The Call I Thought I Could Return Tomorrow

My father called me one evening and asked if I was busy. I was. I don’t remember what I was doing. That’s the part that bothers me.

It wasn’t anything important. I wasn’t saving a life or standing on a stage or dealing with some catastrophe that couldn’t wait. I was probably answering messages, watching something on television, or doing that modern thing where you spend twenty minutes scrolling through your phone while insisting you don’t have time for anything.

“Can I call you later?” I asked.

There was a pause.

“Of course,” he said.

I told myself I’d call the next day. I didn’t. The following morning, work became busy. Then there were errands. Then dinner. Then I was tired. Another day disappeared. A few days later, my mother called. My father had been taken to hospital.

I remember standing in my kitchen holding the phone and suddenly being unable to hear anything except those four words. I went to the hospital. He was asleep when I arrived. There were tubes, machines and that peculiar hospital smell that makes every room feel like time has stopped.

I sat beside him and held his hand. It was strange. I had spent years thinking I would have more time with him. More arguments. More stupid conversations about things neither of us really cared about. More chances to ask him questions I had never thought to ask. More opportunities to tell him that I loved him without making it awkward.

Now I was sitting beside him, desperately hoping he would wake up so I could have a conversation I had previously considered too ordinary to make time for.

He never did.

My father’s last conversation with me was a question I had been too busy to answer.

“Are you busy?”

I have thought about those words countless times since. Not because he was asking for anything extraordinary. He simply wanted a few minutes. And I had them. I just didn’t know they were the last ones I would ever have. That is the cruel thing about ordinary moments. They never introduce themselves as important.

We assume important moments will look important. They usually don’t. Sometimes they sound like a ringing smartphone you decide not to answer. And perhaps that is what frightens me most about living on autopilot. It isn’t that we might waste our lives doing nothing. It is that we can waste them doing things that seem important while ignoring the things that actually matter.

We keep waiting for life to begin after the promotion, after the debt is paid, after the children grow up, after the house is finished, after we have enough money, after we feel ready. Meanwhile, the people we love are quietly getting older. So are we.

I loved my father. I still do. But love doesn’t automatically make us present. Sometimes we love people deeply and still give them whatever scraps of our attention remain after everything else has been dealt with.

We imagine we will make it up to them later. Sometimes there is no later.

That doesn’t mean you should abandon your responsibilities or turn every ordinary day into a frantic attempt to “make memories.”

It means something simpler. Pay attention. Because one of the saddest discoveries a person can make is that the life they kept postponing wasn’t waiting somewhere in the future. It was happening while they were postponing it.

I still wish I had answered that call. But I have learned something from not answering it. When life feels dead, I no longer ask, what enormous thing should I do to change my life?

I ask a smaller question.

What is alive in my life right now that I am failing to notice?

Thank you for taking the time to read. It means a lot.

Ansel

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This post was previously published on medium.com.