Years Of Gravity

My father falls back against me with the full weight of eighty-two years, and I remember this:

The water is icy cold. Without knowing the science of gravity, I understand the physics of sinking, knowing the water alone will not hold me up, knowing my arms and legs have to work to keep my head above the water, knowing my father will eventually let me go. 

I push back with all my strength to load him from the motorized wheelchair into the car, the weight of the memory of each year pressing into my side. I struggle to gain leverage and lift him, one arm under the back of his knees (which have not worked for decades), the other under his back, as a groom carries a bride over a threshold. His years are so heavy, so saturated with pain and regret. 

He holds me in the water. I can’t be more than five or six. The backyard pool is draped in summer sun, light pouring down and dancing, bending and shimmering on the sky-blue pool bottom. He holds me there, waiting to let go, feeling my fear, my tension. 

I am thinking about now and then, and at the same time, trying to keep my father from falling, to avoid a 911 call for the third time in two weeks, not including the times my mother never tells me about. 

I watch the way the light dances in the underwater sky. I am safe with his hands around my waist, but I know he is going to let go. I am afraid. This is my first real lesson about gravity—even in water, the earth still pulls us down.

Past and present are on a constant loop. I am straining with all my strength to hold him up, remembering how he held me safe then. Neither of us wants to accept what is happening, all the strength I can bear pushing back against the weight of his whole life. It’s too much, the memory of each lost year pressing into my flank, pinning my leg against the open car door, blood starting down my shin. I am holding on with everything.

He lets go and I am screaming, kicking and flailing and splashing, trying to stay afloat, suspended between two skies, not ready to be alone, not ready at all to be let go. I am sinking, water converging to cover my mouth, chlorine stinging my nose. I close my eyes, waiting for my father’s hands to save me.

I don’t want him to remember only now, or all the falls the past year, or the ambulance ride two weeks from now that will take him away forever, from the house he has lived in for forty-eight years where he built his life, made our lives as perfect as he knew how. I don’t want him to remember any of this, his one leg in the car, his other with foot planted on the street, no strength left to move his own legs, my straining to hold him up.

I am pulling myself through the blue water, learning so quickly the way legs and arms use water to resist gravity. I remember my head resurfacing, my father now at the shallow end, empty arms beckoning me to swim back to him all on my own. And I am kicking and paddling all alone, my mother and brother and sister on the pool deck cheering me on. 

I gather all my strength to try to hoist him up, to keep him from sliding off the passenger seat into the street. Certain things we just don’t want to know about until they’re real, to admit that a time comes when the only good parts left are all in the past, a time when we can no longer tread water, no longer put food to our own lips, no longer hobble to the bathroom on our own, no longer hold ourselves upright, no longer get into a car unassisted, no longer do any of the things that living requires without the need of someone else’s hands, without the need for someone to hold us up.

For the first time all by myself I swim from the deep end back into my father’s arms. He picks me up and lifts me high above his head in celebration. We are smiling and laughing in the water, in the sun, under a bright blue sky, in the untouchable past.