Samantha Mathis - The Time I Kidnapped My Father

 

 

When my father announced that he was going to move to Guatemala, that he was going to buy a brand-new SUV and drive from Tucson, Arizona to Guatemala City down the Pan American highway with no real game plan, just to see what he could get up to, I knew this would not end well. What version of bad, I didn't know, but never in my wildest did I think that it would end up with me, sort of, kind of kidnapping my father. 

 

My dad and I had a complicated relationship. My parents split up when I was two. I loved my father. I greatly admired his accomplishments. He was my favorite person to talk to about politics, but I never really felt that unconditional love. He was difficult. He loved to provoke you, and he loved his scotch and cigarettes. 

 

So, now, he was 70 and he was in need of his fourth act. So, off he went to Guatemala, “The land of eternal spring,” he loved to say. He made a life there. He found an apartment conveniently located above what became his watering hole, Shakespeare's bar. He had his own stool. It was like his cheers. They called him Señor Don-Don. [audience laughter] And you know, it worked for a while. We tried to support him in making this decision to live in Guatemala. That's where he wanted to be the rest of his life. He never wanted to come back to the United States. Never mind that meant he would miss out on big milestone moments in his kids’ lives, weddings, graduation, my Broadway debut. But there was always some reason he couldn't come back, and so we went to him. 

 

And for 14 years, I tried to go down once a year. It was stressful having him 2,000 miles away, aging. Things started to go wrong. He was aging, and it became like whack a mole. He would get sick, and one of us would have to run down there to be with him while he was in the hospital. We loved him and we'd do anything for him, even if it was a giant pain in the ass. 

 

And then, when he was 83, he got really sick for the third time he went into the hospital. My brother called to find out what was going on. And my dad said he was fine. He was just waiting for them to come get him on the border of Oklahoma and Kansas. Yeah, he didn't know where he was. When he got home from the hospital, he was left alone for 10 minutes and promptly keeled over and fell on his head. So, he was no longer safe there. We couldn't let him stay there anymore. Even his caretakers, Merrily and Mario, didn't feel like they could handle, so we had to bring him home. So, the question was, how? 

 

Well, he couldn't fly commercial anymore. He didn't know who he was now, half the time. He was dealing with incontinence issues. Hell, he couldn't go 15 minutes without a cigarette. So, it was decided we'd get a medevac plane. That's a plane for medical emergencies. The question became, who would escort him back. And I volunteered for duty. 

 

I went down on a Friday, and I had less than 24 hours to figure out how to get him on this plane, but how, how to get him on the plane? He said he never wanted to come back to the United States. I had to get him on this plane. He was in danger there at this point. We needed him to come back and find out what was going on with his health. We paid a lot of money for this plane, and it was non-refundable, so failure was not an option. 

 

I called my brother on the way to the airport and I said, “How am I going to get dad on this plane? What if he says no?” And he said, “Well, you're an actress. You'll think of something.” [audience laughter] I said, “Yeah, I'm not really an improv girl. I'm used to having a script and I can't exactly say to him, ‘Hey, daddy, we think you're losing your marbles, so you need to come with me right now and get on this plane.’” And he said, “Well, tell him someone gave you a private plane.” I don't really have friends with private planes, but I thought, okay, I can work with this. Come on, Mathis. Figure it out. 

 

When I got there, I didn't really know who would be waiting for me. I walked into his bedroom and I said, “Hey, dad, it's Samantha.” And he said, “Hey, babe.” He was so tiny. He was so fragile. This man, who had loomed so large in my life for better or worse. I launched into my story. “Hey, daddy, so guess what? I came down, because the TV show I'm on, they found out that you haven't met your grandchildren.” This was actually true. He hadn't met my brother's children. “And so, get this. They have given me a private plane to take you and me back to Pittsburgh tomorrow to meet your grandchildren. Pretty fancy, huh?” 

 

I paused, and he didn't call bullshit. So, I kept going. “So, tomorrow, you and I are getting on this private plane. And they're even sending a private car with a bed in it,” ambulance, [audience laughter] “so that you can be comfortably driven to the airport when we meet that plane, which will meet us tomorrow at noon.” It was like one of those moments in a Western, my dad loved Westerns, when the two guys, the cowboys have their hands on their guns, and they're both staring each other down waiting to see who will blink first. And I said, “Fancy, huh?” And he said, “Yeah, that sounds neat. I have to go to the bathroom.” 

 

And I thought, okay, well, he seems to be buying it. And if he's not, he’s not fighting it. So that night, I didn't get any sleep. And in the morning, I was nervous, but had the calm of someone going into combat. His caretakers, Merrily and Mario, were a wreck. I kept grabbing them in the hallway going, “You've got this. You've got this.” And dad, he was cranky and slow, but still on board. So, we got him dressed, and into his wheelchair and downstairs to the lobby of the apartment building, and then the ambulance got lost. 

