Blah Blah Blah

At 87, my father has little patience with the details of life (not that patience was ever his strong suit).

He doesn’t have the time for trivia. Instead, his conversations over the past months have focused on things like whether or not it hurts to be cremated, the fact that he made somebody laugh, or some new pain in his body.

With age has come a natural falloff in the details of human engagement. Most notably, he now has no patience with words that don’t mean anything. As a result, he ends many sentences with   “… blah blah blah.” This is his way of telling me that the details don’t matter, that we both already know how this story’s going to end, so why even bother putting the rest of this thought into words? Blah blah blah. His conversations sound something like this:

“So I went to the oncologist … blah blah blah.”

“In the hospital, the doctors all dress like lawyers and, well … blah blah blah.”

” They told me to cut down on sugar … blah blah blah.”

At first, I was frustrated and confused with his verbal shorthand. Blah blah blah?  How am I supposed to figure out what you mean when half of your conversation is blah blah blah? Meaning is essential because I organize and manage many details of my dad’s life and blah blah blah doesn’t give me much to work with.

My requests for anything akin to complete sentences had zero impact.  Even as I begged my dad to tell me more, to please finish the sentence,  I suspect that all he heard as I spoke was   “… blah blah blah.” As dad’s memory becomes dimmer, more of the details go into the blah blah blah hopper.

Years into this new language, I now have come to understand. Most of the stories in my dad’s life, and perhaps in all of our lives,  have pretty predictable endings. Families are not, for most of us, hotbeds of happening activity. They’re about groceries and the weather and doctors and daily foibles. Daily life is usually much more Blah Blah Blah than Rah Rah Rah. And if we’re lucky enough to live with our family members for some time, then we know the stories. We know the endings. The treasures of conversation with those we love are not found in the spoken word  but in the unspoken words.

My dad looks at me. He presses my hand. He finds his thought then loses his thought and, with it, he loses the last half of the sentence that was just on the tip of his tongue. He presses my hand harder.

Blah Blah Blah.