left shoulder.
  • His left foot will need to be amputated.

It was impossible to know if any of the above were true. Maybe one was true. Maybe all had a little bit of truth to them and maybe he made them all up. The thing with my father, was that he was saying these things his entire life so it was impossible to believe anything he said.

He was always on the brink of his existence.