Chapter 8

Dad has an Emergency

If Dad’s letters from the army base began and ended with endearments that seemed to have been written by someone I’d never known—as, in a way, they were--the contents themselves were banal, mostly about the weather (hot), his classes, eating at the canteen (free coffee and donuts at the PX!), movies on the base (“The Road to Zanzibar”) and USO shows, occasionally jaunts to Philly. Reassuring her that he got plenty of sleep and food (eggs this morning, beef at noon, corn at supper, raw vegetables, canned fruit). Washing his clothes, shaving, showering. No, he doesn’t have a cold. Always, “take care of yourself.” Much discussion of his wristwatch, which worked and then didn’t and so on. Gas mask practice, rifle practice. Always upbeat, cheerful and loving. “I feel fine,” etc. No mention of his future in the army, or theirs together. Nothing about her pregnancy except for “I’ll be here when Junior comes but not much longer.” (Did they think I’d be a boy? Did he want a boy?) As it turned out, he wasn’t “here” at the army base when I was born. He was in the South Pacific. Only one mention of war: “Everybody is happy now that Paris is freed,” that’s it.

This fact-based commentary sounds familiar to me. It’s not unlike the father who, at age 90, called me at 10:30 one night, sounding—excited, actually. He said he fell, he hit his arm and back on a sharp edge of the table, he had a bad cut and he thought he’d broken some ribs. Two of the domestic care workers were there at the time because it was the daily changing of the guard, and they helped him patch up the lacerated skin. One of them thought he should go to the ER.

I’d spent that whole day with him and I was exhausted. I didn’t want to return and take him to Stanford Hospital late on Saturday night, which would surely end up being an all-night affair. He sounded fine, not weak. He said he was not nauseous or feverish. I asked him to call the clinic, see if there was a nurse there that he could talk to. I didn’t see how he could develop an infection overnight. Or could he? Did I just want to believe that because it was easier for me? Of course I did. But it seemed he didn’t want to go to the ER either; he also knew that he’d be there all night. (Or did I just want to believe that, too?) Guilt, obligation, selfishness, regret, pity, ambivalence—these were continual states of mind for me during those quasi-caregiving years.

There was no nurse at the clinic for him to talk to. The caregiver told me she thought it could wait until tomorrow, that the bleeding wasn’t so bad now. Dad agreed. I told him I’d call him in the morning. I went to bed uneasily, though, leaving the phone on my nightstand as always.

It had been years now of uneasy feelings: a sense of foreboding, phone on the nightstand, on alert. But so far nothing catastrophic had ever happened. Dad got sick, but it was just the flu. Mom fell down and was rushed to the ER, semi-comatose, but they couldn’t find anything wrong, she was released and things went on. The relentless, dreary pace of the decline—mainly hers, but his too, somewhat—was enervating. On my twice-weekly drives down the freeway, I occasionally had to pull off to a rest stop and take a quick power nap, I was that sleepy. I sometimes longed for something drastic to happen, for that burst of adrenalin—something to catapult me out of this torpor I was in as I watched my parents wither away so slowly that it was barely noticeable to the naked eye. Is there anything more boring than aging?

I’ve always been the restless, impatient one in the family. Mom practiced self-therapy and self-hypnosis; Dad immersed himself in facts and equations; my sister drew and meditated. I paced. I multi-tasked. I drummed my fingernails on the arms of chairs. Now, it seemed, I was waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. For drama, excitement, tragedy, anything other than the endless, suffocating ongoing drudgery of minor incidents, errands, mundane tasks.

Dad said he fell because he’d felt sleepy at the table, and when he stood up he’d lost his balance. Always given to formulating obscure theories, he’d immediately—while still dripping blood, unable to move—arrived at two: 1) “Someone” pushed the rug back, so that it wasn’t where he expected it to be. 2) He’d been reading Science News, and he’d found it “too interesting” and stayed up so late that he’d gotten overtired and lost his balance. It was Someone’s fault; it was Science News’ fault; it was not his fault. He’d have to cancel Science News, he said.

In the morning I arrived to take Dad to the clinic. He was in his pajamas and bathrobe and was moving slowly and painfully. He said he didn’t want to get dressed. I was shocked at first. How can he go out in public in his night clothes? But it got worse—he insisted on taking along the bottle that he used for peeing at night.

I told him no, absolutely not, it’s not OK to expose yourself in public.

He looked surprised. “I’ll be in a wheelchair,” he protested. “I’ll go off into a corner.”

“Dad, it’s a clinic, there are plenty of bathrooms.”

“But what if it’s an emergency, what if the bathroom’s in use? I don’t want to have an accident.”

“Maybe we should stop at a store for some Depends.”

“Some what?”

“Adult diapers.”

“What good will that do, if I wet them, I can’t go around in wet adult diapers. Besides, I’m not ready for that.”

I called my sister. “Dad fell, he’s OK, I’m taking him to the clinic right now, but he insists on taking a bottle with him to pee in. What should I do?” Even as I said this, I knew how absurd my question was. Dad was 90, he fell down, there was blood, he needed a doctor, and here I was, worried about propriety.

But growing up in an eccentric family, it was always me, the older sister, who worried about making my family appear normal to the public. I had parents who didn’t socialize with the neighbors and who spoke with funny Noo Yawk accents. Mom didn’t shave her legs or wear a bra and checked 14 books out of the library every week. My sister spent all weekend in her pajamas lying on her bedroom floor drawing cartoons. Even our house was eccentric: We didn’t have a TV, not ever, and our living room furniture consisted of two redwood patio chairs, a redwood patio table, and a lounge pad on the floor. Weekly, my mother soaked all the hairbrushes in the toilet for some unknown reason that we never thought to question and remains a mystery to this day. My sister’s guinea pig had the run of the house because Mom couldn’t stand to see any creature caged—pellets piling up behind the stove, which was where Miss Farley hid, terrified of open spaces. For breakfast we ate wholesome, raw-tasting wheat-germ pancakes because Adelle Davis’ cookbooks were the family bible.

