Go your own way
It’s morning. I walk to the backdoor of the master bedroom; normally I’d tiptoe, but if it’s just my dad, I don’t mind waking him up—in fact, that's my goal.
I tug on the strings that control the blinds, and with each tug, the blinds twist, letting in a wider and wider ray of light. One ray splays perfectly across my dad’s eyelids, which flutter open for the briefest of moments.
I’ve learned that when possible, always use nature to my advantage.
“Dad,” I call out, “it’s time to get up.”
I repeat myself a few times, getting louder and louder each time.
“Why so early?” he finally mumbles.
“We need to go to the hospital,” I say. It’s a sort of lie.
It’s the story I’ve been selling to him: He got sick, came home from the hospital, and now he needs to go back to do some tests for a while.
I hand him some new clothes when he finally gets out of bed, makes his coffee, and warms up his oatmeal. I budgeted time for this routine.
“I have my own clothes!” he growls.
“These are new,” I say. “I want to see if they fit.”
I was at Target the night before, running around buying various different outfits for my dad’s new life. It felt like shopping for the children I don’t have, and the signs talking about “Back to School Sale!” certainly don’t help.
The pants fit, and I rush to rip off the tags and stuff them into some plastic bags. The shirts are hit and miss, and I’ll have to return some of them. Still, I have enough; there’s seven pairs of street clothes, three sets of pajamas, another pair of shoes, a toothbrush, toothpaste, sandals, and even deodorant.
I pack everything into bags and toss them into the car.
I think my dad sees this. He’s moving very slowly and taking his time putting on some of his other clothes.
“Dad, we need to go!”
“What’s the hurry!?”
I’ve budgeted for extra time, but it’s still not enough. Children, the elderly, and elderly children, have no concept of time.
My brother shows up, and we all get into the car.
“How are you today?” I ask my dad as he watches the garage door close, probably for the last time.
“I’m doing okay,” he says back.
I hope he feels like this is just a normal trip, but even when Alzheimer’s-struck, he’s not dumb.
“Where am I going?”
My hands temporarily freeze on the steering wheel. Does he know? I ask myself.
“The hospital,” I say instead.
I can feel my heart beat as we cruise down the streets away from my parents’ house. Am I doing this right?
I can feel my already-shaky hands tremble even more. Is how I am doing this, right?, I start asking myself. Should I have told him the truth? Should I have tried to use more logic?
I can feel my brain recalling all time my brother and I spent researching different places, learning the ins and outs of an industry we knew nothing about, debating which spots had the best programs, the best activities, the best staff. Is this the right decision?
And then, we’re there.
We check him in, bring his clothes, start planning how we’ll decorate his room. We brought some photos to make him feel at home, photos of him and his family, of him with us, of him and my mom.
“How much is this place?” my dad asks in Cantonese.
Again, I freeze.
He knows, I tell myself.
“One thousand dollars,” I tell him. “Medicare covers it.”
He nods, seemingly satisfied.
Neither is true. My mom had saved a significant amount of money and still, figuring out how we’ll make money stretch is hard. I don’t know how anyone else does this. I’m sure many people don’t do it at all.
My nerves kick in again as we leave. I wonder if this is what I imagine sending your children off to college is like. You do all the research, give all the advice you can give, and at the end of the day it’s still a crap shoot—it’s a gamble.
You just have to trust that things might be okay without you.
I remember that my dad used to always say, “Just put me in a nursing home. So long as I have my music, I will be alright.”
That’s basically what we’ve done.
My parents’ house is how I left it, and this is precisely what feels wrong. Everything is exactly how I left it. I have not lived this way in years.
I try to start cleaning the house, but I don’t know where to start. Everything in the house is loaded with nostalgia and I want to keep it all, but one of the seemingly cruel things of life is that growth requires loss. I wonder if I should borrow a little of Marie Kondo and give thanks to these items for what they meant and then move on. I mean, my brother and I could find a way to keep everything for sure, but who are we hoarding these items for? The next generation? Someone else? There’s no guarantee that anyone else will value those same things the way you do. In fact, it’s probably guaranteed that they won’t.
