My pop was always the best pop he could be. When my sister and I were kids, he was the most loving, caring, concerned, helpful, and encouraging father I could ever imagine.
It’s not his fault that things changed. When my mom got sick, I was in 5th grade, and my sister in 8th. My sister understood the situation better, I’m sure. For me, my mom was ill and that scared me, especially since instead of getting better, she gradually got worse.
My sister knew it was cancer and what cancer could do. I was clueless.
It took my mom two years to die, and my pop changed over those two years into someone my sister and I had a hard time recognizing. I mean, he still loved us, we knew. But nursing my mother took a huge toll on him.
I can remember those nights toward the end, lying in my bed downstairs, listening to my mom cry out in pain. My sister knew long before I did that my mom wouldn’t survive. She accepted that would be the outcome. Me, I didn’t want to think about that possibility.
Maybe, I kept hoping against hope, she would suddenly start to get better. The screaming would stop.
I knew nothing about drugs back then. Now that I’ve been through medical school, I understand them, know that they get better, and stronger every year. If my mom were going through what she went through now, I’d know what might better help her, what would alleviate more of that pain. Maybe enough to at least stop the screaming.
Not being able to abate the pain, to prevent my mom’s suffering, that’s what changed my pop. It was a kind of guilt, I think. He believed he should have done more to help her.
Compound that guilt with the knowledge that he would lose her, and I can’t imagine the kind of pain he himself was going through. And then he did lose her, his soulmate, and he was broken.
My sister and I tiptoed around the edges of his coming apart. He’s still a strong man now, but it’s a different kind of strength. Before all this happened, he was the kind of strong that thinks it can take on anything this world throws at it. It’s brash and it’s on display, like those searchlights they use at the theater when a big movie debuts. Afterward, that strength was altered, evolved. It became the kind of strong that can endure almost anything the world throws at it.
He became a quieter man, much less communicative than he’d been when we were younger. I don’t think it had anything to do with how much he loved or cared about us. But my sister couldn’t handle the change. She moved right out her freshman year at Hawai‘i University. My dad barely said a word about it. There was no protesting her decision. He simply let her go.
So it was just the two of us. And then my sister was murdered. We both took that hard. But my dad, now he had that strength to endure coupled with an anger, a smoldering rage he’d never exhibited before.
He threw himself into work even more than he had before.
There was no doubt he was a dedicated police officer before my sister died.
Already the star of HPD, that didn’t seem to be enough afterward. It was as if he was working all the time, always thinking about cases. Solving crimes became a 24/7 obsession for him. There were periods where, if he were deep in a case, he’d go for days without sleep. I thought sometimes that he’d kill himself from overwork.
So far he hasn’t. I think I became a doctor as much to help people living with cancer as to take care of my pop should the need arise. It’s the reason I wanted to do my residency back here at Queen’s Hospital. To be home. To be with him to help him, should the need arise.
And speaking of needs. My mom has been gone for 10 years now. In all that time, I don’t believe my dad has had a single date. It’s been all business for him, and he’s had no one to care for, no one to love. I think what my dad needs most of all right now is someone to fill the place that’s been empty since my mom left him.
Lanning Lee 