 

We waited for 5 minutes and 10 minutes and then 20 minutes, and I started texting the company like, “Where are you?” And they're like, “We're lost.” I'm like, “I know.” My dad, he was sitting there and he was being patient, but I started to get so anxious that he was going to flip out, that he was going to say, “You know what? I don't want to do this. I don't want to go. In fact, I don't believe you. I think you're lying to me. This woman is taking me against my will.” 

 

So, he asked for a cigarette, and I gave it to him. And then, I remembered I had in my bag a jelly jar of whiskey from my father, because I didn't know if he could go eight hours without a drink. So, I gave my dad a cocktail. Sweet Jesus. It had been 40 minutes, and I'm racking my brain how to keep him calm. And then, I think music. My dad loves Frank Sinatra. So, I pulled out my cell phone, and I hit speaker, and out came Come on and fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away. I was like, “Daddy, this is going to be so cool. We're going to get on that plane, and it's going to be a cool private plane, and then we're just going to get to Pittsburgh, and you're going to meet your grandchildren.” I was just tap dancing like mad to keep him from realizing this was an elaborate ruse. 

 

Finally, the ambulance came, and we said goodbye to his caretaker, Merrily, which was terrible. She loved my father. We were both weeping, but trying to keep it together in front of my father. I don't know, if he didn't know, he wasn't a dumb guy. So, we got to the airplane. It was small. It had a gurney in it. They strapped my father in and hooked him up to a heart monitor. And then, my dad asked for a cigarette. And I was like, “Yeah. No, dad. No, we're on an airplane. You can't have a cigarette.” 

 

And the nurse said, “No, sir, there's an oxygen tank here that wouldn't be safe.” And he said, “I understand that, but I want a cigarette. I want a cigarette. I want a cigarette.” I looked up to the front of the cabin, and there was a minibar in the medevac. And so, I asked him, “Could you hand me a straw, please? Could I borrow your scissors?” I took the straw and I cut it in half, and I took a long drag on it and I said, “Here you go, daddy. Here's a cigarette.” And he said, “Thanks.” And it worked. [audience laughter] 

 

It did for a couple of minutes, but then he said, “Nah, it's gone out.” And the nurse, I could have kissed him, he pulled out a small flashlight and he lit the end of the cigarette. [audience laughter] My dad said, “Thanks.” Again, it worked for, like, I don't know, two or three minutes. There was peace, and the plane took off and then he said, “No, it's gone out. It's not working. It's not working. It's not working.” I looked up at that minibar and I said, “Excuse me, could I have a cup with a glass of ice?” And they said, “Sure.” And I said, “Thanks.” And I reached into my bag and I pulled out that jelly jar, still half full of whiskey and I made myself a really stiff drink. [audience laughter] 

 

When we landed in Pittsburgh two flights and eight hours later, I walked off the plane straight into my brother's arms, and I just wept. I believe we'd gotten him there. And over six days, my dad would go through a litany of tests, and they would discover what we had feared that he had dementia. We found a nursing home for him with a memory care unit. He wasn't quite there yet. And I'll never forget, they told us to put his name in all of his belongings. So, we got Sharpie, indelible ink pens, and my brother and I sat there putting my dad's initials into his T-shirts and his underwear. And it was awful. I felt so guilty putting him in this place, but what choice did I have? None of us were capable of giving him the care he needed. 

 

I was now a shell of a human being. I hadn't been home in a month. My dog wasn't doing well, nor was my relationship. And I said, “Daddy, I need to go home. I'll be back in a week or so.” I told him I loved him very much and I would see him soon. Four days later, I was sleeping, and I woke up wide awake at 04:00 in the morning. I didn't know why. I got back to sleep. And at 06:00, my sister called and she said that daddy had died at 04:00 AM. 

 

I thought of there was a woman that had been across the hall from my dad in that nursing home, and she wailed the better part of every single day. I'd seen her grown son coming out of the room one day, and I pulled him aside to ask him what the quality of care was like there, which was, they were understaffed and overworked. I asked him how long she had been there, and he said 15 years. I was so sad that my dad had died. We'd only had him back in the States for five weeks. He did get to meet his grandchildren, but I was also relieved that we wouldn't have to go through 15 years of a long, slow descent into my father losing his mind. 

 

Three months later, we had our father cremated. And three months later, we went to Guatemala. We brought him back. We had a party at Shakespeare's Bar. They pulled his stool out, and everybody came and had a cocktail in his honor. And then, my brother and my sister and I went up into the mountains to this beautiful lake that my father loved so much. We got on a boat, and we spread his ashes and we said goodbye. [sobs]