On January 3, 2009–my parents’ fifty-first wedding anniversary–my father came home from the hospital. It was a month since the stroke that had paralyzed him on the right side, and five months since the stroke that had skewed my mother’s speech.
I was so busy preparing for his return, including the hiring of a part-time home health attendant through an agency, that I forgot my parents’ anniversary. Two weeks later, when I remembered it, I felt guilty. It was yet another addition to the stew of love, fear, duty, and joy that drive the life of the caregiver.
The HMO had already shipped a hospital bed. It was identical to my mother’s, and it was waiting for my dad in their room. I prepared the bed with sheets and blankets and a bed pad.
The van arrived from the hospital. Two men rolled my father on a stretcher down the hall and they placed him in the new bed.
My dad started complaining right away that he was hungry, so I went into the kitchen to try to figure out what to feed him.
When I got back to his room, I found that my mother had been walking around by herself. This was dangerous, as she was a fall risk. She’d gotten out of her hospital bed and climbed into my dad’s hospital bed.
I would never figure out how she crawled over the railings or how she crawled over his body. But there she was in his bed, between him and the wall, enjoying a lucid moment as she looked happily up at me: “Feed me too.”
My father didn’t have much of a diet when he got home. In the hospital, he’d eaten nothing but mush. His partial paralysis had made it risky for him to swallow solid food. Even if he chewed it thoroughly, he might choke on it.
I didn’t know what to feed him besides baby food, applesauce, instant breakfast shakes, ice cream, and water. Soon, however, I learned how to puree vegetables, chicken, fish, or steak in order to create tasty meals that appealed to him.
I also learned to pulverize pills and mix them with applesauce, so he could swallow his medications. At first, I put the pills in a plastic bag and smashed them with a hammer on the kitchen counter. Then I learned about all of the nifty pill grinders on the market.
I spoon-fed him all of his meals. I realized that I was the first family member to feed my father since around 1930, when my grandmother had taught him to eat on his own. I was struck by the great loving cycle of life.
On his third night home, as I was feeding him, my father looked up at me between mouthfuls.
He said, “I love you, Bob.”
I was forty-eight years old. I had never heard my father say this before. I was overcome and I didn’t know how to reply.
The next morning, I heard him say it to my mother for the first time in my life.
Later that day, when I was feeding him lunch and he said it to me again, I said, “I love you too, Dad.” It was one of the most liberating experiences I’d ever known.
As I was growing up, my father had been a drinker, and it had widened a moat between us. My father did love his family, but the booze too often got in the way of his expressing his affection.
Now all of that was changing. I was grateful that we no longer had to hide our feelings.