Walking My Father Home Taught Me What Matters And How To Live

I thought I moved 2000 miles to help my father die, but I was wrong. I came back so he could remind me how to live.

I was sitting at my desk like any other day when the phone rang. Glanced over and saw my sister’s number so I smiled and picked up.

Linda? Dad’s dying.

There’s a candle burning on my desk and I am the moth, hypnotized by the flame. That’s all I can see, the flame flickering and dancing until it slowly dawns on me that somewhere in the fog, she’s still talking.

Words. So many words. Tumor, hospital, emergency, pneumonia, and I want to scream at her to shut up, shut up, but she keeps talking.

I can’t breathe. Oh God, I can’t breathe.

Stop, I say. Stop. Please.

I don’t even know what you said, I whisper, so she says it all again. Family meeting next week, she tells me. Two thousand miles away.

I hang up the phone, slide to the floor and cry the ugly cry.

I stand at their door, sniffling. Shh, he whispers, sitting up. I had a bad dream, I snuffle. Shh, don’t wake your mom, he says and gets up.

We tiptoe to the kitchen and I climb on the wooden chair in my kitty cat pajamas as he pulls out milk, sugar, cocoa, and cups.

He puts milk on the stove and while he’s stirring cocoa and sugar, the milk boils over and he grabs the hissing pot, cussing under his breath.

Mama will be mad about the pot, I say as he sets the cups on the table and his shoulders shake as he laughs silently. He promises to soak the pot.

We sit in the dark with only the stove light on and he takes a sip and asks me what I dreamed. I swing my feet under the table and say I forget.

Forty-something years later, I bolt awake to a hand on my foot.

He’s sitting at the foot of my bed, crying. I had a bad dream, he says. I glance at the clock. It’s after three.

We go to the kitchen and I put milk on the stove. Stir cocoa and sugar. As I pour milk into the cups, I ask what he dreamed. I forget, he says.

Setting the cups on the table, I say I hope it tastes okay, I didn’t burn the pot and he laughs so loud his laughter fills up the dark.

Two weeks after I moved two thousand miles to keep my dad the hell out of one of those homes for the dying, the lady from Veteran Affairs shows up to check on him. They walk around the yard and I can hear his voice, but I can’t tell what they’re saying. I watch through the window, nervous.

Before she leaves, she stands beside me and rubs my shoulder gently. You look exhausted, she says. I look at her and blink, but no words come out, so I swallow and nod. Oh sweetheart, you need to get help, she says.

I look at her, blank. My eyes fill up. There’s help?

A few days later, she calls. Tells me she found a senior’s group that meets to play cards once a week. They have an opening.

Hey Dad, I say as I hang up. Did you know there’s a senior’s group that gets together to play cards? I’ll get my shoes, he says. Laughing, I tell him it’s not right now. It’s on Fridays. Well sign me up, he says, so I do.

It’s so early the sun isn’t quite awake. I tiptoe to my door and listen. Run down the hall and hide behind the ugly burgundy sofa. Mom gets up first, all bedhead and curls, wearing her white bathrobe with tiny pink flowers and lace trim around the collar. She puts coffee on.

Dad walks in and turns on the radio, real low. Peeking around the corner in the dark, I watch as they slow dance in the kitchen while the smell of coffee fills the air and I fall asleep on the cold tile floor.

We found another respite program at a private care home. He’d go for dinner Saturday and stay for Sunday brunch. Saturday was music night when the man with the guitar came. One of his neighbors from the farm lived there. Oh my God, Polly, he said. Is it really you? It really was.

They had so much catching up to do. And for me? It was one blessed night every week I could sleep the whole night through.

It’s maybe a month or three in, and we walk in like we do every Saturday. One of the staff walks up to greet us, drying her hands on a towel.

Dobry den, John. Yak spravy? she says.

I look at him and my face says wtf without my mouth even moving.

He laughs. I’m teaching her Ukrainian, he says. She’s a tiny Filipino woman I just adore, and she’s grinning a mile wide. She says she’s teaching him Tagalog. We trade, she says, and hugs him. I get you coffee, she says.

