Becoming My Father’s Reluctant Caregiver

How we’ve both struggled to care for one another throughout our relationship

“Dad…can I ask you something?” It’s a moody December afternoon. A Sunday. The light coming through the window is a muted gold, the sky the soft blue gray of winter. The house is quiet. Dad and I have just finished our usual small talk and his girlfriend, Leslie, has been gone most of the day.

There is a long, narrow scab down the center of Dad’s forehead, from where he fell the other night and hit his head.

“I know we’ve talked about this before but…I feel that it would be an act of neglect not to keep at it. You’re going to fall again. Your health is declining. If you don’t want to go into assisted living, that’s fine, but you at least need a caregiver. I know you want Leslie to take care of you, but she’s barely ever home. You shouldn’t be here by yourself.”

“I don’t need a caregiver. And I couldn’t afford it, anyways.”

“I know. We’ve talked about this. But you could apply for VA benefits. And there are other options. I’ve told you about this so many times. It seems like such a better solution than you forcing yourself to get through a day, potentially falling and breaking a hip or hitting your head again… We have to think about the future and if we don’t take action now, with all the waiting lists and red tape…it’ll be too late. You won’t be able to get the help you need when you need it.”

He shakes his head. “I won’t fall again. It wasn’t even a big deal. And if things get worse, I’m just going to kill myself.” He looks at me with his watery blue eyes. “I have a plan. And I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

1984

I loved to help my dad do chores when we spent weekends at the cabin near Big Bear. I think I just really loved to be outside in the woods, away from the noise and bustle of our suburban neighborhood. I was 8 and I begged him to let me help him apply a coat of sealant to the deck.

I wasn’t wearing safety glasses — who wore safety glasses in the eighties? — and only five minutes into the job, I clumsily flicked my paintbrush, the sealant getting into my eyes. I squealed and yelled for my dad.

He ran to me, scooped me up, and carried me the short distance to where he had parked the pickup truck. He lowered the gate and laid me down on it, my head dangling off the edge.

“Dammit, Yael, I told you to be careful. This stuff can blind you.”

I was crying and my tears came harder when he said that. I was terrified by his words.

“Do not move,” he said, cranking the spigot at the side of the house and bringing the hose over to me. He held my head down, and forced each eye open, one by one, letting the hose pour water into my eyes while I screamed.

“I’m sorry,” he kept saying.

After a few minutes, he threw down the hose and told me to get up. He wrapped his arms around me and squeezed me so tight.

“Grab that pile of papers to your left,” he says. “Then flip them over so they’re upside-down and file them in that order.”

I’m sitting in the cramped corner where his desk and file cabinet are arranged. I hate doing his filing. His organizational system doesn’t make any sense to me and he’s such a perfectionist about it that if he thinks I might have put something in the wrong spot, he’ll make me take out the whole folder and re-sort the entire thing.

“Don’t forget to file everything in front of the tabs, not behind.”

This conversation goes back to my childhood. When I was little and he would take me to work, we’d argue incessantly about his filing system. I could never understand why he filed everything in front of the tabs and not behind them.

“Dad, I got it,” I say, and I start sorting and filing.

1986

Dad became so stressed about work that he wasn’t sleeping anymore. It seemed like every other week, he had a new stress hack: meditation, diet, self-hypnosis… By the time I was 10, it was fitness.

He started waking up early to go for walks and one day, he asked me if I would go with him.

I wasn’t really keen on getting up early, but I agreed to do it.

So we walked through our neighborhood in the early morning light. We sometimes went to my mom’s high school and jogged around the track. Well, my dad jogged, and I fell behind and eventually sat down and waited for him to finish. I particularly loved Tuesdays and Thursdays when we’d bicycle to a nearby park and ride up and down the hilly trails under the beautiful oak trees.

We almost never spoke on these outings. Barely a word passed between us. I never knew what to say to him.

“Could you put thirty catheters into that bag that hangs on the back of the door, please?”

I dig through his closet, looking for his bag of medical supplies. Sometimes, it takes a while — he occasionally moves things and then forgets where he put them.

I count them out and fill the bag.

“Listen,” he says, his voice urgent. “I need you to hang that from the left handle. You always hang it from the right one and that makes it so hard on me.”

“Okay, Dad,” I say, trying not to show my irritation.

