My Father's Footprints Read Free

keeping my father at home
     and administering medicines and meals with a precision and doggedness no hospital could achieve. My mother is
Star Trek
’s Borg Collective, a flying cube of quasi-mechanical imperialism. My father will take his medicine at the exact time prescribed.
     He will eat balanced meals, three times a day. Assimilate or be destroyed. Resistance is futile. My father lives an extra
     nine months or so because he is almost too busy to die.
    Paid caregivers from the outside are held to rigorous standards of conduct.
    “Where’s the hospice aide?” I ask one day, darting into the apartment in between work and home.
    “I fired hospice,” my mother says.
    “Very funny.”
    “I did.”
    “Nobody fires hospice. That’s like… I mean… um… they’re the last word in… last words.” I concede that this is not exactly
     Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I’m kind of babbling while my mind bids farewell to all those brisk, competent
     hospice workers who were—I had thought—going to get me through those moments when I’m weak and exhausted and afraid, like
     right now, for instance.
    “Hospice are the people who take care of you when you have nobody else,” I try again. “Everybody likes hospice.” (Possible
     title for final
Raymond
episode?)
    It’s no use. My mother is scared. Her response to fearfulness and isolation has always been to set up an even more fearful
     and isolating situation. The hospice people are
not helping enough.
So they must go.
    We find a different hospice agency and reenlist.
    “You have to promise not to fire them, even if the aides show up late,” I beg.
    “I’m not promising anything.”
    My mother does most of the work and grows so tired that we arrange a five-day respite for her. My father will go to a beautiful
     nursing home in the woods.
    Early one morning, I drive my father out to the McLean Home for this short stay. I step through the sliding doors and behold
     the sunlit atrium, the California fireplace, the greenhouse, the smiling and friendly staff, the soft jazz playing in the
     lobby. It is impossibly peaceful and cheerful.
    “You don’t happen to have a second bed available, do you?” I inquire weakly.
    The soft jazz turns out to be a man playing, perhaps a little dementedly, the Natalie Cole version of “Avalon” over and over,
     but in all other respects, McLean appears to be paradise onearth for the middle-aged, the weary, the sandwiched. I don’t want to leave.

    Conversation between me and my son, who is eight.
    “Does anybody live to be one hundred twenty?”
    “Not very often.”
    “How old will I be when I die?”
    “Old, I hope.”
    “Will you live to be one hundred? How old will I be when you’re one hundred?”
    “Sixty-five. We can be old men together.”
    I get a lot of this these days. It’s evening, and Joey and I are driving back from McLean. He’s a trouper about visiting my
     father, but spending a lot of time around the very old, around the near-to-death, has stirred up questions in him.
    “Do really old people want to die?”
    “Sometimes. Sometimes people who are ninety or one hundred say they feel they’ve lived enough; they’re tired in some way we
     can’t even begin to understand.”
    We come up over a rise in Simsbury, and Hartford surprises us, twinkling in the distance. Life is long, life is short. We’re
     just guests here, checking off tasks, getting through our lists. The car surges through the night. There’s a lot to talk about.
    When the five days are over, I drive out to bring my dad home to my mother. I have slipped into some horrific high-functioning
     mode, where my voice booms out cheery good advice to him and my manner is that of a bustling and businesslike male nurse.
    This is precisely what my father does not need. He needs some humanity from me. He needs to visit with me in the kind, intensely
     personal way that a father may visit with a son. I do notgive him