“Oh, let him take the bottle,” said my sister. “What difference does it make?” I was not surprised at her response. She is a Hin-Jew--a devotee of Ama the Hugging Guru--who regularly spends time in an ashram (“She’s off to the ashcan again,” I’d tell my husband). My sister is very non-judgmental, exactly the opposite of me.

I put the pee bottle in a plain paper bag and took it out to the car along with the plastic water bottle that he was never without, and the frayed purple woman’s shawl that he wanted, draped over his shoulders. I knit that shawl long ago, when I had the misguided idea that I, completely lacking hand-eye coordination as I am, might actually be able to do something craftsy. But in fact my hands don’t garden, peel a potato, draw a straight line, thread a needle, play an instrument. Nor do they diaper babies or adults. Or wash old people’s dentures, as I told Dad with a shudder when he handed me Mom’s false teeth to take into the bathroom.

I tied Dad’s shoelaces because he couldn’t bend down, and he put on his blue baseball cap. Mom used to obsess over everyone’s health, and her greatest fear in the world was that something would happen to Dad, that he’d have an accident, or get sick. Now Mom sat at the table, staring blankly at a book propped up in front of her, eating a banana cut up into tiny pieces, utterly unconcerned as Dad hobbled around. Mom, whose entire adult life was about feeling other people’s pain, and helping them solve their personal problems, had lost her greatest gift, her finest talent: her empathy.

“A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou,” Dad intoned merrily as the screen door slammed behind us. He liked to recite things, pleased to demonstrate his good memory.

I said, “Dad, you’re sounding crazy.”

“I am?” he said, startled.

But he also shouted orders at me as I wheeled him into the clinic. I’m pushing him too fast, if I don’t know how to push him, he’ll get a nurse to do it.

There’s absolutely no one around, I say, it’s Sunday, and a holiday weekend at that.

I’m going the wrong way, I’m going too fast over a bump on the floor, I’m doing it all wrong, he says.

I was always doing it all wrong. I gritted my teeth. I wheeled him into the waiting room, which was full of people, who all turned to stare as he continued to loudly issue commands. I wondered if they thought I was the resentful spinster daughter obligated to take care of my querulous, demanding old dad. I had to shout at him, into his almost-good ear, so he’d hear me, which made me sound bitchy, and I had to repeat everything several times until he understood me, which of course made me sound condescending. I made sure to call him “Dad” so no one would wonder if I was his surly, much younger wife, trying to push him into an early grave so I’d inherit his money.

The thing is, Dad had always shouted orders at me, and at my sister. When he taught me how to drive at 15, it was only my overwhelming need for mobility and independence that kept me from leaping out of that 1950s DeSoto and slamming the door behind me. “How can I have a daughter that’s so stupid?” he yelled as I clumsily shifted the clutch, or failed to come to a full stop, or forgot which pedal was the accelerator. When he tried to help me with my algebra homework, surely the “s” word popped up then, too. Worst of all for insecure teenage me: Once, as we screamed at each other, he hollered, “If you keep this up, no man will ever want to marry you.”

The doctor said it’s too late for stitches—cuts need to be sewn within 12 hours. Why didn’t I know these things? Was it because I didn’t want to know them? Anyway, wasn’t it barely over 12 hours? But Dad was happy not to have stitches. The doctor cleaned his wound and Dad grimaced. His skin was thin and papery with age, which was why the cut was so bad. Looking at it, all bloody, made my knees feel watery. Apparently no rib damage.

The doctor bandaged Dad’s arm and I wheeled him up to the door of the restroom, which, thankfully, was empty. Dad got up from the wheelchair with difficulty. “I can manage on my own,” he told me. You damn well better, I thought, leaning against a wall, arms folded. This is so much not my thing. I don’t do this: blood, Mom’s false teeth, adult diapers, the endless monotonous discussions about bodily functions—and whatever comes next. I didn’t sign up for this. There is a reason why I didn’t have children. I’m not the earth-mother type, like my own mother used to be, all nurturing and affectionate. Come to think of it, I’m more like my father in that regard: a little hands-off, not effusive, sometimes not as empathetic or as emotional as others expect me to be, sometimes sharp; my Californian husband calls it my “New York attitude.” My mother, who had the manners of a Southern belle rather than the native Brooklynite she was, always said I was tactless, like Dad. My sister agrees; she says I sometimes speak before I think. I’m the kind of person who can walk for eight hours almost nonstop through the streets of Paris but instantly gets bored and exhausted down on the floor playing with a kid. My biological clock never ticked. If there is a caregiver gene, it’s missing in me.

I stopped at Walgreen’s on the way home and bought gauze, bandages, and, despite Dad’s objections, Depends (“It’s for emergencies,” I reassured him).

When I said goodbye later that afternoon, Dad gave me a huge smile and hug and said, “Thank you, you’re marvelous.” But I knew I wasn’t, and nothing that had happened or was to happen in next five years of Dad’s life—when he broke his hip on my watch and insisted he didn’t need to go to the hospital and so once again I delayed; when I waited until his memory was too far gone to suggest helping him record his life; when I argued with him, my stubborn and opinionated Dad, about inconsequential matters; and much more --convinced me otherwise.