Strong
An old man, his mouth open, watched my brother lift a heavy chest of drawers and maneuver it up into the moving truck. My brother looked like Hercules. “He’s strong, huh?” I said to the man, but he didn’t respond. “You’re so strong!” I yelled to my brother, but he didn’t respond either. His excuse wasn’t deafness but humility. I felt so grateful to him, to my sister-in-law Ashley and their son Phinny. It had taken us all day, but we’d emptied Dad’s apartment. Moving is the worst. Couches, art, paperwork, kitchen supplies. So many micro-decisions: keep? throw away? give away? Emptying my dad’s apartment while he were still alive one building over was surreal. It was as if he was dead, only we could go say hi to him.
“Who are you?” my dad said when I walked, masked, into his room in assisted living. “Oh! You’re my daughter,” he said. He was wrapped up in a big red shawl one of the residents had knit for him. He’d had a haircut recently and looked like a baby chick. I asked him how he was doing. “All these people take care of me,” he said. “I don’t really get what I’m doing here in this free room. I don’t have a job. I don’t have an apartment. I think about going out into the world. I hope there is another side to this.” I pointed to his oxygen tank. “It’s hard for you to go out into the world when you’re attached to that thing,” I said. “And the room isn’t free. You’re paying for it. You set it up for yourself so that you could have this kind of place if you needed it.” I wanted to tell him there was no other side out in the world for him, that he was in this room until he died, but what if he did have it in him to get better? Who am I to tell him his future? “That’s a good point,” he said. “I want to ask my doctors some questions and find out what is going on.” He folded and unfolded his bony white legs as he talked. He spends most of his time in the fetal position, and it was hard to imagine those legs getting stronger, straighter, but anything is possible.
“Well,” I said, “we emptied your apartment. Sam and those guys had to get the truck back, but they send their love.”
My dad was still thinking about the outside world, I imagined. His eyes looked bright and confused at the same time. His apartment was gone. His stuff was gone. Now he lived in a small room with a bed and a chair, a TV, and a button he can push anytime he needs to get up or have a snack or adjust the angle of the TV. He has a tube that runs from his nostrils to an oxygen tank that makes breathing noises. Soon he won’t remember who I am, probably. I drove to New Hampshire five times this week. I have so little to say to him. “Hi. How are you? You look great. How’s the food? It’s a nice day. I love you. Bye.” Maybe I won’t come back for a little while. Maybe he’ll forget me when I’m gone.
I had thrown most of what was in his frig away: the plastic cup half filled with lemonaid, the almost-empty bottle of wine, the old partial loaf of bread. There were two bottles of salsa that I brought home with me because they were both full, and it seemed wasteful to throw them away. One was unopened and the other had barely been touched. At home that night, I got out some tortilla chips and dipped them straight into the jar. I thought about my father eating this salsa. I imagined him putting it in a little glass dish, getting four or five tortilla chips and sitting down in front of the TV for a snack. I remembered as a child going to St. Margaret Mary’s with friends, and taking communion with them. It wasn’t something we did at our church, and so I didn’t know if it was okay or not that I was doing it, but I was curious. “This is the blood and the body of Christ,” the priest would say, and I would try to make it look like I knew what I was doing. I felt weird opening my mouth so the priest could put the wafer on my tongue, but if that’s what Catholics did, I was game. I dipped a chip into the salsa and thought to myself This is the blood and the body of Christ.
I wish I had been closer to my father. I wish when I saw him, I wanted to hug him, hold on. I hope he dies soon and goes peacefully in his sleep. I hope he remembers who I am, who Sam is, who Jyre is, who our mother was, and feels loved.
