THEMINDKILLER

My parents called me after eight o’clock last night. I was playing Stardew Valley in bed, but Sean saw who was calling and answered my phone. There are only two reasons why they call at that hour, either somebody died or they’re being evacuated due to fire or floods. They called a few nights ago to report on the former (my grandmother passed away peacefully in her sleep), and the fires are ripping through their neighbourhood once again so I assumed it was the latter. But it was something different and sort of unsettling.

First off, I should say that my parents are definitely dealing with some cognitive decline. They don’t get out much, and although we talk every week that doesn’t replace the stimulation we get from friends and the outdoors. It may be more than lack of mental stimulation and I have been taking steps in case it is and that’s all I want to say about that right now. Another thing about my folks is that they are anxious. Clinically so. Dad admits it freely, but Mom is in denial even as she describes her panic attacks in perfect detail. “Adrenaline rushes,” she calls them, as if it’s simply a loose pipe, gushing neurotransmitters. For both of them, age has made their anxiety more pronounced.

So with that context, I took the phone from Sean with an adrenaline rush of my own and put on the cheery voice. Dad had made the call but Mom was on the line now.

“Hi Sweetie (sweetie only gets used when something’s terribly wrong), we just wanted to get in touch, because obviously something is happening, and we wanted to let you know we’re here, and to make sure you’re there.”

Okay. Now I can mention that I am my parents’ child, and I too have a cocktail of (diagnosed) disorders. I also have a fabulous imagination. All that aside, the world is burning, so assuming the end of times has arrived isn’t a completely irrational stretch. I briefly went there. It felt like the time I was in a canoe that capsized in the Peel River right before going over a waterfall. My friend and I sputtered and clung to the overturned canoe and looked at each other and I thought “this could be it,” and my body simultaneously contracted and relaxed. And I felt guilty for some reason. Like dying was a moral failing. It was spooky, but obviously I lived to tell the tale.

But back to my parents—there were other possibilities of course, maybe the fire had spread and they had already been evacuated and that’s what Mom meant. I waited for her to fill in some context and she didn’t, which suggested something earth-shattering. Or, I thought, maybe their world has become so small that they just assumed I knew what they were talking about. This can also be a sign of cognitive decline, I’m told. So I caved. I asked what was happening.

And now we’re on a journey that isn’t going to make total sense to you, because it doesn’t make total sense, period. That’s not the point, so stay with me and think about metaphors and how a smart, creative but fearful mind might translate events into words.

“Something’s happened to the news,” Mom said. “It’s gone.”

“Gone?”

She paused here and I could sense her frustration and reminded myself that I’ve been misinterpreting their fear as anger (at me) for my entire life. To be fair, Mom was a really hot-headed lady in her younger days. Bit of a tyrannical matriarch. Also very perceptive, to the point where we jokingly call her an oracle. So I asked for more details.

“We were watching ABC Newshour and now it just says “Please Stand By.” I heard her talking to Dad, and she reported back. “Oh, now there are some figures moving around on the screen but nothing else.”

By this time I’d opened my laptop and was Googling like crazy and finding nothing. To me it sounded like a simple digital age glitch but the more I thought about it, in THIS timeline, maybe a news station could implode in the middle of Newshour. In June, ABC News suspended their longtime national correspondent Terry Moran over his social media posts about President Trump and his administration. But I wasn’t finding anything that suggested that. Sean even held his nose and went over to his Twitter account since it’s still the best place to find some information quickly. I remember a few years ago when my parents called to tell us that somebody had driven around their (very small) town and fired off seven hundred rounds of ammunition (we live in Canada, FYI) at five o’clock in the morning, but not to worry, they were fine. The only place I could get any up to date information from the Police was on Sean’s Twitter account.

Yes, I’m doing everything I can to convince them to move, don’t look at me like that.

We never figured it out. I found no evidence that anything strange happened on any news station last night, but I did think about generational difference and the (understandable) power that television news has on the Olds. It’s a lifeline for many, which is exactly why its numerous failings are so dangerous. But it goes beyond their generation. Even in many contemporary apocalyptic films, TV news is one of the last things to go. So when they thought somebody had cut the feed, they panicked and needed to call the kids.

This makes me very sad. Sad at the state of the world and sad that things aren’t as comfortable for them as I’d like and sad at the fairly cliché but still devastating scenario of a final phone call at the world’s end. Some people don’t even get that, I know. For a few minutes, my parents thought this was happening, and that they were lucky to get through before the lines went dead.