1

My ninety-three-year-old father has a problem: what next. After the first anniversary of my mother’s death had passed, he called a widow to whom he had been attracted for years (“but I was fully married and so was she”) and invited her to lunch. He contemplates Valentine’s Day; he hasn’t bought a gift for a woman for a half-century—not since he and Mom “settled in.”

When I visited recently, Dad and I took this eighty-three-year-old woman to a nice restaurant. “What does she see in me,” he asks later. She gives him “mixed signals.” She says she only wants to be friends, doesn’t want their relationship to “go any further,” and yet she invites him in to meet her cat. I believe he would like to put his arm around this woman.

When I walk past Mom’s organ in the living room, I catch a strong scent of her perfume. The first day it takes me by surprise; then I begin to seek it out. Now I think that Dad has lost his sense of smell.

He drives off the “campus” of the retirement community. His mind remains clear. He attends lunch at the main building, walks with a cane, paints pictures for his great-granddaughter. He uses email and bill-pay, plays computer games.

Dad sits across from me in the family room. I ask him whether he thinks there is much sex among the residents.

“None. The men can’t do it and the women aren’t interested.”

Later he adds, “I’m not planning to take anyone to bed.”

My parents had been married for 69 years.

2

My ninety-four-year-old father left his car door ajar the last day he drove his ten-year-old Buick. He added a dead battery to the list of no-longer-useful items my sister and I would have to dispose of, getting him ready to move into a “garden apartment.”

The last time our parents had moved, from a suburban ranch into one of the semi-detached, so-called “garden homes” that formed the independent living community at what everyone called the Village, Mom was eighty-three and had done all of the packing herself. They wanted to be in place when one of them “went down,” as Dad put it. Now my sister and I began to disentangle their life together.

After Dad retired, he took up painting. He worked in acrylics and proved adept at copying photographs or postcards. He rejected abstract art; he offered photographic verisimilitude. Art, for him, did not change our view of the world; rather, it confirmed what we already believed to be real.

My sister and I save the numerous paintings in his garden home for last. How many more might each of us take home, how many could we fit on the walls of his new apartment?

Dad’s move, one connected to nursing care as needed, had come upon us with some urgency. He’d begun to fall, and his woman friend could not help him get up. He drove the two blocks that separated his garden home from the dining room, easing out a portable walker from his trunk at lunchtime, but his license had expired months before.

While my sister and I give away much of his furniture and pack him for life in a small apartment, he remains disengaged, forgetting why we are here. He loses patience with us: “Stop asking me so many questions!”

When the Village’s crew arrive on the designated morning to move him, the two men marvel at Dad’s paintings. One of them has lost everything in a recent divorce and has nothing for his walls. I decide to give the men as many of the paintings as they will take. I want them to hang on someone’s wall, not gather dust in a basement. In the end, his partner chooses a favorite and the divorced man takes all the rest. At first, I feel relieved. Dad will never know, my sister and I will never have to throw them away—a terrible but likely prospect. And yet, that night I find it impossible to sleep. By morning I am convinced that I have given away my father.

3

My ninety-five-year-old father complains about having nothing to do but watch TV in his chair. He says he is not happy. The Center offers numerous activities. Would it kill him to make an effort? He says, “I don’t like to go anywhere by myself.”

A nurse brings Dad his daily medications. The first morning a new anti-anxiety capsule appears in his cup, he asks: “Why are there seven pills? There are supposed to be six.” Paranoia enhances what memory he retains.

In a cogent moment he says, “I wonder why I’m still here.”

Every time he falls, I expect him to break a hip. But he seems to bounce. His body collapses on the floor in a puddle of bones, needing only a firm grip to pull himself up and walk again. Afterwards, he won’t remember the drop to the ground but may have a sore shoulder and often dried blood where his skin—paper thin—tears even beneath his clothes.

Yesterday he phoned me four times. Our last conversation ended abruptly, as they had done more than once earlier in the day: “I see a light on my phone. Someone is trying to reach me.”

Now I wonder whether it is Mom on the other end of the line. For what he has, there are no pills that any doctor can give him; he needs a hand to hold. He remains stuck, glued to his La-Z-Boy.

I try to contact her: Mom, Dad needs you. He won’t go anywhere by himself.

4

For a nonresident, I have spent too much time in this facility with its graduated levels of care. No one wants to progress along these markers of infirmity, even though, ironically, it is the opportunity the facility offers to go up—or down—that initially draws most retirees to join the community.

The maze of walkways that connects all of the various wings of the main one-story structure is nicely appointed, the blue or green carpets punctuated by gold rosettes, the walls papered with patterns bordered in gold stripes. Couches with stiff backs form circular resting places at points where corridors cross.

I often sit in such a crossing. To my right, a short hallway ends in double doors. Just beyond those doors lies the nursing wing where, in the first room on the left, my mother died. I had been visiting and, the next morning, stopping into her room to say goodbye before heading to the airport, I arrived just in time to hear her last words and watch her die.

Now my sister and I have decided to move Dad into the next level of care. He has only resided in the “garden apartment” for eight months, but he has stopped using a walker, requires staff assistance to wheel him to the dining room, can no longer bathe himself.

I sit with him in the late afternoon and the man I have never known to be depressed tells me he feels sad.

“If I had a gun,” he says, then points his finger to his forehead.

He has forgotten that he only recently became a resident of his garden apartment.

“I’ve lived in this house for thirteen years,” he says. “It will be hard to move.”

Now, when small things change in his routine and I ask him how he is adjusting, he seems perplexed.

