Are we the selfish ones (one)

Part one.

I think you’re sick.

You cough. But you always cough a lot—still, something tells me that you’re coughing more than usual. Like you’re almost wheezing.

You seem weaker. You can’t get up without Mom’s help. I wonder if it’s the couch that’s the problem—it’s leather and the cushion has a lot of give so you practically sink into it. So I buy you a new one. It’s firmer, and you seem to like it. But you still seem like you have trouble standing up. Or staying standing up.

I buy you a brand new walker. I push it to you. You push it away. Even when I’m holding you and I can tell you’d fall over the moment I let you go, you push the walker away. How come strength and sense fades with Alzheimer’s, but not stubbornness? Someone goofed up somewhere.

Mom thinks you’re fine. She says you’re fine. You’re just being lazy. You’re just being dramatic. Somehow, I think she’s sneaking in a “I really hope…” in the beginning of each of those.

We finally test your temperature. It’s one hundred two.

I give you Tylenol. Mom asks me to take you to the ER. I say let’s wait an hour to see if the fever goes down. But she’s made up her mind, and like a cooked egg, late-night college mistakes, or the One Ring, once some things are made, they just can’t be unmade.

“Daniel, please. Okay? I won’t be able to sleep if we don’t go. Can we just go now? Okay? Please. Okay?”

“Let’s go,” I say, two minutes later.

“No…” she whines. “Give me five minutes.”

“Why?”

“I need to start washing the towels.”

“Just do it later.”

“No…we need to start it now.”

I plop onto another couch and grumble as I submit to her stubbornness, arguing to the invisible judge that just two minutes ago, she was the one that demanded that we go to the ER, now.

Maybe you and Mom were always made for each other.

It’s eleven p.m.

The next five hours are a blur, and it all goes according to plan. Isn’t it weird that there’s a plan?

You get taken to a room. Mom and I sit next to you. You seem to stabilize.

“Maybe we didn’t need to bring him here,” Mom says. “I’m going to ask if we can take him home.”

My face burns a little in frustration. “This was your idea,” I say scathingly.

She either doesn’t hear me, or ignores me. The outcome is the same: I feel unacknowledged.

They think you have pneumonia.

I was sick for the past couple of weeks. I hope you didn’t catch pneumonia from me. But I don’t think I had pneumonia.

It’s about two a.m. when I cancel everything I have planned for the next day. Well, technically, later today.

They take you upstairs. You’re stable. The doctor will evaluate you in the morning.

Finally, it seems like there’s nothing left to do. So we go home. I crawl into bed at four a.m. and it’s one of those moments where you’re so tired you actually can’t sleep.

All according to plan. This, after all, isn’t the first time we’ve taken you here.

We visit you the next day. Which is really just the same day. I’m barely awake.

You’re barely awake too. Mom tries to say ‘hi’ to you. Your eyes open, just barely, like little slits.

You don’t look happy. Not like, actively, unhappy. Just, like permanently pissed. Like unhappiness is plastered all over your face, or if someone sculpted a mask to look permanently unhappy and shoved it onto you, except that you gleefully accepted this new look.

Like your facial muscles are tight. Like your eyes are crossed. Like your lips are pursed and teeth are clenched.

Why are you so unhappy, Dad?

You’re mean to Mom. When she asks you a question, you mumble which means no one can understand you. And when Mom doesn’t understand you, you suddenly have the energy of the sun and growl and yell at her.

Dad, I know you have Alzheimer’s. I know you don’t always understand what is going on. I just wish you would be nicer to other people when trying to figure things out.

A physical therapist shows up, and the theatrics are predictable. You refuse to do anything other than shoo the therapist away. Fine, they have other people to attend to.

Minutes later, you ask for help getting out of the hospital bed to go to the bathroom, which the staff cannot let you do because they’re now legally on the hook, you know, since you refused to work with the therapist and all. It’s your fault; of course, you’ll just see it as everyone trying to boss you around.

Just another day. All according to plan.

A few days, even weeks before we took you to the hospital, Mom started saying something interesting to me. She’ll never say it to you. But she says it to me, and I’ve heard her say to some of her other relatives.

“I really pray to God that He takes John home soon.”

She says this in kindness. I wonder if she’s actually ready for you to “go home.” Saying it is one thing. Actually being ready, is another.

I’ve been saying my own version of this phrase for a much longer time. Some of it in kindness. Some of it, is charged by less positive emotion.