“No, please,” he says. “You don’t understand how hard everything is. In order for me to get into that bag, I have to lean against the counter with my right hand. If you hang it from the right side handle, it’s almost impossible for me to get my left hand into it. If you hang it from the left side handle, it leans open enough for me to get my hand in.” He looks pleading. “I’m not trying to be difficult. Everything is just so goddamn hard.”

“Okay,” I say, putting a hand on his arm. I feel horrible. Guilty. Why do I get so angry and irritated around him so easily when everything is such a challenge for him? Where is my compassion for him?

1990

My parents enrolled me in a private high school. Over the past three years, my family had moved twice — the second time to another state — and I’d attended six different middle schools. Because of the harassment and assault I’d endured in 7th grade and all the changes and new schools, my anxiety was overwhelming.

There were almost 1,000 students at that school — it was the biggest student body I had ever seen. And it was all there in front of me because the first day of school started with a school-wide assembly.

My dad walked me to the gymnasium doors and after I peeked in and saw all those students in the bleachers, all I could think about was: Where was I supposed to sit? Who would I talk to? Was everyone going to stare at me as I walked in?

I grabbed my dad’s arm. “Please don’t leave me,” I begged him. I just wanted to go home. None of us knew how unstable my mental health was by that point. Anxiety disorder wasn’t widely understood to be an actual mental health issue.

My dad, the son of two scrappy, pragmatic immigrants, didn’t believe in coddling people. “You’ll be fine. You have to do this. You have to go to school. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

“Dad, please,” I begged. I was crying by then, ducking my head so the students just arriving wouldn’t see me.

“Yael…” He took me by the arms and made me look at him. “I’m not taking you home. You will be fine, do you understand?”

I nodded, though I was stiff when he hugged me. Then I turned and made my way into the gymnasium, comically slowly. I looked back over my shoulder once and saw that Dad was still there. He waved his hand, reassuringly, then turned and left.

“Did you set the washer to do a second rinse?” he asks. “You know I prefer to have the sheets rinsed twice.”

“Yes, Dad, I got it.” The house is so dark now. It’s only 5 o’clock, but at this time of year, night has already fallen.

“When you clean the bathroom, I need six cups in the dispenser. Just six. It’s too hard to get them out if there are more.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t forget to make sure all the cleansers are closed after you use them. Sometimes Leslie goes to use them after you leave and when you don’t close them properly, she shakes them and all the liquid comes flying out. She really hates that.”

“Okay, Dad. I’ll make sure I close everything.”

I lock myself in his bathroom with all the supplies I need, but instead of cleaning, I spend six minutes scrolling through Instagram, trying to calm down. I keep checking my email, wishing someone would send me a message.

I feel so alone.

1990

My friends and I laughed all the way out to the parking lot. It was December, just a few weeks from our holiday break and we were crushing freshman year (despite my anxiety).

My friend Sheri’s dad was waiting for me. “I’m taking you home,” he said.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked. Dad always picked me up.

“Your mom’s sick. He asked me to come get you.”

Something was off, I knew, but I said nothing. Sheri and I got into the car and when he dropped me off, I walked into the house and found Grandpa there, on the phone. I froze. How had he gotten there from L.A. so quickly? Why was he there?

Without greeting, he handed me the phone. “Your dad wants to talk to you.”

I took the phone, my hand shaking.

“Sweetie?”

I heard his voice on the other end.

“Listen. Something happened when your mom took Tegan and Levi to school. She passed out in the car on her way home, but she’s okay. It was fast and she came to when the car started swerving off the road.”

“Dad. Where are you? What’s wrong?” I asked, my voice shaking.

“Something’s wrong with your mom’s heart, okay? We don’t know what. But something is very wrong.” He suddenly broke down in tears.

I immediately followed. I had never witnessed my dad cry. I knew it must be really bad.

“Sweetie. I need you right now. You’re the oldest. I need you to help your grandpa. I need you to do the laundry, make dinner, get the lunches packed for the kids. I need you to take over for your mom while we’re in the hospital, okay?”

“Okay,” I whispered. “Just don’t let her die, okay?”

He let out another sob.

I make tortellini for dinner. We always have tortellini for dinner when I visit Dad. He makes sure of that. I actually don’t like tortellini very much — what I love is ravioli. He gets them confused, though, and can’t remember. I don’t want to be rude and point out his mistake.

