Saying Goodbye in God’s Waiting Room
Let’s talk politics again next week. I just finished my last visit with my father.
I wanted it to go like this: We sat together in the driveway where I went from diapers to parking the car returning from Iraq, sand from there caught in my boot treads mingling with the soil I near-literally sprung from. We talked about baseball and how cigars used to taste before Mom made him quit. His memory was sharp in places, missing in others, so a lot of what was communicated crossed via wires we’d created over the decades playing catch, winking across the table at my wedding, arguing together with some car salesman to save a hundred bucks. He’s old school enough not to have cried at the goodbye forced on us but I wasn’t. Bye, dad.
None of that actually happened. It was what I wanted so badly. Instead it went like this.
How the hell did my parents end up in some assisted living facility in some awful part of Central Florida removed from planet earth if not time itself. God’s Waiting Room, the locals only half joke. The place was a swamp drained nine months ago. Mom and dad ignored some good advice and made some bad financial choices and moved around; Zillow says my childhood home is going on its fourth owner since I packed out.
Dad had dementia, which isn’t really death as much as erasure. It’s not the funny kind of memory loss where he thinks I’m someone else. Instead, the memory loss strips out the mental filters, and old folks like dad blurt out things. You tell yourself he doesn’t mean it and really doesn’t even know he’s doing it, but you also so badly want his last words not to be a slurred “I made poopy.” It’s a mean disease.
I looked around at what other people wrote in these circumstances (Springsteen made a career out of it.) It seems most stories take the high road, a man with flaws, sure, but one who, fill in the blank, served his country, worked two jobs to raise his kids, was quiet but fair, something like that. The writer reviews lessons learned, picks out some vignette from childhood to illustrate wisdom or some salt of the earth stuff. For full drama, build it around some talisman, a gold watch passed down, a family mystery revealed when dad finally explains the origin of that old pocket knife he always carried. It’s yours now, son, take care of it.
But I sat in that too tight room angry as hell over mediocrity. Even the smell, that hospital cleaning fluid smell that never quite overcomes the old people odor, pissed me off. I never had enough to love or hate. My father was uninterested in my sister and I enough, but that was kind of the extent of it. He never beat us, never squandered the family Christmas money. He was home almost every night frozen in his chair watching television. As I got older and our interactions switched to long distance phone calls, the equivalent was me saying something about my week and dad waiting for me to pause long enough for him to say “Well, OK, here’s your mom.”
Our time together under one roof was before cable and he’d watch hours of whatever was on those handful of broadcast channels. Because this was also before remote controls and he didn’t want to get up to change the channel, he’d just watch whatever CBS had on Tuesdays from after dinner until when he fell asleep. There wasn’t so much to love and admire, and there wasn’t enough to hate and inspire. He was edgeless and his seeming goal was to pass that on by example.
I was determined to be the nerdy kid until I finally realized it was a terrible way to meet girls and a good way to get beat up. But in elementary school I was the one who went to the public library after school and had a nodding relationship with the workers there, my semi-imaginary friends who feigned interest in how I was doing. I’d take out the classics I’d learned about in the World Book encyclopedia, and spend days turning the pages. I couldn’t understand them, or why it took those old writers so long to say anything I did figure out.
Dad’s one interest was the American Civil War. I couldn’t follow the complex back-and-forth on the maps at an early point, but I found some dramatically illustrated picture books that were my first taste of what porn does to your brain. Dad planned a family trip to Gettysburg nearly every summer I can remember as a child but we never went. There was never any real reason, like money or work, given, we just never went. I had no idea if dad’s last wish was to see the place or he’d dropped the idea himself in 1972 and just not mentioned it.
A very few times (OK, that once) when we talked about “fatherhood” with me as an adult raising kids of my own he laid out his theory: the dad earns money. In return everyone should basically leave him alone. It seemed at one glance practical, maybe stoic and even noble. Dad missed the school play every year (I did drama club, too, jeez I really had a need for approval now that I think of it) because food isn’t free, you know. And we always had enough, a decent life with the essentials for sure.
But as I grew older and faced the challenges of raising kids myself I realized that was the easy part. Going to work was not so hard. Trying to find the right thing to say to an eight year old who just got teased at school is hard. You wanna leave a mark on a kid? Sigh and get out of the chair to go out back and watch her try to go around more than twice with the Hula Hoop.
But time did pass. I remember how near the end he got to climbing out of the car like it was a space capsule, his biggest part of the day sorting out pills for the week. It was those memories that made me angry sitting in Central Florida. Assisted living and its ilk are just stopping off points for Americans to go and die. I don’t know if there is such a vast death industry of such commercial places in any other country but they are everywhere in Florida, in every price range (the industry itself is worth $420 billion nationwide.)
Many justify their high prices based on the food served, even though I learned most dementia patients basically starve to death. They forget they are hungry, they forget how to chew, and at some point they forget how to swallow. They spit their food out, perhaps trying to communicate it is too hot and not knowing the words, or they are just not sure what to do with the stuff. It is really, really hard to force an adult to open his mouth, chew, swallow and get anywhere near enough nutrition in him. The docs offer supplements but in the end nature always wins.
About the last thing you can do with dementia folks is talk subtly about childhood and disappointments and anger. Dad seemed to slip and slide mentally around the room. You realize you’re actually talking to no one, and that makes you wonder why you are talking at all. What is the point now, decades after I’ve left home and become whoever I am, of telling dad we should have done more stuff together? I feel ungrateful, then angry again, then pointlessly try again to explain some of it to him.
Then I left. You expect some sort of conclusion, a “wrapper,” a proper ending, not just running out of time years ago. You realize any of that had to have happened years ago and you realize that was as impossible as the man getting up out of bed now to do it. This is a terrible place to wrap up a life no matter how poorly lived and shortly after my visit my father died.
Mom had me go through his clothes and things, saying maybe there was something I could use. I thought hard thoughts that day, and I failed to distract myself by watching the dust in the sun beam. I handled his things too roughly, angry he never was the man I wanted him to be, but worried at the same time that as much as I cursed the image in the old glossy photos I was afraid of what I saw in the reflection.
Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.