When we visit you later today, and the next day, and the day after that, my version of this phrase returns to me. It comes to me as I stand next to where you lie on the hospital bed, my back rested against the wall with my eyes connected to your resting face, you know, the one that looks like it’s pissed.

In my mind, I ask you a question: Are you happy, Dad? Are you? Because you don’t look happy.

You don’t answer, of course. Even if I spoke out loud, and even if you could hear my voice, I don’t know that you have the brain power to process an answer about “happiness.”

So I ask you my next question, charged with all of my positive and negative emotion, my version of Mom’s prayer, the one she says in kindness.

Why don’t you just go home, Dad? Why stay here? At every turn is just confusion, frustration, belligerence. Someone offering you food is someone telling you to do something you don’t want to do now. Someone giving you a walker to prevent you from falling is someone trying to boss you around. Someone telling you that they love you is someone keeping you from falling asleep. Every singe form of communication is someone asking something of you—your attention, your voice, your ability to live without anyone bothering you. So why stay? What’s left for you here? Go home. I don’t know what comes after life, but go do it. We had the best run we could’ve had here, and I think the time for that is up. Let’s go do something new. Me. You. Go do something new, Dad. Go be free. Have some relief, isn’t that what you want?

Go home, Dad. It’s the right thing to do now.

I rub my eyes as my internal voice subsides. I rub my temples, next. Emotion is flooding my body.

On the way home Mom asks me something. Or says something to me. I think it’s about you and your health. I think she wanted me to decide something for her. You know, one of those times where she defers a decision to me, only to actually have already made the decision herself, except she won’t take any responsibility for the choice she wants to make, leaving me to bail her out when something goes awry? That kind of decision. I think it was one of those.

Whatever it was, it breaks something in me. I snap. I go berserk and thankfully the road ahead is straight and requires no attention.

I don’t really know what I say to her, and it probably doesn’t matter. All I remember is something about why do I have to be the rock that supports her, and everything she does?

My voice is ballistic. I uppercut the roof. I strike the steering wheel. I miss the horn, thank god. I haven’t been this angry in a long time. I don’t know if I’ve ever been this angry.

Mom is entirely silent.

When we get home, I run to my room and yell into a pillow. And then I try to fall asleep. And I do, for who knows how long.

I wake up with an ache. The physical kind. The emotional kind. The spiritual kind, if there’s such a thing.

Last year, when you went to the hospital, I told a good friend that I wasn’t sure that I wanted you to get well, and that I hoped that he understood.

“I can completely understand,” he’d said in reply.

Was I the selfish one, last year? It is, after all, a variation on Mom’s prayer to God for you.

Why don’t you go home, Dad?

Am I the selfish one, for asking that? For wanting that?

Are you happy, Dad?

I cook Mom dinner and I snack along the way. I tell her that food’s ready, but as predicted, she goes off to go do something else instead. There’s always something more important for her to do, isn’t there? I can’t ever get her to sit in one place and just eat with me, with us. Maybe she just never wants to eat with me.

So I finish eating and leave food on the table before going to my room.

Hours pass. It’s quiet and late now. You’re not here, so the TV isn’t on which means I don’t have to hear five hours of news. Thank god.

But it’s still eerily quiet.

Someone knocks on my door.

“Daniel, can I come talk to you?”

I have very rarely heard those words from Mom. If ever. Not in anger, not in sadness.

“I don’t think I can take care of your dad anymore,” she says.

I just stare at her eyes. I haven’t thought she could take care of you in a very long time.

“What if I send him to a nursing home, and I go with him? And then when he passes away, I can move back here?”

I raise an eyebrow. Is she actually suggesting that you guys go to a nursing home?

“This way he isn’t alone,” she continues. “And then I can come back to this house later.”

Huh. That’s, actually a really good idea. I never thought of that.

“What do you think?” she asks me.

I tell her what I think. And then I add, just to be cautious, and skeptical: “How about you think about it, and tell me what you think in the morning? If you still think it’s a good idea, I’ll call them tomorrow and schedule an appointment for us to go visit.”

“That’s good. That’s good,” she says. And then before she walks out, she says one more thing: “Thank you, Daniel.”

This catches me off guard, a second time. There’s something different about how she says the words. I don’t know if it’s because she sees how exhausted I am, or if because she actually sounds sincere—not just saying the words because she’s supposed to, but because she actually means them.

Or maybe it’s just because I choose to hear the words that way.

My face softens. “Of course,” I mumble back to her. “You’re welcome.”

…