Breakfast Memories Page 4

  Three days later, I arrived at the home where Mom and Dad had raised us, their home of 45 years. My sister and Hersh, my best childhood friend (better known among us all as Mom’s eighth child), along with the movers, loaded the moving truck with my dad’s collections and treasures: my parents’ first-ever purchase, their walnut dresser; their original 59-year-old bed; the love seat from their engagement; two of Dad’s treasured nautical ships; clothes; and a box of things that Dad had labeled “Bernadette Come Live With Me.”

  It was a torturous two-hour ride to their new temporary living arrangements, and I prayed that God would let me see through the fountains of tears that were pouring from my eyes as I drove. It was just the three of us—Mom and Dad and me. Mom was in the back of my SUV resting her head on a pillow that was protecting the twelve stitches that had been sewn into the back of her head after a fall five days before. Unbeknownst to me, Dad had called an ambulance after she had tripped on a rug in the living room. Typical of his protective behavior, he demanded that, after the physician finished the stitches, they both return home. He would care for her stitches. Of course. That was his plan.

  Dad, in the meantime, was in the front passenger seat with a back support brace around his middle to ease the inconsolable pain from a fall he had taken in the bathroom two weeks earlier while trying to pick up a towel. Again, his pattern of care: a call to 911, the hospital, then a refusal to stay and his insistence to return to their home. The back support ran around the middle of his stomach, a stomach that now measured 56 inches, up from a slim 38 inches from a year ago—the weight gain due to massive water retention and over all bad health.

  They moved into assisted living two hours later, a half mile from my home, on the same Friday I had picked them up. My best friend Kimmie, Marshal, Manny, and Mike were there to meet us and help get them settled into their new temporary home. Kimmie had organized the apartment with new low mattresses, filled the refrigerator, put Mom’s favorite soups in the cabinets, and made sure that Mom’s marmalade and bagels were set and ready for her Saturday morning wake-up.

  But then the third, unexpected plan surfaced, and it was brutal. An insurmountable challenge reared its head, triggering a cascade of events that threw us all out of control.

  Plan Number Three: God’s plan.

  That Friday evening would be the one, and only night my dad stayed in their new apartment.

  CHAPTER 5

  Accepting the Unwanted and Unacceptable Things

  There is a universality about accepting the role of being a parent to parents, about accepting that our parents will lose the ability to help themselves, about accepting that our parents are no longer who they were, about accepting that there is a resistance when parents do not like their children interfering in their lives. These are all issues faced by those with aging parents. Complicating this further, is when a child is watching a parent disappear into a fog. Having a parent with you, but not really there with you—that is deep grief.

  But add in the need to accept that you are watching someone disappear into an abyss, and one finds that it gets even harder.

  I was entering yet another chapter as caregiver into their lives. Neither our priest nor their doctors could give me or my siblings the answers that we needed to prepare us for what was about to happen. We were operating without any handbook.

  After all the years of protecting her, and dismissing his own chronic and debilitating pain, Dad stayed only one night with her in their new assisted living home.

  We were learning a life lesson aligned with one of my cousin Sidney’s most quoted Yiddish adages, “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht.” English translation: “Man plans and God laughs.”

  On Saturday morning at 7 am, the day after we moved my parents out of their home of 45 years, I brought Dad to the hospital. He was complaining of weakness and shortness of breath.

  He was immediately diagnosed with congestive heart failure and admitted. The E.R. doctors reviewed and questioned his narcotic use, took x-rays, and found that, in fact, he had a broken tail bone and two broken discs in his back. I listened as he weakly told the doctors he’d fallen a month before, how he’d gone by ambulance to the hospital, but had refused to overnight in the hospital and signed himself out in fear of Mom’s being left alone at home. Because of this, he was never treated for the injury, left the hospital, accepted new debilitating pain, and returned home to care for her.

  I stayed with him in the hospital that Saturday and Sunday night until Monday morning when a neurosurgeon operated on his spine. For three years, he had been on multiple medications, including the heart medicine amiodarone. After his spinal surgery, he experienced a stroke from an amiodarone overdose and was admitted to the ICU. After two weeks in the ICU, he was released into a stroke rehab center. And after three weeks of rehab and very little progress, the facility changed his status and admitted him into their long-term nursing care. After three weeks in the long-term nursing care, I couldn’t take anymore and moved him into my own home with the help of hospice.

  My parents brought me into this world. It was now my job to help Dad out of his.

  It was my turn to reach for a power of love I had never known.

  CHAPTER 6

  A Force Greater Than His Love

  We were in a race and didn’t know it.

  Mike, Manny, Marsh, Kimmie, and I helped the medical transport attendant push Dad’s gurney through the main front door of our home into the living room on right side of our colonial house. It had been a living room to us for eighteen years, and now it was about to become a room in which he could die. Did that make it a dying room?

  God, help me.

  When we said goodbye to the staff at the nursing home, Dad’s nurses, doctor, and case worker were confident that his death would not be soon, and that he could still enjoy some moments of cognitive clarity.

