Tomorrow
“Hi, how can I help you?”
“I’m calling for my mom,” I say. “I need to cancel her appointment.”
“Okay. What’s her name?”
I tell them. I give them her birthdate. I say the time of the upcoming appointment.
“Okay. Would you like to reschedule it?
I pause. We all follow scripts in our lives; it makes things easier. But it also makes little things like this, harder. I don’t think there are any scripts for what I have to say, and if there are, no one told me about them.
“Um, no.”
I can hear the other line waiting for me to explain myself. So I do.
“She passed away,” I mumble, and I can feel some tears bubbling up as I say the words.
The other line doesn’t know what to say either. Except for the known lines about being sorry for your loss.
But I’m not really paying attention anymore anyway. Something in me hurts and breaks and saps all of my focus. I wasn’t ready for this. And somehow, I know that whatever “this” is, is going to continue, probably for a very long time.
It’s the first day since she moved on.
My dad is going through his usual morning routine. Coffee. Oatmeal. Banana. Newspaper. Plop onto the couch.
I let him finish that whole cycle before pulling up a chair and sitting next to him.
“Dad,” I lean into his ear. “I have something to tell you.”
“What’s that?” he mumbles.
“Mom died.”
I choose as direct, and explicit language as possible. In his mental state, I don’t want to take any chances.
“She died?” he asks, in a quiet voice. “How do you know?”
I can tell that under normal circumstances, this would have made me angry. Why does he have to challenge me on this? How would I ever say such a thing, and not know? I mean, I was at the hospital. I saw her.
I’m about to say this exact thing to him, but as the words form in my mouth, my brain pulls up the mental image of seeing my mom in the hospital, and immediately I shut down.
I don’t know how long it takes me to come up with the alternative answer.
“The hospital called me.”
“They called you?”
“Yes.”
There’s a long moment where something hangs in the balance. I’ve read the stories of how people with Alzheimer’s process—or are unable to process—the death of their loved ones. I wonder how my dad’s story will fare.
When my dad finally does answer, he does so with a long sigh, something like a combination of exhaustion, despair, and sadness.
I reach out and rub my hand along his arm.
“I can’t believe it,” he says.
It’s still morning, the light beginning to shine brightly through the window. There’s a breeze that rustles the blinds. And I’m still rubbing my hand along my dad’s arm.
I decide to go to the gym. My feelings are steady, I’d like to get some energy out of my body, and quite frankly, I don’t know what else to do.
After that, I somehow manage to fill up my day. I don’t really remember with what. Probably some phone calls. I’m pretty sure I eat along the way. I just know that the day is busy, and by the time I come back for the night, it is night time.
I open the garage door, drive the car in, and then realize, I’m coming home to a much more empty house. My dad will be there. He’ll probably be watching TV. That much is normal.
But something will be missing. No one will be pacing around the house, trying to clean up. No one will be at the dining table reading the Bible or working on the computer. No one will be there to exclaim “Hi!” to me when I open the door.
It’ll just be me, and my dad.
I brace myself for this reality as I open the door to the living room, only to be greeted by something else entirely.
“Daniel,” my dad calls out once he sees me through the doorway.
“Yeah?” I mumble, kneeling down to untie my shoes.
“Is Mom still in the hospital?”
My hands freeze. Whatever it means to “have your heart sink,” this is it.
I’ve read the stories. I’ve read about the questions that other caregivers ask each other about this exact scenario. Do you tell the truth? Do you put them through the same cycle of emotions, over and over again? Do you lie?
Some raw instinct takes over me, and I just speak.
“Yes.”
He nods at me, and then returns to his television.
And that’s it. That’s it.
My brother and I would like to move my dad into some kind of care center—assisted living, memory care, hiring in-home staff—whatever. But there are so many options it’s overwhelming, and I am in no emotional state to be making rational, logical choices.
So I try asking my dad for his opinions. I know how crazy this sounds; moving for a fully-functioning adult is already a task fraught with anxiety. But I try anyway, and I do so by taking advantage of my dad’s propensity to read: I write him a letter giving him some options.
Importantly, I don’t say anything about my mom. Depending on the letter, sometimes I say she’s still in the hospital, sometimes I add the detail that she’ll be home after a long stint in therapy. Sometimes I don’t mention her at all.
“Let me think about it,” my dad says.
“Dad,” I sigh, “we need to decide by tomorrow.”
I also know that he has no concept of tomorrow, and that when tomorrow comes, he won’t have remembered anything.
“We could get new information,” he challenges.
“Like what? What kind of new information?”
“How am I supposed to know!?”
I grumble, and he catches on.
“You know,” he starts, “we never had any problems, even when we moved from New York. We always found a way. What’s there to worry about?”
Amusement gets mixed in with my frustration. This is an unusually coherent conversation.
It’s also a mirage, and unfortunately it tugs at the side of me that still wants to argue with him, to treat him like a normal human being.
“Dad,” I state firmly, “we’ve already discussed this several times. We need to decide soon.” Which, is actually true.