I play “Remember when?” as I encounter various different things that remind me of her. The bottles of prune juice that I regularly bought for her (“Daniel, I need some prune juice!”), which I just dump down the drain. A blue salad bowl, which showed up at a number of her house parties over the years. Her clothes, which I should just pack into a bag and donate but I can’t bring myself to do it.
It’s so quiet as I work. The only sounds I hear come from outside the house. The phone rings—the house phone—with the phone number we’ve had since I was born. I wonder if I’ll have to cancel that phone line forever. Nostalgia isn’t worth a land line in the modern day, is it?
I play the piano that my mom bought, that my brother chose, and I can hear the notes of Claire de Lune bounce along the walls. My mom used to be so happy when I would play as an adult. In the past year or so, I thought about preparing a recital and forcing my parents to sit down and just listen to me.
I waited too long.
I wonder if this is how my parents felt when they let me go off to college, and if they wondered if I would be okay. I wonder if they wandered the house, expecting to see me, only to find nobody at all. I wonder if they wished that they could talk to me without having to use a cell phone.
I wonder if they felt something like what I feel right now, where I really want there to be an afterlife and spirit mediums who can commune with her because then at least, through them, so can I.
Because as ready I was, I just really wish I had a little more time with her. I’d give a lot just to have a little more time with her.
A lot.
In my mom’s last days, I remember standing with my brother outside my parents’ house at night time. The crickets were doing their thing. The suburban sprinklers were doing their thing. The night sky with its bright, silver moon, also doing its thing.
We talked about putting my dad in some kind of care center. We talked about whether I would stay in the area. We talked about what it was like for him to at least have his own home.
“Maybe it's best if we all leave and go our own ways,” he said.
I nodded.
I knew he was looking out for me. He knew that the coming days would be incredibly hard for me to be in the house, to have no choice but to be in the house. He knew that it was probably better for our time with the house to come to an end, and for it to become a home for somebody else.
I remember feeling something I had not felt in a long time—like I was the little brother, the little brother who always appreciated what his older sibling had to say, what advice he had to give.
I told myself that it’s okay to let ourselves fall into our standard family spots, to let him still be older, wiser, and the family that I can still talk to in this way.
And I could tell that he wanted to say more.
My phone buzzes. It’s someone from my dad’s new home.
So far dad is doing well, a text reads.
With it are a series of photos.
I drop what I’m doing and look at the photos. I’ve been nervous all day, wondering if he was alright, wondering if we had made the right decision.
In the first, he’s eating lunch with four other residents. He’s waving, with a slight smile.
He ate all his lunch, the text continues.
In the next, he’s sitting down in a one-person recliner, next to a few other residents.
In the next, and I do a double-take on this one, he’s playing bingo.
He’s been participating in activities.
He’s playing bingo. He’s actually playing bingo. I thought he would just be sitting in a chair all day.
In the final photo, it’s just him, smiling—and it’s the biggest smile I have seen from him in a long, long time. The kind that you don’t fake, not in people with Alzheimer’s, not in people in general.
He’s smiling.
I have rarely encountered that feeling people describe as a wave of relief washing over you, but I imagine, this is it.
I wondered if this was the right thing for us to do.
But at home, he would sit on the couch, watch TV, alone, with no social interaction. Now, at home, he gets up, he moves around, and has other people to interact with, and other people to tend to him.
I can’t help but wonder, if this wasn’t actually the best thing for him.
I am sure he will continue to miss his wife when he sees her in the photos we set up around his room.
But when I process the photos I’ve just received, all I want to do is tell some of my friends, which I immediately do. And I can feel this giant breath of relief finally leave my body, for the first time, in a very, very long time.
Because he’s genuinely happy. He is happy. And so, I’m happy for him too.
The house is still quiet.
I feel alone in a way I never have before.
The best way I can describe it is this: I feel like someone who was there to guide on an adventure, is suddenly gone. There’s a freedom to that, if I’m weirdly honest. If I see a mountain, a beach, a river, I can just go there, with no one to fight me on it, no one to tell me that that’s a bad idea, and no one to force me to go another way because that’s how they once traveled.
But it’s sad, too, because now when I see something cool, a view, an animal, the way that the world sometimes just comes together perfectly, now I can’t tell her about it.