  “You’re doing the right thing, Kate,” the nurses told me when I said I no longer wanted him in nursing care and would be taking him home with me.

  “Know that your time with him is special, and let us know if you need additional help with hospice.”

  “How long will he live?” I choked on the question, not really wanting to know the answer and regretting that I had asked the question.

  The nurse set down her clipboard and looked directly into my eyes. “No one can ever say when a person will pass, but we believe he still has time to spend with you. It will be a while, not right away.”

  A while—not right away—that’s what they believed. That’s what I heard.

  They were wrong. He didn’t have a while. And my time with him was not special. At least not at first.

  I was exhausted and frightened out of my mind. This time with him was special? That’s what the nurses at the nursing home told me.

  What? Are you kidding me?

  With all the painkillers for his black legs, his broken back, his scarcely beating heart, and his constant foot ache, Dad could barely see and talk. As soon as he was lifted off the gurney and onto the hospice bed, he began writhing and moaning in pain and yelping the word “help.” He was suffering.

  This was not special. This was hard.

  To me, special was when Man, Marsh, Mike, and I were on a summer cross-country family trip to Major League Baseball stadiums watching the Cleveland Indians vs. the Seattle Mariners, my son’s favorite teams. Special was watching them hold their gloves open, praying that a foul ball from one of the major-league players would land in their worn-out Spalding gloves.

  That was special—sharing moments with all four of us together. This was nothing like that. This was hard. This was awful. This was responsibility like I’d never felt before. Compounding my anxiety over caring for Dad was the concern of what was happening with Mom. The question haunted me: What would his passing do to her?

  Did she even know he was dying? Did she know anything?

  She was seated next to his bed and was gently petting his hand. “Is he OK?” She timidly asked me du
ring his first hour in our home. Her voice sounding as if the “he” that she was referring to was a helpless newborn fawn, and she was a young child wishing to nurse the fawn to life.

  “Is who OK, Mom?” I asked, hoping to hear her say, “Peter, my husband, your father.” But that wasn’t her answer. She didn’t offer a response—just a sigh, a soft smile, and a blank stare.

  Oh, my God. I flashed back to our time in the neuropsychologist’s office. She didn’t know his name or who he was.

  God, help me, I thought once again.

  We would sit with him in our living room, now transformed into a hospice medical setting with needles loaded with morphine, a bedpan, a special recliner chair (which he never used), and a portable hospital bed equipped with special reclining settings so that fluid would not collect in his lungs.

  “Do not be afraid,” I whispered in his ear throughout that long first day and into the dark night. “Dad, don’t be afraid.”

  He would stare at me, as if I was speaking a foreign language. I would stare back, in a trance, wondering what I could do to help him die in peace.

  On the second day of caring for Dad my soul began to shift. The trance lifted, and I felt myself enter a new setting—not a hospice setting, but something different.

  Something was happening between Dad and me. I could feel from his body that Dad was trying to tell me something. There was something that he needed me to hear. It was different than the messages he sent me from the days of my childhood. It was eerie. I had lived my life with this man as my father, but now I heard him need me to be more than a daughter to him. I felt him pleading with me to understand that he needed to meet with my soul and form with me a new type of friendship, the kind that so many long for. A friendship that relies on a secret language shared and understood only between two people.

  He was asking me to feel and understand his need to keep protecting her, even upon his passing. I was drawn into a conversation with him by a mystical pulling to hear him, without the use of words. He was inviting me to enter his spiritual journey in leaving Earth, and share with me a new language that was just between him and me. It was another language without words—much different, but similar, I realized, to the love language that he shared with Mom when we were little. Through his eyes and the magnetic feel of his soul, I felt what he wanted me to hear.

  I am afraid, but not of dying. I accept my own death. But when I go, I can no longer protect her—the dwelling in my soul, the only person who has ever truly understood and accepted my shortcomings and faults yet celebrated my wit and mind, the one who never criticized, never doubted, and showed me only gratitude, love, admiration, and respect.

  No one understands what she needs. Who will shelter her, know how to love her, care for her, make her toast with marmalade every breakfast? Dementia has stolen so much of her mind that she is now a shadow of herself. Without my voice to speak for her, who will make sure that she does not end up alone, fading away in a nursing home?

  As I looked at him, helplessly tucked into the hospice bed, my heart opened up to the voice of his soul. I cared about him and how much he loved her. I cared that they had something that few people ever know. He was dying, and he was going alone, leaving her behind. For him, this was the most unbearable pain.

  The doctors and nurses told me that hearing is the last of the senses we lose. So again, I shifted my prayers from wishing for him to be healed to praying that he would understand that I was hearing him. I prayed that he could hear that the messages he was sending me through the language we now shared, a language without words, were coming through loud and clear.