It will be his eighth language. He already spoke seven.

It’s not the language. It’s this. He has a pulmonary embolism, a tumor growing in his stomach and he’s lost his vision. He’s slowly dying knows it, but he’s learning a new language, and teaching one in trade.

And me? I am so humbled. Doesn’t matter how much he’s shrunk and shriveled with age, he is still seven feet tall.

The doctor said the tumor in his stomach would grow and grow, and over time he’d be able to eat less and less until — and I shook my head and said no. No, he is not starving to death in my house. Absolutely not.

I did not move two thousand miles for him to starve on my watch.

Hey dad, I tell him. We get to eat all day. Breakfast and snacks, lunch and snacks, dinner and snacks. He laughs and says I’m crazy. But he says he likes muffins and pudding and darned if he didn’t regain some weight.

One day he told me his vision loss confuses him. How so, I ask. Well, sometimes I can see, just for a second, and then it’s gone again.

Oh, I say, nodding. He doesn’t understand macular degeneration. Let me show you something, I say. I set him in front of the tv. Don’t look at the tv, I tell him. Look here, towards my voice.

Well, holy shit, he yells. He didn’t realize he had some vision left in the very corner of one eye. When he falls asleep in front of the tv, I kiss his head, cover him with a blanket and tiptoe away. The next day I find his white cane in the garbage. I shake my head and laugh until I cry.

You got more seed potatoes? he yells. I bring the whole box. Blind, far too skinny and less than a year from heaven, he’s crawling around on his hands and knees in the dirt planting potatoes. When we dig them up in the fall, he tells me they’re the best potatoes he’s ever eaten and I have to agree.

We’re having coffee in the sun one morning when he sets the cup down and starts to cry. I’m sorry, he says, pulling a Kleenex out of his pocket and honking. Why? I ask. You shouldn’t have to take care of me, he says.

Oh, right, I say. That’s why Baba lived with us when I was little, right? Every damn morning when the sun came up she’d reach her foot out and poke my mattress until I woke up. I remember that, he says, laughing.

You’re a good kid, he tells me, smiling.

My Dad wasn’t perfect, lest you think different. There isn’t one person who shares my blood would let me get away with that for a red hot second.

He’d give you the shirt off his back, but when he threw a spoon from the kitchen table to the sink clear across the room, every one of us kids disappeared like cockroaches when you turn on a light.

I could make a long list of his shortcomings, I promise you. Just like my own kid could make of mine. What are any of us, if not human?

One day he came home from playing cards and handed me a chocolate bar. Where’d you get this? I asked, surprised. Won it gambling, he says. I laugh and say you won this Dad, you enjoy it.

Nah, he says, it’s okay. I had five. Saved one for you.

Five, I ask, laughing. Five? Yeah, he says. I always win. I eat two and give two to the losers. The losers? I ask. Yeah, he says. I tell ’em thanks for a good game and share my chocolate and when I told that story at his funeral, everyone laughed and then reached for a Kleenex.

He was at respite that day. The night before, he put on his dress shoes and danced to the music, they said. Got up to have coffee in the morning sun, on the patio swing. After brunch, he stopped by the kitchen to tell a joke to a staff member. Well, he said, I guess I’ll be going now.

She was still laughing as he took two steps, maybe three, and then his body crumpled to the floor and his soul just kept right on going.

She handed me his shoes, her face crumpling. Holding his shoes in my hands, I sought the words but they escaped my lips and seeped through my eyes instead and I floated away on a sea of tears.

In his book on love and grief, Ram Dass says we’re all just walking each other home. One year. That’s how long I had to walk my father home.

No one tells you how to lose a parent. If you’re lucky, you’re a grown ass adult by then. I guess you’re supposed to just figure it out.

Here’s what I finally figured out.

I thought I moved two thousand miles to help my father die, but I was wrong. I came back so he could remind me how to live.

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? — Mary Oliver

Hey, I’m Linda and you can read more of my stories here.