I haven’t written a word, except for work, in weeks or so it seems. I hear words and stories all the time in my head, but my heart and hands are unwilling to type. My parents are fading away like a brilliant sunset that turns silently into the dark night. Together yet apart. One in assisted living, one in nursing care. What tears our family apart is that they cannot be together. I should be writing about my 15th year (of my 31 years of marriage), but I don’t care to. My marriage will never be a strong and vibrant as what my parents have, despite their weakening hearts. Their devotion is not unlike the couple in The Notebook, where the wife has Alzheimer’s and the husband has heart disease.
Dad has his litany of ailments and Mom is a “loon,” most of the time. Ironically, it is during Mom’s lucid moments when she complains, “Take me home, Jack. I want to go home” that Dad suffers the most. He feels her pain, tears well in his eyes. Dad needs assistance, not as much as Mom. He changes the oxygen tank which he drags wherever he goes; for the most part, he is tethered now to a machine. I see him wearing down, running out of air and time. He dresses himself, pays his bills on time, and walks the long walk up the two flights of stairs to fetch Mom. What he cannot do or struggles with are daily showers and laundry and cooking, so he is on the assisted living side in the same retirement community, which Dad refers to as the “institution.”
Meanwhile, Mom resides in the nursing side of their retirement complex/institution, refuses to walk, prefers to be pushed in the wheelchair, and wants to sit near Dad as she watches Fox News. Dad is as sharp as any SNL comedian; he would rather watch CNN, anything but Fox Network, but he defers to Mom, as he has for years. The rest of us know his true thoughts as he withholds little from us. Mom has no idea of the time or day or year or what she had for breakfast or what happened five minutes ago, and considering how she gets her current news, it is no wonder she is confused all the time. Sometimes our family changes the station to Comedy Central and Mom is happy because Steven Colbert is as “patriotic” as anyone on Fox. What Mom knows is family and that she is not home and that she wants to go home.
I have no doubt that my parents will go home together–probably within hours of each other. They cling to each other exclusively as do swans or turtle doves or wolves or gibbons or loons, other animals that also mate for life.
Love is Complicated 