  I stopped saying do not be afraid and stepped away from hovering over him. It was their private time together, and I began to watch and listen to the two of them from a distant chair that Mike had put in the adjoining sunroom. The day room was bright, but the silence from his hospice room was as quiet as the darkness of night. The only sound was the synchronized cadence of their breathing. Each hour, I excused myself for interrupting their peaceful rhythm and shifted his body so that he wouldn’t develop painful bed ulcers. I didn’t let on to him that I was exhausted and scared. I was simply sad as I watched their love story unfold in front of my eyes—the old fashioned kind of love story shaped by sharing a world for six decades.

  That night when the night nurse arrived, I didn’t say goodnight to Dad and tell him how much I would miss him. That’s what I used to say to him when I would say goodnight to him at the nursing home. But now our soul language told me he didn’t want to hear those words. He needed to hear something that had much more meaning to him than my missing him.

  Holding his hand and laying my head near his ear, with tears pouring down my face, I whispered to him, “Thank you, Dad, for all the love you have given to Mom your whole life. It must have been so painful to watch dementia close in on her. I am so sorry, Dad, that I wasn’t listening. I didn’t hear you tell me how sad and scared you were. I wish I had listened, Dad. I wish I had listened much sooner than I did.”

  In our own newly formed language, I felt him message me back. “It’s OK.” I heard his words through the tender movement of his fingers that were wrapped in mine.

  A shiver shot up my spine. He’d heard me. Our language was working.

  For five days, he simply rested. No food. Cloth baths. Mom stayed at his side and continued petting his hand, reminding me of a child petting a little kitten.

  Next to Dad’s bed in the makeshift hospice room was the little love seat from their bedroom of 59 years. I had moved it during the original move from our childhood home to their assisted living, when Dad insisted that it be packed with them.

  I remember when we were little sitting on it in their bedroom at night, watching TV with him. It wasn’t a very comfortable love seat. There were no fluffy cushions, and the armrests were as hard as rocks, but it was something that mattered to them. It was the love seat that was in Mom’s parents’ home. It was the love seat that she sat upon as Dad got down on one knee and proposed marriage.

  To them, it was a piece in time that represented the beginning of their life story. I watched her as she was sitting on it now, her small, fragile hips on its edge, leaning over the hospice bed with her head down on the chest of his barely beating heart.

  I felt his soul message me a thank you for bringing the love seat here for her now. Now, as their life story was turning the corner toward its ending.

  Hospice taught me how to administer morphine to reduce the severe pain of dying. I never thought I could be strong enough to position the morphine syringe in the back of Dad’s left cheek pocket every four hours. As Mom watched me, I wondered if she knew that the man in the bed was dying and that I was helping him in his passage by giving him narcotics to ease the pain of death.

  I remember watching her when I opened his lower lip with my left hand, holding the morphine drop in my stronger right hand. The drops weighed less than an ounce, but the weight of what I was doing, helping Dad die, took every ounce of my spirit and physical strength.

  Yet amidst my overwhelming dizziness with the reality of what I was doing, there was something tugging at me, telling me that I’d been shown this type of strength a long time ago.

  I jolted with the flashback. I was doing what I had learned by Mom’s example—I was doing what had to be done.

  The boys were little, about three and five, when my mom’s best friend, her sister Margaret, became very ill.

  “It’s Mom,” she said. I listened to her voice on my answering machine as the boys threw their empty lunch boxes on the kitchen counter. She didn’t sound right. “Aunt Margaret called and asked me to come down and stay with her a bit. She’s not feeling well. Daddy will be home alone for a couple of days. Can you please check in on him?”

  Mom was on the plane to her sister Margaret’s the next morning.

  When she arrived at Margaret’s Jackson Heights apartment, the door to the apartment was unlocked, as if Margaret was expecting her. Mom walked
in, and gently yelled out, “Hello, Margaret,” waiting to be greeted with her sister’s embrace. Instead, she found her older sister on the white-and-black tiled bathroom floor nearly unconscious. Mom called for an ambulance, rode with Margaret to the hospital, and was met by their other sister, Catherine. Four days later, Catherine and Mom stood together as Mom signed the papers to release Margaret from life support. Margaret had succumbed to pancreatic cancer, which she had kept a secret from her sisters.

  I remember, at that time, thinking that the reality of what Mom had to do and the responsibility of doing what her sister requested must have been overwhelming, yet, in the hour of need, she’d had the strength to do what had to be done.

  A staunch Irish Catholic woman, Mom helped Margaret with the faith that she would journey on to perpetual life, a journey in which Mom and Margaret both devotedly believed.

  It was my turn now, and “overwhelming” didn’t even touch the depth of my fear or anxiety, yet I was doing what Mom herself had done.

  I was assisting Dad in his journey—a journey in which he and I both devotedly believed. I quickly learned that there was one particular character strength I needed to find within me: being able to do what has to be done.

  Late Friday evening, five days into his hospice care, I heard him mumble, “Miss O’Rourke.”—It broke my heart that his mind and soul were flashing back to the days when he would wait for the “pretty Irish lass,” Bernadette, at the bottom of the B. Altman’s elevator.

  He shook and exhaled a loud rattling noise like a snore, and for the first time a force greater and more powerful than his love for his wife entered the room.