Finding Purpose

What is purpose? Well, to me purpose is living a life of meaning. I then ask myself, “Am I living a meaningful life?” I would like to think that I have. For those of you reading who don’t know me, or know my life, when I was about 10 or 11 years old, my father was diagnosed with a very rare auto immune disease. I know what most people are thinking, “Oh my God you father had AIDS.” No, my father didn’t have AIDS. My dad’s auto immune disease was something called polymyositis. It was a disease that attacked his muscles and vital organs. When we were going through tests and things at home, the doctors had no idea what it was that my father had. So the doctors in our area referred him to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The doctors at home were able to get my dad on some medications that would keep him stable until he started seeing specialists at Mayo Clinic. Luckily for me and my family, my grandparents and my aunt lived in a small town about an hour and a half away from Mayo Clinic, so we stayed with my aunt and cousin at their house. It kind of saved my parents money, but they had to drive 180 miles round trip every day for five weeks. Let me tell you, it was a very long five weeks. I can’t really remember, but I want to say that my mom and dad didn’t have to make those trips on Saturdays and Sundays. So all they both wanted to do was rest for those two days. Now, my sister and I were both very young. Like I said, I was about 10 or 11 and my sister was about 6 or 7 at the time. It was during the summer so my cousin Danny, who was only 2 years older than me, was home every day. My grandparents had to “babysit” us all, but for the most part we either lounged around my aunts house, or we went to a nearby park to play on the playground equipment.

There was one time my mom and dad let my cousin Danny and I go with them to Mayo Clinic because we both really wanted to go. Honestly, my cousin really wanted to go because he knew there was a Barnes and Noble really close to the Clinic. Luckily for him, my parents had a fairly long break between my dad’s afternoon appointments. So my parents took us to Barnes and Noble. Now the funny thing about that day, Danny and I stayed up all night the night before because Danny was convinced that there was no way in hell my parents were actually going to wake us up really early in the morning to go with them. So Danny and I stayed up all night, we made midnight snacks, played video games and even attempted to sleep in shifts. That only worked for about the first two hours of the night. I want to say that I slept for the first hour and Danny was so paranoid that I would fall asleep for his shift to sleep, that he decided to stay awake. So my next shift to sleep, he didn’t want me to sleep because he was afraid that he would end up falling asleep. So no sleep for us at all. Well, my dad had to sleep in a reclining chair because he didn’t have a sleep apnea machine yet and he struggled to sleep lying down flat in a bed. We called my dad the “Living Room Warden.” So Danny and I were awake all night right? It was about the time that my parents were getting up in the morning and Danny and I were in his room sitting in the dark listening to my parents talk. Well I couldn’t quite make out what my parents were saying, but Danny could hear every word they were saying. Well Danny heard my dad say, “Those little pricks were up all night, don’t wake them up, they can stay home.” Once Danny heard my dad say that, he walked out and said to my dad, “Well are you ready to go you little prick?” My dad just laughed at Danny, but I think my dad mostly laughed because I don’t think he thought that we would be awake and ready to go. That was a very long day with no sleep. Danny and I slept all the way there and then slept all the way home.

So it was a very long five weeks with my parents having to go to Mayo Clinic every day. At nearly 11 years old, I could tell it was really taking a toll on my parents. My dad was getting poked and prodded every day, he even had to get a couple muscle biopsies done, so my dad was in pain when him and my mom got home some days. My mom had to keep calling work once a week and tell them that she had to use more vacation time or sick time. Well, when we got closer to finding out what was wrong with my dad, my mom ran out of all of her vacation and sick time, so she had to file for the Family Leave Act. That meant that my mom could miss work without pay and she didn’t have to worry about losing her job. I remember watching my mom crying after she found out she had to do that. I wasn’t quite old enough to understand, but that meant, there was no money flow. We were getting some money from my dad being on unemployment and his pension, but we didn’t know how long my mom would be out of work for. But I think the week after my mom had to file for the Family Leave Act, my mom and dad got a call from this doctor that told his scheduler, “Clear my schedule, I want to see this man, first thing in the morning.” Well, this doctor was a doctor that wrote a book on the disease that my dad had. So when my mom and dad got home that day, my mom walks in and says, “Alright kids, pack your things, we’re going home in the morning.” She came in saying this with tears in her eyes. I thought that it was because my parents had just given up and the doctors just couldn’t figure out what was wrong with my dad. Come to find out, they were in fact happy tears. My mom was able to get it out and tell my sister and I that the doctors were able to give my dad a diagnosis and put him on the correct medication regiment. They did say that my dad was never going to get better and that he would never be able to go back to work and he would have to be on oxygen for the rest of his life. This meant, a long life of needing to need help being taken care of. So at nearly 11 years old, I basically became a caretaker.

