I knew that my dad was a good man, a kind man, and though he’d led a wounded life, he’d done the best he could in raising me. Never once had he raised his hand in anger, and I began to torment myself with the memories of all those years I’d wasted blaming him. I remembered my last two visits home, and I ached at the thought that we would never share those simple times again.
Later, I carried my dad to bed. He was light in my arms, too light. I pulled the covers up around him and made my bed on the floor beside him, listening to him wheeze and rasp. He woke up coughing in the middle of the night and seemed unable to stop; I was getting ready to bring him to the hospital when the coughing finally subsided.
He was terrified when he realized where I wanted to take him. “Stay . . . here,” he pleaded, his voice weak. “Don’t want to go.”
I was torn, but in the end I didn’t bring him. To a man of routine, I realized, the hospital was not only foreign, but a dangerous place, one that took more energy to adjust to than he knew he could summon. It was then that I realized he’d soiled himself and the sheets again.
When the neighbor came by the following day, the first words out of her mouth were an apology. She explained that she hadn’t cleaned the kitchen for several days because one of her daughters had been taken ill, but she’d been changing the sheets daily and making sure he had plenty of canned food. As she stood before me on the porch, I could see the exhaustion in her face, and all the words of reproach I’d been rehearsing drained away. I told her that I appreciated what she’d already done more than she would ever know.
“I was glad to help,” she said. “He’s been so nice over the years. He never complained about the noise my kids made when they were teenagers, and he always bought whatever they were selling when they needed to raise money for school trips or things like that. He keeps the yard just right, and whenever I asked him to watch my house, he was always there for me. He’s been the perfect neighbor.”
I smiled. Encouraged, she went on.
“But you should know that he doesn’t always let me inside anymore. He told me that he didn’t like where I put things. Or how I clean. Or the way I moved a stack of papers on his desk. Usually I ignore it, but sometimes, when he’s feeling okay, he’s quite adamant about keeping me out and he threatened to call the police when I tried to get past him. I just don’t . . .”
She trailed off, and I finished for her.
“You just don’t know what to do.”
Guilt was written plainly on her face.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Without you, I don’t know what he would have done.”
She nodded with relief before glancing away. “I’m glad you’re home,” she began hesitantly, “because I wanted to talk to you about his situation.” She brushed at invisible lint on her clothing. “I know this great place that he could go where he could be taken care of. The staff is excellent. It’s almost always at capacity, but I know the director, and he knows your dad’s doctor. I know how hard this is to hear, but I think it’s what’s best for him, and I wish . . .”
When she stopped, letting the rest of her statement hang, I felt her genuine concern for my dad, and I opened my mouth to respond. But I said nothing. This wasn’t as easy a decision as it sounded. His home was the only place my father knew, the only place he felt comfortable. It was the only place his routines made sense. If staying in the hospital terrified him, being forced to live someplace new would likely kill him. The question came down to not only where he should die, but how he should die. Alone at home, where he slept in soiled sheets and possibly starved to death? Or with people who would feed and clean him, in a place that terrified him?
With a quiver in my voice I couldn’t quite control, I asked, “Where is it?”
I spent the next two weeks taking care of my dad. I fed him the best I could, read him the Greysheet when he was awake, and slept on the floor beside his bed. He soiled himself every evening, forcing me to purchase adult diapers for him, much to his embarrassment. He slept most of the afternoon.
While he rested on the couch, I visited a number of extended care facilities: not just the one that the neighbor had recommended, but those within a two-hour radius. In the end, the neighbor was right. The place she mentioned was clean, and the staff came across as professional, but most important, the director seemed to have taken a personal interest in my dad’s care. Whether that was because of the neighbor or my dad’s doctor, I never found out.
Price wasn’t an issue. The facility was notoriously expensive, but because my dad had a government pension, Social Security, Medicare, and private insurance to boot (I could imagine him signing on the insurance salesman’s dotted line years before without really understanding what he was paying for), I was assured that the only cost would be emotional. The director—fortyish and brown haired, whose kindly manner somehow reminded me of Tim—understood and didn’t press for an immediate decision. Instead, he handed me a stack of information and assorted forms and wished my dad the best.