Jane’s daughter Catherine drives to the Cape for a visit. Dad breaks into a smile as soon as she enters the room, but Catherine hasn’t seen him in a year, and the shock on her face shows how much he has aged. She walks up to him and stands beside him, puts her arm around him, kisses his head again and again. She doesn’t say anything, but starts to cry and for a long time can’t stop.
Anyone who loves my dad, I love.
I’ve hired Marion Prendergast, a woman I met at the Council on Aging, to come over twice a week so I can get out of the house and do something athletic. At first I worried about how Dad would get along with her, because he doesn’t like a new face. During her first few visits he slept a lot and they spoke little, but yesterday they had a breakthrough in communications, as Marion put it. She fixed the air purifying machine that’s supposed to run constantly in the living room, and that led to some talk, at which my father woke up to her. Indeed, when I returned from my Sunday bike ride his mood was cheerful bordering on electrified. He smiled, he was attentive, and when Marion said good-bye and went out to her car, Dad got on his walker and followed her out to the driveway. This, from a guy I can rarely persuade to leave the house.
For the rest of the day he remained alert. He expressed an interest in the John Adams biography by David McCullough that lay on the dining room table, and I handed it to him. For almost an hour he wandered around the house, sitting down with the book on his lap, then standing up again and resting it on top of his walker as he looked around the kitchen, looked around his room. Finally he sat down and asked for a notebook and pen. Over the next hour he wrote several lines, and later I took a look at them.
Jensen material right dad
Shoes
Joe Boyd Do I have material from him
That was more than he’d written in months. Though lacking punctuation, there was even a complete sentence. His mind was ticking over, he had projects, he later announced, “I think I’m going to go so far as to have a cocktail,” and under his scrutiny I poured him a stiff one. He took only a few sips from it, but after dinner he kept moving, inspecting his desk and his photos on the living room walls. When I retired at ten he was still sitting upright in his chair, uninterested in sleep.
I don’t think it’s irrelevant that Marion is a tall, engaging, well-spoken woman. A woman who says tomahto for the vegetable, and ahnt for her mother’s sister. She is also quite attractive, as well as light-haired. My father’s natural draw is to blondes, and I doubt that has changed with age. Something lit him up for twelve hours straight.
Consider an incident from our August reunion, when another blonde was in the house, Janir’s wife LL. She and Janir were sleeping in the little room above the laundry. In the middle of the night Janir woke to rattling and shuffling, and found his grandfather halfway down the three stairs between kitchen and laundry room. He had his walker with him and was trying to negotiate the second tread, something he hadn’t done in six months. He was confused, he was worried about them, perhaps they needed something. Or perhaps he needed something. All we know for sure is that the ancient male was roaming his terrain.
I come down in the morning to find Dad awake, lying in bed with a troubled face.
“I had the most terrible nightmare,” he says.
I sit on the little trunk at the foot of his bed and ask him what happened.
“I dreamed my father died.”
I put my hand on his feet, wanting to console him. He has the worried look of a child. He searches my face, then asks, as if fearful of the answer, “Is there any truth to that?”
“It’s true, Dad. It happened many years ago.”
He looks stricken by this news. Almost fifty years have passed since his father’s death, but grief overwhelms him now. I’ve never seen him look so unprotected and forlorn. An hour passes before he comes around.
Sandy calls to tell me his father has died, at ninety-six, and I ask him the question he always asks me: “How do you feel?”
“Relieved, I guess. And guilty. I had another great bawling catharsis, the same as with my mother. But you know I wanted them to die and leave me that money. I never hid it. I thought they’d lived long enough. So fear, too, of what people will think of me.”
“It’s not like you put them on an ice floe. You did everything you could to make them happy and comfortable. You did that for years.”
“I did. But no matter how long it goes on, you’re not supposed to want them to die. Of course I think a lot of people do and can’t admit it. I think a lot of old people are ready to go, but they can’t admit it. I wonder how many would push some button if they could, and just end it. Is your father still interested in life?”
“A little less all the time.”
“Would he have wanted to live this long? In the condition he’s in?”