At 11 years old I became a caretaker for my father. My dad didn’t need around the clock care, but he needed help doing day-to-day things. The first couple of years after my dad go his diagnosis was rough. My dad fell in to a deep depression where all he wanted to do was hole up in his room and didn’t really want to be bothered. My dad isolated himself for what felt like years, but it was only a few months. My dad needed his own room because he needed a hospital bed so he and my mom didn’t sleep in the same bed, let alone the same room together. My dad had an oxygen concentrator machine in his room and it was very loud. My dad just isolated in his room, a lot of the time in the dark, and just stared at the wall or ceiling, or he was sleeping. One day, my mom finally walked back to his room and said to him, “This is not a life to live, isolating back here. You’re not going to die from this disease. Me and the kids will be out in the living room with the living, so when you want to start living, that’s where we will be.” It was something along those lines. I want to say about 30 minutes later, we heard my dad walking down the hallway and he came out to the living room and started watching a movie with us. So my role as a caretaker to my dad, I had to do a lot of lifting and getting things for him. My dad went from being a concrete worker, to barely being able to lift a gallon of milk because of his disease. My dad had to be on oxygen 24/7 so that meant when we went out as a family, my dad had to use oxygen tanks. At first he was using small oxygen tanks that fit in a bag that he could throw over his should and carry. After awhile, that was too much to deal with, having all those tiny bottles with us in the car when we went out, because he would run through them so quickly. He eventually had to get larger tanks. So he got these tanks that he could pull behind him in a little cart. I usually had to load and unload all the tanks when he got new shipments sent to the house.

With my dad not being able to lift things or do little home maintenance, that meant that I had to do it. I remember having to replace some plumbing, having to do electrical and even doing a concrete project. I had to do some things at a young age that most grown men never had to do. I hated it when my dad would tell me we had a new project to do or if he told me there was something in the house we needed to fix. I hated having to fix things in the house. It always ended up with my dad and I arguing and having a big blow up. My mom would have to remind my dad that I was a young kid and that it wasn’t normal for a kid my age having to do the things that he would ask me to do. I remember when I was about 13 years old, we had to replace a section of plumbing for the bathtub. The existing plumbing was all copper and we had to use PVC because it was easier to use that to replace the copper we had to cut out. Now if we could have afforded to hire a plumber, the plumber would have been able to use copper to replace the portion we had to replace. So I had to use a saws all power tool which I had never used before. I didn’t really have the strength to hold it to make a level cut on the copper pipe, dad ended up getting frustrated and yelling at me. I told him I was doing my best. Mind you, I was having to do all of this in a small cut out in our wall that lead down to the basement. I was standing on the stairs trying to keep my balance and cut some rusted copper piping so I could replace it with PVC. So I eventually get the section of copper piping cut out and my dad said that we needed to go to the hardware store to find the right size of PVC. It’s actually kind of funny, any time that my dad said we had to go to the hardware store, it was never just one time that day, we ended up having to go several times that same day because we would always either forget something or something else would go wrong with the repair. So we get the right piping to replace the old, but we forgot to get the cleaner and glue we needed to secure the PVC to the copper piping that was still there. I was struggling to get the new pipe on because it was in a tight space and the PVC nor the copper piping were very easy to bend in order for me to get the new pipe fittings on. I ended up breaking the PVC piping so we had to go back to the hardware store. I eventually yelled at my dad and told him we needed to hire a plumber because they would have had it done in no time. My dad had threatened to throw me out of the house. I walked away, my mom had to remind my dad that I was a young kid and he couldn’t physically do it. My dad apologized and we got the job done. Took us nearly 8 hours, but we got it done.

I spent nearly 15 years of my life being a caretaker for my father. Like I said, he didn’t need around the clock care, but he did need help with a lot of things. I was about 24 when we found out that my dad got cancer. He had stage four non-Hodgkins lymphoma, it was a very treatable kind of cancer, but with his auto immune disease, my dad couldn’t handle the chemo treatments. My family had a tough decision to make, either he doesn’t do treatments and he dies, or he does do treatments and has a chance of living, knowing that the treatments could kill him too. So we made the decision that he would start chemo therapy. Halfway through his chemo treatments, the doctors saw the cancer was gone, but they needed to finish chemo therapy so that they made sure that it was gone. My sister and I were both away at college when my dad started chemo therapy. We came home for Thanksgiving and my dad had just gotten home from spending 11 days in the hospital due to some complications. My dad was looking rough but he was feeling hopeful. Two days after my sister and I returned to school after Thanksgiving, we got the call that my father had passed away. It was December 2, 2014, I was completely lost. Not only did I lose my dad, but I felt like I had lost my sense of purpose. I had spent so much of my life being there for my dad, being a caretaker for him, I didn’t know what else to do. I know what you all are thinking, “Why did you go away for college?” Well my parents said that they would be fine without me and my sister being at home. They said that it would be a little rough but they would manage. I initially didn’t want to go away to college, I wanted to go to a university nearby so I could commute back and forth every day. But I had to follow my dreams and get a college education and my parents told me they would be fine. But most of my life I had been a caretaker, I thought that was my purpose. At least that was my purpose for awhile. For the last almost 7 years, I have been struggling to figure out what my true purpose is.

If you’re reading this and you feel like you don’t know what your purpose in life is, you’re not alone. I’m almost 31 years old and I’m still searching for what my purpose is. I’m not married, I don’t have kids and I’m not working my dream job. I think your purpose, changes as you change in life, as you grow. So I guess I found my purpose for the time being. I’m not exactly fully happy with my life, but I’m getting there. I just need to take a chance and see what my forever purpose is. Right now, I’m happy with my life right now. I have a job, I have my own apartment and I’ve been seeing someone that I really like. She’s pretty great. I just hope that if anyone is reading this and you’re feeling lost and alone or don’t know what to do with your life. Just keep going. Believe me, I’ve wanted to give up and just coast in life, but I got to keep chasing that dream. Keep chasing your dreams.