“Why can’t we decide tomorrow? What’s the hurry?”
I start to protest again, but he cuts me off.
“You know we never had any problems, even when we moved from New York.”
“Dad!” I raise my voice, realizing we’re about to have the exact same conversation.
“What’s there to worry about? Your mom and I always found a way.”
I want to scream and yell and tell him that Mom is gone. But then I remember that combination of exhaustion and despair and sadness, and I don’t want him to go through that again.
I bite my tongue. And just say, “okay.”
I wake up and realize that it's a Monday. I would have gone to the gym. I would have taken my parents out to dim sum. I probably would have to stop by CVS to pick up some medication for my mom.
Today, I’ll do none of those things.
I go out for a brief walk, wondering if magically my mom will be out there on her own walk, and I just have to go meet and surprise her, as I always have.
“Hi…hi…” I’ll hear her whisper as if she’s preparing to speak. And then, “Hi!!” she’ll say excitedly, before switching to Cantonese. “How did you know I was here?”
“Magic.”
“Smart kid,” she’ll say. “Smart because your mother is smart.”
I’ll roll my eyes.
But she’s not there. Everywhere I look, next to the water fountain, through path that cuts through trees, the downward slope close to the parking lot, everywhere I look, she’s not there.
I remember when she was in the hospital, and her state was still uncertain but she had trouble moving her legs, I told her that if she worked hard enough, she could go home and we could go on one of those walks again, one of those where I wait a while and then go find and surprise her.
“Oh, that would be wonderful,” she said, and I can hear her voice saying it now.
I decide to run an experiment with my dad. I write him a letter telling him the truth. I tell him what happened to my mom, when, and what his future options are. And critically, I frame it asking for his help.
“She died?”
“Yes.”
He goes back to his form of exhaustion and despair and sadness. But he also makes a choice on one of his future options.
When I return the next day, I see that he’s written a date on my letter, and that he’s circled one of the options.
“What do you want to do, Dad?”
He looks at the paper, and maybe because he’s already circled an option, or maybe because it really is the option he wants, he points to it.
“I think this one is good.”
We repeat this for a few days, and I start hoping, wondering if maybe the information is starting to stick.
And so the next day, I take away the letter before I leave for the day, only to come home to the reality that I think I always knew would be waiting for me.
“How is your mom doing, Daniel?”
I tell him the truth—a sort of truth.
“She’s doing good,” I force a smile. “She’s happy.”
The days become a blur.
I have to do a bunch of things that I’m no longer used to doing. Water the plants. Take out the trash. Do my own laundry since my mom forced me to let her do it.
I also have to take up my mom’s role as caregiver to my dad, which means I have to cook him rice, wash his clothes, bug him about eating and taking showers and clean this stupid cup that he spits into all day and it’s so gross.
It drives me nuts, cleaning up after him, preparing every little thing he does, and all the while I’m left thinking that I don’t know what love drove her to do this. I don’t know if it was love. I’ll assume that it was.
In some of her final days, she would say, “He doesn’t really care.”
“No, he does,” I fought back. “He asked me about you today. He asked if I could bring him here.”
“Really?”
“Yes. He asked, ‘Daniel, can you take me to the hospital to see your mom?’”
“No…” she said once or twice, “he doesn’t really care.”
I kept fighting her on it, for her own sake. Whatever the truth was, it didn’t really matter. My dad can’t care, even if he tried. He’s already forgotten my brother a couple times, which isn’t fair.
The days become a blur, but I do notice that he hasn’t said anything about my mom in a while. He hasn’t asked about her. It’s like he doesn’t even wonder. He sleeps on his bed stealing all the blankets, ignoring her pillow, like it doesn’t bother him that there’s supposed to be someone else there.
That kills me a little. No matter how much I understand it.
Even then, as always, he's still my dad. And so I continue to support him. I just know that I have to do it my way. My mom had her way. And my brother and I, well, we have to find ours.
I decide to try the real truth one more time, in letter form.
“Mom is dead!?” he exclaims after finishing reading.
“Yes,” I say, rubbing my hand on his arm.
“How do you know?”
I sigh. “The hospital called me.”
“Which hospital?”
I raise an eyebrow. But I tell him.
“They called you?”
“Yes.”
He looks at the letter I printed for him, then back at me, then back at the letter.
“What did they say her name was?”
My dad’s disbelief rubs off onto me.
“What do you mean, what did they say her name was?”
“Huh?” he looks back at me, confused.
I realize that the words in this conversation are getting too complex for him, and trying to be both truthful and kind is getting too complex for me.
I repeat my mom’s name, the name he knows.
He grumbles. “They said she died?”
I bite my tongue. I can’t do this anymore, and I vow never to do it again.
“Daniel, can you take me to see your mom?”
“Yes,” I say, every time he asks me now. “Tomorrow.”
Because he won’t remember tomorrow anyway.
“How did you think she was doing?” I sometimes ask him.
“Mm…” he thinks out loud to himself. “Pretty good.”
And I smile, and walk off.
It's not fair. But I think, I think, it’s just better this way.