He wasn’t supposed to do it this way. Nobody is. He was supposed to get gray and dry and wither away. It should have been a gradual process. But he had to do it differently. He kept me on the ropes for years.
He lived in one state while I was living in another. That alone made it tough to keep tabs on him. Not that I wanted to keep tabs on him. I wanted to lose him.
Growing up, I was so ashamed of him. He was an ill-dressed, ill-spoken immigrant son who refused to be American. I longed for the day when I could get away from him. When I married, I moved from Ohio to Michigan with the greatest of glee.
His intrusion into my life began in the way that bad news always comes, with a phone call. A hospital called and said he had been brought in with a head injury. Going to see him was not an easy matter. I had a baby still in his playpen and a husband who was a traveling salesman, gone from Monday to Friday.
We had to drive there on Friday nights, arriving at three the next morning. The Jewish lady whose husband lay in the next bed raved about what a marvelous daughter I was, coming all the way from Michigan to see him. I didn’t feel marvelous; I felt churlish and resentful and somehow surprised.
The doctors were puzzled. The severity of his condition did not seem warranted by the extent of the injury. They kept him for a month trying to figure it out. They released him after a month, saying he needed to go into a nursing home. The bill was $865. You can imagine how far back that was—1964 to be exact. However, salaries were lower, too, and we could not have spared it from my husband’s paycheck. Luckily we had a rainy day fund and that’s where it came from.
He had to be transported by ambulance with me riding along with him. That summer the fashionable thing was black cotton dresses. And that’s what I wore, a tight black dress. The tightness and blackness were all wrong. The air conditioning in the ambulance worked erratically and I got hot as a firecracker.
He began asking me where we were going. He looked bright-eyed and inquisitive, like a baby chick. Just for a little ride, I told him. After a while the motion of the ambulance lulled him to sleep.
Looking back I can see that the nursing home was an old wooden structure that was a firetrap. At the time I didn’t even notice. The main thing I noticed was the calm, bedrock confidence of the nurse who ran the place. She didn’t wear a nurse’s cap but her uniform was white and starched and the gleaming gold nurse’s pin said, “St. Catherine’s.” Help us, St. Catherine, I said to myself; surely we all need it.
The nursing home was on a side road in the country, but only four miles in a zigzag course from our house in a new suburb. Trees shaded the home pleasantly, the front lawn was neatly shorn showing the marks of a well-aimed scythe, and windows sparkled in the afternoon sun.
They tucked him into bed in a room with two other men. Mrs. Ronquin led me to her office where she examined the doctor’s reports and gave me forms to fill out. The cost would be $230 a month. I signed a paper agreeing to pay it. The question of how we would pay that amount over a prolonged period hovered in my mind.
“You can have every confidence,” said Mrs. Ronquin, “we will take good care of him.”
I did have confidence and it was well placed. When I went back a week later he was sitting in the common room fully dressed, his color much improved. Mrs. Ronquin was busy and a nurse’s aide told me I could take him out for a cup of coffee. The place being so far out in the country I had drive to a restaurant near my sub-division.
I was in fear every moment. Was his mind right? Would he act appropriately? In years past he always refused to tip the waitress. Nobody ever tipped him when he was digging ditches, why should he tip her? I would sneak a dime or quarter under my plate so the waitress would not think we were rubes straight from the hicks. This time all went well and we returned to the home.
“Is this my hotel?” he asked.
“Yes, it is,” I told him.
At the end of two months he felt good, looked good, and it was time to take him home. I asked Mrs. Ronquin to release him and she said she would the following week after the doctor okayed it.
Two days later I was folding laundry at my sunny kitchen window. A knock sounded at my door. When I opened it, there he stood.
“I found you,” he said. “I remembered where you were.”
“How did you get here? Did someone give you a ride?”
“I walked. You took me for coffee and I remembered.”
“Well, come in and stay. I haven’t had time to get your room ready, but it won’t take long.”
“No, I won’t stay with you. You shouldn’t have put me in that place.”
“Don’t be silly. You needed good care.”
“You’re not a good daughter. I won’t stay here. Give me six dollars and take me to that hotel where I stayed one time.”
“That flea bag? No, I won’t.”
The upshot of it was that I gave him the money and drove to the small neighborhood hotel. He insisted on being dropped off at the corner so I did and went home. The next day when I tried to call him the hotel had no listing. Further investigation revealed the hotel was there but the name had been changed. When I got that squared away and obtained the right number I dialed it. The hotel said he never showed up. If only I had driven round the corner I would have known the name had been changed. I was worried sick. Where could he be? Did somebody mug him? Was he lying in an alley?
A few days later I got a call from Cleveland. He had gotten rattled when the hotel had a different name. Somehow, with six dollars in his pocket, he had gotten himself to Cleveland where he went to my uncle’s and borrowed money. It was my uncle calling; he bawled me out for being so mean to my father. I hung up.
“What will he do? Where will he go?” I asked my husband.
My husband comforted me. “He’s got a lot of life left in him. Just think! He got all the way to Cleveland on six dollars. You or I couldn’t do that.”
A year later he began calling. He sounded like his mind was leaving him. He appealed to me in the wheedling manner of a child. He would ask me to come to Cleveland to help him file for Social Security benefits. He couldn’t find his card and didn’t remember the number. When I did go there, it was futile; from one minute to the next he’d forget what we were supposed to be doing. He lived in a fleabag hotel downtown around the corner from his bank. He slept a lot, waking up twice a day to go out and get breakfast. Each time he got up he thought it was a new day and he would pay his daily rent of two dollars. The hotel happily collected the double rent until he started urinating in the corner of his room. Then they wanted him out. No ambulance this time. I brought him back in my car, my husband having advised me to get the door handle removed on the inside of the passenger door.
Once again, this time by stupid happenstance, I was wearing a black dress. This time the air conditioner worked fine but he kept trying to jump out, pawing at the door, looking for the handle. I began sweating buckets. I didn’t dare make a rest stop.
This time I put him in a home twenty miles out in the country. A week later they called and said he wasn’t eating. They wanted me to visit and try to feed him. I put on my black dress.
He lay in bed, a shrunken wisp between the white sheets. He knew me; he spoke my childhood pet name and looked at me with an affection I hadn’t seen in years. Before I could put a spoon in the bowl of cream of wheat, he began coughing, a wrenching cough.
Suddenly two nurses appeared from nowhere; they motioned me away and pulled a screen across the bed. I heard their anxious remarks as they inserted a suction device into his throat. I saw shadows moving frantically behind the screen. I heard an ominous gasping gurgle. I heard a prolonged noise, a sort of pounding. The shadows grew still.
A nurse came out. “I’m so sorry, he’s gone. It’s sad that you were here to hear all that. Thankfully he didn’t suffer long.”
“But why did he die? He looked all right.”
“His heart, dear. He should have been on medication for years. His lungs got full of water. At least you were here and you know we did everything possible.”
They helped me with all the arrangements. After the funeral I plucked a red rose from his casket. Then I went home and took a pair of scissors to my black dress.
THE END