“It has always been this way,” he tells me.

I ask him if he believes he will see Mom again when he gets to Heaven. He says he hopes he will.

“But I don’t think I will recognize her.”

I am about to leave him, once again, to return to my own life, but promise that I will phone him every day. I only hope that he remembers to push the button on his portable phone instead of on his television remote when he hears the ring.

I remind him of the advice he has often given me as we face an uncertain future.

“You just have to take what comes.”

5

In November, Dad moved to Assisted Living, where he would live for three months. He learned not to complain that they gave him a blue paper with an absorbent pad to sleep on instead of a bottom sheet.

My sister received the call from the nurse’s station. Between the two of us, both at long distance during the winter months when she becomes a “snowbird,” my sister and I alternate trips to Cincinnati that last about three days each. When she called in early January, I was already preparing to travel.

On the day of the call, Dad’s friend had been concerned that he did not have enough clean pajamas. She searched through the drawer of his only remaining piece of furniture and discovered a gun. She immediately went to the nursing station and the supervisor arrived and removed the gun from the dresser. Dad became quite agitated.

He said, “You can’t take my gun!” and then, whatever it might mean for a man stuck in his La-Z-Boy with no strength to get himself out, he “went for her.”

When I arrived for my visit, I stopped by the social worker’s office to retrieve the gun. They had also found a tin of ammo in the dresser. The date on the gun read 1966, so he had owned it for fifty years.

What if Dad had had the means as well as the desire to put an end to his life? With what sorrow would he have recalled if he could the limitations of his only remaining way to defend himself? When he “went for” the supervisor holding the gun, with what reproach, and toward whom, did he reportedly cry, “It only shoots blanks!”?

6

On my next visit, I bring a couple of gifts to help Dad celebrate his ninety-sixth birthday.

During the previous six weeks, his speech has become almost indecipherable. The therapist tells me that his tongue no longer works symmetrically—due, she surmises, to small strokes.

Television has moved beyond his comprehension and newspapers pile up on his end table, unread.

On his birthday, but unaware of the timing, the staff deliver an unexpected notice from the director of nursing. Although my father has only resided in Assisted Living for two months, they want to move him again—to Nursing, where there is a higher ratio of staff to residents. My sister will move him in early February.

7

Now when I arrive, I pass by Mom’s old room.

“Brother brother brother . . . father father father . . . brother brother brother . . .” The woman sits with eyes closed in one of the recliner chairs, hands twitching. She caws, a migratory bird that has landed indoors and wants to get out.

The aides wheel Dad up to a table with the few other men for meals. No one speaks. He chokes on his food and now they always serve him applesauce. Even his Salisbury steak arrives pureed.

Until recently, he’d helped me work one of the puzzles, for age four and older. Until my last visit, he could still sign his name. He uses crayons in the art group and bats a beach ball with a swimming pool noodle when it comes toward him.

He lives now on a long corridor in Nursing. He likes to “walk” in his wheelchair; they have removed the footrests so he can move up and down the hallway, in and out of the lounge, watching whatever is going on. But when his long-ailing prostate gland creates urgency, he enters the nearest room—never his own—to use the toilet, where he can still pull himself out of the wheelchair and onto the grab bars. He uses other men’s shavers and any toothbrush he can find.

When the aides try to redirect him to his own room, he has begun to curse them. He uses the f-word—not one that was ever part of his vocabulary—and when he wants their attention, he shouts “help.” When an assistant wheels him to the bathroom after dinner and tells him it is too early for bed, he yells so that everyone in the lounge can hear: “Goddamn it! I pay rent here!” And when she pushes him back to where I sit waiting, he begins to undress, saying, “Bed. Bed.” When I explain that the staff are busy and he will have to wait awhile, he curses again. “Shit! This is shit!” He quiets down but “walks” himself to the corridor and continues to remove his shirt.

Now the staff wants us to move him again, this time, to a Special Care unit off the Nursing Center.  Since we first moved him out of the garden home, he has climbed “up” in additional levels of care three times. We think he has hit the apex.

8

It is mid September. The morning sun warms us as he sits in his wheelchair, his Cincinnati Reds cap shielding his eyes, his sweater tucked around his shoulders. I chat: how nice the little pond; see the tomato plant someone on the staff has added to the walled and locked courtyard; wonder if anyone ever fills that birdbath. Lucky you to have chosen this facility; how much I like that Brittany—she always makes you smile.

After a brief quarter hour, he says it is time to go in. He charmed them when he first arrived on Special Care, the way he “walked” the long perimeter in his chair. They attributed his loss of weight to his ceaseless motion.

And then, for no apparent reason, he stopped his constant rolling.

He recognized me today and smiled. But within a few minutes, he had already fallen asleep. The nurse reports that he had yelled out all night long. At lunch I joke with him. I turn and say, “You will be ninety-seven in four months; at the rate you are going, you will live to be a hundred.”

“Whoopee,” he says.

After lunch I wheel him over to the piano. I have brought sheet music to his favorite hymns, and have printed the words in large print. He sings parts of each hymn as once he did when Mom played her organ.

Later I bring him a large chocolate milk shake from Graeter’s. When I give it to him, he lights up and sucks the cup dry. I don’t tell him goodbye, just good night, even though I am leaving on an early morning flight.

We bring in hospice. And the next week, I get a call. The night nurse had observed significant decline and pronounces him “in the final dying stage.” I make plans to fly the next day and am on the computer setting up my flight when the phone rings again: “He’s gone.”

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