“Absolutely not.” I’m sure of this, though less sure of how he feels now that he’s closer to the end. “Don’t all of us say the same thing,” I ask Sandy, “that if we’re too debilitated we wouldn’t want to live? But maybe that’s just what we think now, and later we’ll change our minds. I’m pretty sure my father has. He’s probably looking around and thinking, Hey, it’s this world or nothing— and he’d rather have something. I can imagine myself going through the same change. Right now I’d say, Shoot me, get rid of me. But when I get close, who knows? How about you?”
“I’ll fight it tooth and nail,” Sandy says. “I love this life and I won’t want to go. I’ll tell them to do everything they can think of to keep me here.”
Emerging from his shower, my father no longer dries himself off. He just waits for me to help, then makes low quavering noises as I rub his scalp and chest, his skinny arms and legs, the hollows below his collarbones. He’s frail and forgetful. He sits down for breakfast and eats so slowly he seems to draw a blank as he holds his spoon. Once seated in his lift chair he stares straight in front of him. All day he sits and breathes. He’s on his last legs, and the question keeps coming back to me: What’s the point of such a minimal life?
Make a jump with me here to the two years I spent in the early seventies, living with my wife and young son on a backcountry farm in Chile. Our neighbors were hardworking peasants with small decent houses and enough to eat, who lived far more pedestrian lives than the friends Clarisa and I had left behind in Boulder. But as we settled into Chilean country life, it became clear to me that our neighbors there were no different from anyone else. They were driven by the same emotions, they suffered and celebrated in the same ways, and their lives were worth no less than my own.
Of course, how obvious. But when you’re born in Manhattan, grow up in a privileged segment of the world’s richest nation, attend a New England boarding school and top it all off with four years at that thoroughly elitist institution, Harvard, it’s easy to be tainted by the idea that the lives of some potato-planting campesinos in southern Chile are somehow less valid than your own.
Now jump back to my father, sitting down on the toilet so I can work his pants up over his ankles. My father, who claims every day that he can button his own shirt, but who can’t. My father, who periodically shits on the floor, who can’t hold a conversation, who may not know whether he’s in pain or not. What’s the point, I ask myself, a half dozen times a day.
But my dad’s life is his own. It may be less of a life than the rest of us have, only a small reed of a life—but he is driven by the same emotions, knows suffering and has his pleasures. He’s alive and wants to stay alive, and until that changes there’s no way I could slip him any of those Nembutals.
Kathy Galt and Billy Renz have come to visit, driving all the way from Ohio. I love that they’ve made the effort, and how they link my two worlds.
One of Kathy’s skills is drawing people out, especially old people. She’s done some interviewing for the local NPR station, and she can get almost anyone to talk. But in my father she meets her match. She sits at the dining room table with him, brings him food and shows that she’s interested in what he has to say. But conversations with my dad are thin affairs. This morning she took him out for a walk on the bike path in his wheelchair—an expedition I set up for them because of how much I love that walk myself. But after wheeling him along for a few hundred yards, Kathy stopped to check on him, to see how he felt about it. He looked a little worried, she thought.
“I tried to put myself in his place,” she told me when they got back. “What if my memory was failing and someone I didn’t know was pushing me along past all that waving vegetation, in and out of the shadows, and the world kept coming at me? It could be scary. It could be like a trip on mushrooms or something. I tried to sink into his world, to feel how disorienting it could be not to know where you’d come from or where you were going. I thought he might be struggling with it, so I brought him back.”
Still, she finds Dad charming. We’re all sitting around after dinner, talking about Iraq and Iran, when he comes out with a perfectly clear sentence. “It’s hard to slow down a president bent on war.”
“And we have one of those, don’t we?” Kathy says.
“I’ll show you.” Dad pulls his walker to him and rises to his feet. “I’m going over here, and I’m going to roll. You try to stop me. You’ll see how hard it is, once I get going. It’s like a snowball rolling down a hill, going bigger and faster. You try to stop me.”
Kathy and Billy both look at me. I shrug: I don’t know what he’s doing. But I’m standing close by when he starts to lower himself to the floor, and grab his arm to help him down. Soon he’s stretched out on his back, legs extended and ready to start rolling. “Try to stop me,” he tells Kathy, who squats beside him. He tucks one elbow under his side and begins to roll toward her.
“Oh,” he says, and stops. “I can’t do that.”
