My Father-in-Law
It’s been a hard week for my father-in-law, and also all of us who love him. There will be more tears ahead. We have lots to be grateful for since Don has been healthy for most of his eighty-six years. Still, there’s the raw sense that soon our family will be smaller. Soon there’s a voice we won’t be hearing. I’m tired, as if we carry more of the world for he who can no longer, or is it just a reminder that this is a time to act slowly, to pay attention?
Writing about history, I’m in the habit of pulling the past to the present, polishing scenes I believe should be remembered. Now I feel like I’m scrambling to keep up with my own past as it knocks and invades my life. As I sat with Peter’s father, I thought of my father, too. I didn’t see my dad before his sudden death, but instead got a call at the high school where I then taught. Teachers flocked around like angels saying, “You get five days. Take them, take them, even if you don’t think you need them.” I was thirty-two, young enough so that five days was long and I knew little about the particular ways of remembering that is mourning. In a daze I listened to those kind teachers who sent me home saying, “Don’t worry about lesson plans.”
I can’t write much else now, but I wrote this about yesterday.
For My Father-in-Law
Even before we get the news of cancer
and how it’s spread, Don says, Whatever happens
now, I want it to happen fast. Like the ball
he used to play, with not one of his three sons
caring much for sports. Later that Tuesday,
I hold his hand while he sings
If I Were a Carpenter, breaking off
when a nurse caries in a razor and bowl,
shaves him, and proclaims he looks thirty years
younger. He isn’t in pain. He isn’t hungry.
The next day a diagnosis comes, with slim choices.
On Friday, no sirens blare as an ambulance brings Don
to a nursing home where he gets a bed. I lean
close to hear his thin words, offer questions:
Does anything hurt? Does something itch?
Are you hot? Do you want to take off your socks?
Do you want more covers?
No. No. No. No. No. You’re a dear girl.
He refuses even a sip of water.
I’m in pain. I itch. I want to take off my socks
and pull up the covers. I would take a thousand sips
of water. I want, want, want, and leave the room
to phone Peter. Along my way to cold air, I pass through
the parlor, where a woman in a wheelchair bends
her head toward her lap in front of an unlit hearth.
Her husband’s arm stays around her like stone.
Back with my father-in-law, I keep bending close.
A hospice chaplain arrives and says a prayer for peace.
Don says, That was love-el-y.
I say, You’re a good man.
He says, I try.
He doesn’t take a single sip of water.
Soon a light snow falls outside the window.