He says he is still capable of cooking — that he cooks all the time. Yet whenever I come over, he asks me to cook because it’s so hard for him. I want to point this out. He always says everything is fine, he has everything under control. And yet, when I am with him, things are very obviously out of control. But how many times can I point that out before he starts to feel like shit? It’s certainly not going to change his mind about things.

“Y,” he says, waving to get my attention as I stir the sauce. “Can you please pick up that crumb?”

“Huh?” I scan the floor, seeing nothing.

“I think you dropped a crumb when we were eating the chips. Leslie just swept this morning and she hates to come home to a messy house.”

I press my lips together as I spot the minuscule crumb near the corner of the room. With his failing eyesight, how did he even see that?

I pick it up, trying to hide my annoyance, as always.

“She just hates little messes like that,” he says, as if by apology.

I don’t respond.

2001

I woke up on the floor to the sound of the phone ringing. My apartment was packed up, ready to be loaded into my Dad’s truck. He and my sister drove three days just to come to Santa Fe and help me pack up and drive home.

My best friend, Amee, was on the other end of the line. She was crying. “Are you watching the news? There’s been a terrorist attack.”

I stumbled to my feet, dug around the piles of boxes for my TV and plugged it back in, turning on the news. Dad and Tegan woke up at the sound and we watched footage of that first plane hitting the tower in horror.

My dad was on his feet in seconds. “We gotta get out of here. We’re too close to Los Alamos. This is not a safe place to be. Yael, get your shit in the truck now.”

“It has to be an accident,” I said again and again. “No one would do something so awful.”

“I love you,” Dad said, pulling on his jacket, clearly not interested in breakfast, “but you really need to grow up. There is evil in this world. I don’t understand why you can’t see that.”

I stumbled, in a rush to finish packing and get the truck loaded. When the second plane hit the second tower, my dad and I exchanged a glance across the room. His face was steely and I knew he wanted to challenge me to keep my head in the sand after seeing that.

We made it to Cortez, Colorado by that night and the three of us sat in a row at the end of one of the beds, watching footage from earlier that day that seemed like a horror film. We held each other’s hands, each of us crying in silence.

“I think you pushed the mattress too far against the wall last time you made the bed,” he said, before I left the room to put fresh sheets on his mattress. “Please don’t do that this time. And don’t forget to make sure nothing is hanging more than seven inches on each side or I won’t be able to get my legs under the covers.”

“I know, Dad,” I say. “I’ve been doing this for two years.”

He goes on, oblivious to my comment. “Make sure the pad is three inches off the edge of the mattress. Last time I had an accident, it wasn’t over far enough, and some pee dripped off and onto the sheets.”

“Okay.”

“And I really need everything pulled down about six inches from the head of the mattress. If there’s not enough length to tuck in really tight at the end, I can’t maneuver my legs. So don’t pull everything so high anymore.”

I give him a thumbs up and retreat into his bedroom where I fold and put away the laundry I’ve just done and then make the bed according to specification.

Everything has to be so precise or he literally cannot get into or out of bed without help.

2010

“Your father and I are getting a divorce.” The room was so quiet after that statement, I could hear the clock ticking.

“Please. Please don’t do this,” I said. “Not now.”

“I know you’ll think I’m being heartless,” she said. “But we had decided the night this happened. We agreed we’d move forward the next morning, but he woke up having a stroke.”

I was speechless. All I could think about was Dad going through a divorce while dealing with the paralysis from his stroke.

“What do you want me to do, Yael?” my mother asked, throwing her hands up. “Do you have any idea how miserable I’ve been for the past ten years? I cannot go on another day. And you want me to change the plans we already made so I can chain myself to a man I don’t want to be with anymore? You want me to make my life more miserable?”

I shook my head, still lost in dismal mental images of my father’s future.

“I’m not a monster,” she said, getting up from her chair. “I just cannot do this anymore.”

I hug my dad goodbye. I’ve been doing chores for four hours now. I’m tired and I want to go home.

“Thank you,” he says. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

I want to say something. I want to beg him to hire a housekeeper. I want to complain that his other five children could maybe contribute a little more so that most of the burden didn’t fall on me. I want to yell. I want to cry.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” he insists, and I know what he’s referring to. “I don’t need any help. I have a plan.”

I don’t want to say that all evidence points to the contrary. I just smile.

I drive home in the dark, passing all the pretty holiday lights in each neighborhood that I drive through. My house is dark and quiet when I enter. Empty.

I sit down and do the only thing I know to do.

I write.

© Yael Wolfe 2019