And there are already so many little things, I want to tell her. I want to tell her about my dad’s new home. I want to tell her about the things I’m doing with my friends, or with my brother and his family. I want to tell her about how I’m thinking of resurrecting my plan to move to New York.
That last one, it haunts me.
I play “Remember when?”, and I remember when I used to tell her that I was thinking about moving to New York, but that I was worried about her and my dad.
Her response was this: “You should go. Your dad and I will be fine.”
And this is where we are. This, is where we are.
That would destroy me, if not for a dream I had not too long ago, a dream that I hold dearly onto.
The dream goes like this:
I’m outside of my parents’ house. It’s actually their house.
I walk inside. It’s bustling, like it’s a house party. I can tell it’s not our house, at least not on the inside. There’s a half-second story that leads up into the kitchen. My mom is there.
Everyone is talking about going to dim sum.
My mom is putting on earrings. She has makeup on. She rarely dresses this way. She’s beautiful.
I start walking towards her.
She briefly argues with my dad. “Why do you have to be so mean, John?” she growls in Cantonese, as she always does. It’s her voice. That’s exactly how she speaks.
I get to her and place my hand on her shoulder, and I realize that she’s real.
But somewhere, a part of my mind wakes up, and I know that if the feeling is real, this whole dream isn’t real. I know that she isn’t really real. I can hear myself in the prior days wishing that I had just a little more time with her.
And suddenly I think, maybe this is the universe giving that to me.
And so I interact with her.
“Hi!” I say. I expect her to say Hi yourself! as she usually does, but she doesn’t. And so I say it for her.
She laughs, but doesn’t say anything back.
I’m disappointed. I want her to speak to me. I want to hear her voice, speaking to me.
I see this long scar along her cheek, which was never there, and I wonder if this is a sign that this is her “repaired” body, so to speak.
“How is it?” I ask, realizing that this is because I know that I'm in a dream. “How does it feel?”
She responds with this chuckle that she always does.
And then, whatever is good in the universe gives me something beyond my wildest hopes.
She speaks. One, single word.
“Incredible.”
My cheeks swell, and I can feel a tear forming in my real-life body.
And then I tell her: “Then I’m happy. I’m really happy for you.”
And when I wake up, I wipe the tear away, and I tell myself that I don’t want to change anything.
My brother and I have been talking a lot. Mostly because we have to. There are so many logistics to deal with and our texts are filled with questions and answers and suggestions and shrugs.
But we used to talk a lot about other things too.
You’re getting the new Apple Card, I text him one day.
I don’t even know what that is.
It’s a long-running joke that I text him about all of Apple’s newest announcements. He was once the Apple evangelist; now he’s the religion’s dejected follower, chained to the products he once championed because it's what he knows.
It’s nice, to go back to our normal relationship, the way it was before all of this happened.
Another day, we walk and watch his boys bike around a park in the distance or toss sticks into a tree. It’s like a scene out of a film, two older brothers talking about life, watching two younger brothers run around and play.
I remember when my brother and I used to run around and play too.
As kids we used to jump from couch to chair, avoiding the lava that was the carpet floor. As adults we use the furniture for its original purpose and sit and lounge.
On another night that’s exactly what we do. Some things evolve and change, but some things don’t.
We talk about the nature of time, and how it’s crazy that the closer you travel to the speed of light, the slower time passes for you relative to everybody else, and how what if the perception of time is similarly true for us on Earth. I know this is a topic he loves talking about because he always comes back to it. I like to talk about it because it is fascinating, but also because I’m still, and always will be his little brother that likes to listen to him talk.
I tell him about my plans to move to New York.
He encourages me to go, but part of me wonder if there he isn't trying to say Stay in the silence between the words he actually speaks.
But he does not say this. Probably because he knows he shouldn’t. Probably because he knows I might not listen.
He would say that it’s selfish of him, which is maybe true but more than anyone, he has inherited my mom’s nature and is the most selfless person I know.
Still, that’s probably what he wants. And as his little brother, I want to listen to him, in a way I never have before.
But right now, I don’t think I can. We’ve all gone our own ways, and as the baby of the family, it’s time I go mine too.
And somewhere, in there, I know that my brother is happy for me too.