Now he looks confused, as if he has no idea what he’s doing on the floor. The three of us lift him to his feet and guide him to the Monstrosity. He has no more explanations, though Kathy plies him with questions. For thirty minutes she hovers on the edge of laughter.
“That was so cute,” she says later. “What was he doing? Was he the president, or was that the army, or what was that? You can see he’s thinking about things.”
What a spirited group we’ve been. Kathy talks politics, Billy cooks, and my father gets to see a different side of me as I argue and laugh, even scream in the dining room as I do my imitation of Bruce Springsteen from his 1977 concert in Athens. “I am a prisoner,” I cry, then leap up in the air and come down with a phantom guitar and Springsteen’s exuberant howl, “of rock and roll!”
Then, to really liven things up while my friends are here, Joe Jr. and two-year-old Eliza arrive for a visit. Eliza’s the one for Dad. In his ideal world, I think, she’d come to visit every day. And she’s fascinated by him. She drapes herself over the padded arms of his lift chair, stares at him when he’s sleeping, wants to go into the bathroom when he’s seated naked on the toilet and I’m drying his toes with the hair dryer.
In the afternoons Joe takes care of both Eliza and Dad while the rest of us go to the beach, empty and swept by a new cold wind, the sand stinging our ankles as we watch the seals watch us. Kathy puts on a wetsuit and swims out to them, but they keep their liquid-eyed distance. Life is rich like this, with lively people in the house, help with Dad and long walks with Billy to the point.
How lucky I was with Janir through his teenage years. There are kids who pull away from their parents, who don’t want to be seen around them or touched by them. It happens to all kinds of families, it can’t be foretold, it almost seems the luck of the draw. But with Janir, at least when we were home, we always found ways to be close. I didn’t put my arm around him outside Boulder High, where his friends would see, or on a ski lift at one of his downhill races. But we still read together at night, still played soccer-shoot-on-goal in the living room, still wrestled. He’d slam me from behind at I entered my room, hurling me onto the bed with a linebacker cry of “Administer the hit!” We’d scramble around and pin each other against the wall, and after a while relax and just lie there arm in arm.
One day during his junior year, after a prolonged battle in which I kept escaping his hold—he couldn’t pin me, I kept squirming my way out—I stopped and gave him a look. “Janir, are you sandbaggin’ me?”
The faintest smile—then he leapt on top of me and in three seconds had me pinned. After ten I stopped struggling. “Damn, is this how it is now? You just toy with me?”
“Dad,” he said, smiling broadly, “I’m young and strong.”
On Sunday nights we watched television, not so much for the movies with their endless ads as for the chance to lie around in a dead time and do nothing together, our arms and legs touching.
When Janir started at the University of Colorado I moved down to Santa Fe, in part to let him have his time “away” at college. I came back to see him several times during the fall, we spent Christmas in Vermont, and we went skiing in February—but when I drove up to visit him in March he was busy. He had homework, a Sunday ski race at Winter Park, and scrubwork at a fraternity he was pledging. On Saturday afternoon, in our last half hour together, we stretched out on the rug of our old Boulder apartment in front of the TV and watched a hockey game. It was a way to lie side by side and not talk. But I had something to say. I hadn’t seen enough of him and wanted to tell him how glad I was to have this quiet time together. I found it awkward to say, but slipped my arm around his shoulders and finally came out with it: “I’d hate to come up and not get to lie around like this the way we used to. At least for a few minutes. I know you’re busy and you’re growing up—but I still love to hold you.”
The game droned on in front of us. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to say anything. Then he shifted his weight closer and said, “Always hold me.”
Everyone goes back to Ohio and Virginia, and I wake this morning later than usual with the room already light and the sound of a small motorboat going by outside. I’m a young boy waking up in my house on Long Island Sound with a rapturous summer day before me.
A massage therapist once told me, “If you could wake up some morning and feel what your body was like when you were young, you would be so unhappy. Because you’d realize how stiff all your joints have become.”
The sound isn’t a motorboat, it’s a lawnmower, and I’m not a young boy. I’m a sixty-two-year-old man lying in bed in my father’s house, wishing I could wake up as that lucky young boy.
When I write that, a sixty-two-year-old man, it doesn’t sound like me at all, not one bit.