On Dec. 10, 2020, exactly four months from the date my family and I left Boise for our new life in Ohio, my father landed in the hospital.

I got the call from my sister as Erica and I neared the end of a pre-dusk winter walk around the block. Joelle was on speaker phone in her car and our mother was riding shotgun, nervously chattering in the background as my sister calmly caught us up to speed on the developing situation. My father was somewhere ahead of them on the highway, lying on a gurney in the back of a siren-wailing ambulance, possibly having a stroke. It all started in my parents’ driveway. They had just returned home from holiday errands and my father was on the phone with my brother. As Dad tells it, one moment he was following the conversation and chatting with Travis like normal, the next he was hearing the garbled mash of syllables leaving his mouth in place of the words his mind wanted to speak. Then, as Mom tells it, Dad went blank and half-collapsed against the truck. She managed to get him inside and prop him up on the living room couch, then she called Joelle, who lives a mere three-tenths of a mile down the street. Mom did not want to dial 911; Joelle arrived on the scene and insisted. Fortunately for all parties involved, this was a rare victory for my sister.

One of the main reasons for moving closer to our parents was making up for lost time before we started spending time in hospitals, yet here we were, only four months into it – and 15 days before Christmas – doing just that. When Erica and I got back to the house from the walk, as I stood alone in the garage attempting to gather my composure, I momentarily lost it, bursting into tears as I pounded a wall with my fist before collecting myself and heading inside to start handling my shit like a grown-ass adult. I took a quick shower, scarfed some food and drove myself to Akron General Hospital, drawing in deep breaths of air and exhaling with slow purpose as I made my way south down Route 8. Twenty-five minutes later, I pulled into the hospital parking lot next to my sister, got in the passenger side of her SUV and waited with her for updates from Mom, as the hospital was only allowing one visitor per patient at this point in the pandemic. Eventually, we got word that Dad had avoided a stroke, but he did suffer a transient ischemic attack – TIA for short – which is called a mini-stroke or precursor to a stroke depending on who you talk to and how alarmist they tend to be. Either way, it scared the shit out of us, and when I learned that, like a tremor, one TIA typically precedes another and another, it scared me even more.

They kept Dad overnight for observation and released him, without further incident, the following afternoon. Before the rest of us had left the hospital the prior evening, Mom switched spots with me in Joelle’s SUV so I could go in and see my father. After a long, anxious wait pacing in front of reception, avoiding the crowded seating area and doing my best to socially distance, I was escorted through the ER labyrinth to Dad. He was alone in a bed, upright and bright-eyed, still wearing the blue jeans he had put on that morning just like any other day. A TV blared from the wall across the bed, if only to mask the more serious sounds coming from the other side of the half-open curtain. Looking out past the curtain, I caught a glimpse of an elderly obese man being whisked through the ER on a stretcher – flanked by a stern starting five in scrubs – his eyes closed, his body motionless, his bare, swollen torso the color of a yellowed newspaper, and I got the sense I was seeing someone who had just recently taken his last meaningful breath. I wondered where his family was, how far away they lived, who would miss his final moments. Then I turned back toward my father, grateful to see him smiling at me in his street clothes.

Leaving the hospital, Mom, Joelle and I briefly caravanned back north toward Stow and Hudson, over the Y-Bridge and past St. Thomas Hospital where my sister and I were born, then into Cuyahoga Falls where we were raised. We parted ways on State Road near Portage Trail, where I stopped at Giant Eagle to pick up some groceries for the morning. When I got back in the truck, still processing the events of the evening, I turned right on Portage Trail and took the long way home along the well-worn paths of my youth, past 14th Street and Bolich Middle School, past Rocco’s Pizza and the Dairy Queen near Missy’s house, past Christmas lights twinkling from old familiar porches, past the ghost of a younger me shuffling along the crumbling sidewalks. I have a long history with this place, but Erica and Magnolia do not, and as much as my impulses compel me otherwise, I told myself long before we crossed the state line in our rented minivan that I wasn’t going to treat this move like an extended nostalgia tour. I hate the idea of putting the past on a shelf, but it’s not healthy to fetishize it either – especially with your family along for the ride – and that’s a tough balance to strike living 20 minutes away from all that you knew for the first 23 years of your life. But every now and then, especially when I’m alone, I’ll indulge myself and sidetrack through the Falls, and after several hours at the hospital wondering how much longer I’d have my father around, a ride through my past was more a need than a want. And it was fitting that the steering wheel beneath my hands led me to Hudson Drive, which extends from Front Street in downtown Cuyahoga Falls to Route 91 in Hudson, and turning left to drive back to my new home, I passed the side street of my first serious high school girlfriend, and I smiled thinking about the soft snow that fell on our heads as we kissed for the first time one late November night, and I wondered if her parents still lived there on Marguerite Avenue and if Jennifer ever made it back to town. When I got home, I put on headphones and listened to the first two Cranberries records for the first time in 25 years while I caught up on work and thought about family and aging and wintertime love and sweet sadness in the flyover zone, and for a brief moment under the glow of the Christmas lights in the living room I found myself missing my youth, a youth that feels so far removed from where I’m at now yet still so preciously close, and I let that aching teenage feeling linger just long enough before putting it back on the shelf and going to bed, where I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms tightly around the woman I’ve loved for nearly 20 winters.

Fast-forward 12 months and Dad remains stroke-free. On Dec. 11, a year to the date from his release from the hospital, we were back downtown, a few blocks from Akron General at the Civic Theatre, for Wish You Were Here, a Pink Floyd tribute act performing its annual benefit for Akron Children’s Hospital. Dad hasn’t seen many concerts in his lifetime – the short list is dotted with date nights with Mom for the likes of Neil Diamond and John Denver – and at 73 years old he was taking in his first bona fide rock show, and one featuring the music of his favorite band. It wasn’t Floyd in the flesh, of course, but a close enough approximation and a pretty damn good one at that. As we sat sipping whiskey waiting for the show to start, Dad casually mentioned that he was starting to sense his own mortality. I didn’t prod him for details, but I imagine the events of the past year – the stroke scare and overnight hospital stay, the extended summer flare-up of his rheumatoid arthritis – had something to do with it. The adult world will break your heart every day if you let it, and hearing that your father has been staring down his expiration date just might get you there, but it only made me more grateful for putting my life on pause so we could go to this show together. Even if you make time there’s never enough time (there never will be), and 10 years will indeed get behind you, then another 10 and another 10 … “shorter of breath and one day closer to death” and all that. I’ve heard those alarm clock bells that kick off The Dark Side of the Moon’s “Time” hundreds of times since I was 16, but never have they sounded as poignant, as poetic as they did ringing through the Civic Theatre with my aging father at my side.

Enjoy this week’s episode? Support independent writing and consider contributing to The Suburban Abyss tip jar, sponsoring an upcoming episode or telling a friend. Thank you for being here.