2 posts tagged “love”

Today I am my mother's keeper. She has been sick, have dizzy spells and nasea. My mother has always looked after everyone else, and it is hard for her to accept that she needs help once-in-awhile.

She is 83, and takes care of my father, who is 86 and bedridden. He was not always thus. He was once very active, jogging daily, and an accomplished artist. I have posted one of his sketches on the left. He drew nearly every day and there are hundreds of little sketches in piles around my mother's house. I have started to post them online at another blog, My Father's Hand.

The house is quiet now. My mother is resting in her bed and my father in his. I look at my surroundings, their surroundings, in the calm of the afternoon, and think about their lives together. I like to imagine that they were happy in the early days. Certainly after I came along there was an emotional abyss between them that has lasted to this day. Frequent forced separations by three wars, the resulting loneliness and uncertainty eventually resulted in involvements with others for both of them. Despite the ebb and flow of their difficult circumstances, my mother never faltered in her devotion to my father, which was strengthened by her sense of duty as a wife and eased by memories of what was once a powerful love for him, and their common history and committment held them together.

For more than a thousand days since his accident she has tended to him, talking to him despite his lack of a reply, moving his frail body because he cannot, making sure that he takes the medicines he would not ingest on his own. Every day, four times a day, for a thousand days she has given him medicine, put him into his wheelchair, taken him to the bathroom, taken him to the dining table, wheeled him outside, tried to encourage him, stimulate him, get him to smile. And yet he continues to sink further into himself, withdrawing slowly and certainly into a place where no one can follow, deep into the furthest recesses of consciousness.

Uncannily, his physical body is also turning inward. His hands and feet have started to curl, and she must put braces on his legs at night to keep this process at bay. I remember a day many years ago when he was still lucid and talking, but sought out his own quietude while sitting in the sun, his palms resting upward turned in towards his body. To me this seems to be a gesture of both welcoming and withdrawal, a capturing of the outside world for contemplation in anticipation of a final closing much later. He was like a plant, processing sunlight, trapping its energy inside him to light his way on dark nights.

This light is growing dimmer, or is perhaps further away as he starts out on his long journey toward death. He searches my face when it happens to fall in his field of vision. His brow furrows as he tries to understand what he is seeing. He is not blind, but his memory is no longer of any use to him. I look familiar, but I am a stranger. Perhaps I look like someone he once drew. Perhaps there is a spark of recognition, but he does not speak. Together my mother and I move his body, from one side of his bed to the other, so his fragile skin will not darken and burn from the constant pressure of the mattress. We fold and wedge pillows behind his back to keep him in place. She pats his hand and reassures him, "See, that's better. More comfortable now, right?"

It is the same, every day, for a thousand days, her constancy, a lifetime of devotion. He can no longer speak it, but she can feel it, that she makes a difference to him, her huband, my father, the man who once drew pictures.