I watch as Jack zooms down the hallway of St. Augustine’s Little Sisters of the Poor on his tricycle. He’s chasing Augie, a Border Collie mix and the resident nursing home mascot. Grandpa George used to be right out there with him, but not today. Maybe never again. Dad is over in the nuns’ office making arrangements to transfer Grandpa to hospice care.
Our old rituals simplified drastically when Grandpa moved in with us. If I’m being honest, he was an old guy, and I had better things to do. But the one ritual we still enjoyed together was a Cincinnati Reds game.
I was sitting with Grandpa in his bedroom, the expansive room in the corner of our first floor Dad converted into a custom mini-suite for his father. We were watching the Reds play the Padres. It was a late afternoon game. Eric Davis had just hit for the cycle and drove in his sixth RBI of the game. “Man oh man, Grandpa,” I said. “Davis is on fire!”
Grandpa didn’t respond.
“Grandpa?” I asked, turning to him.
He looked at me with fear in eyes, tilting his head as if to say, “What’s happening to me?” He couldn’t speak. I screamed for Dad.
“He had a stroke,” the doctors said at the hospital, “likely even two or three of them.”
Grandpa had an amazing, albeit incomplete, recovery. He could feed and dress himself. And while his gait and speech were slower, his mind was still sharp and his incontinence wasn’t any more pervasive than it had been. But Dad knew the stroke was the first domino in his father’s endgame, and so he moved him to St. Augustine’s Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic nursing home on the northwest side of Indianapolis. “I’m jealous, Pops,” Dad said during the family’s first visit up from Empire Ridge. “You’re right across the street from the new Shapiro’s location.”
“Forget corn beef and cabbage,” Grandpa said back to my father. “Give your Grandpa some matzo ball soup and a potato pancake, and you got yourself one happy old Irishman.”
Dad smiled when Grandpa said these words, but he couldn’t forgive himself. Dad believed he had abandoned his father.
Grandpa George’s enthusiasm for living has never waned, but his hips didn’t share in the sentiment. First one hip went, then the other. He had his last big fall in March and has been bedridden for going on sixty days. It’s sad to see such a proud man go this way—too old to survive hip-replacement surgery, too stubborn to know when to die.