My Father’s Car, His Watch, and His New Nursing Home

I am wearing my father’s watch. It’s a brass Elgin De Luxe, with a tiny rectangular face, a thick crystal and gold hands. His father gave it to him on his eighteenth birthday, engraved with his initials and the date. R.M.F. 6 – 22 – 46. I don’t wear it often. He asked about it recently, wondering if I had lost it, so I wear it today so he’ll know.

I am wearing my father’s shirt. I never dreamed we would share a shirt size. All my life he was overweight, the way men get when they leave work at noon for big lunches and return home for big suppers. But in recent years he’s slimmed down dramatically. Too dramatically, I worry. He shed fifty pounds without even trying, while I packed on middle-age fat until I outweighed him by ten pounds or more. His old shirts no longer fit him, but this one fits me: a white dress shirt with a starched collar. I’m wearing it with the black suit coat he insisted on buying me a few years ago. Someday I’ll need it, he said.

I am driving my father’s car: a big white Cadillac with heated leather seats and an imitation burled wood dashboard. It floats along the highway past farms and forests on the way to my hometown, where my parents still live. I’m going to the funeral of the father of two of my oldest friends. As soon as it’s over, I’ll put my own father in a nursing home.

My father loaned me this car a few weeks ago. He wanted someone to keep it running. He knew he wouldn’t be getting behind the wheel again. At eighty-six, his legs have become too weak to carry his frame. Six months ago, he underwent knee surgery to combat arthritis, but the surgery only made things worse. He left the hospital with a metal walker. It dragged across the carpet; it bumped into furniture. Tremors in his left hand made it hard to grip the handle. My father dreamed of the day he would graduate to a cane. Then, one morning, he fell to the floor as he got out of bed: He had lost the strength to stand.

I live about a hundred miles away from my parents, and as I cross from Maryland into Pennsylvania, the rolling landscape rears up into rounded hills of white. The sky is milky. The highway is bleached with road salt. Hard winds have packed snow onto stubbly cornfields and dormant apple orchards. Their gnarled trees, lifting naked, curving branches to the sky, are planted in perfect rows, regimented as a cemetery.

This Cadillac was one of my father’s few indulgences. He was born the year before the Great Depression hit and lived his life with the frugality his generation is famous for. Even after a successful career as a small-town lawyer, my father is a man who insisted on buying the most jumbo paper towels packs his double-coupons would permit. He stocked the home refrigerator with light beer and jug wine. He woke every workday morning with instant coffee.

I wonder if he indulged in cars because of his father. My grandfather was a car salesman until his job vaporized in the Depression, and with it, my father’s respect. My father worked his way through college as a grocery clerk and through law school buying used cars and selling them for a profit. When he became a lawyer, his big Cadillac was his sign of success. When I was growing up, his Cadillacs were long and blue: eight cylinders, rear-wheel drive, plush seats. He bought a new one every year. But after the seventies, the models became smaller and smaller. Every new car he bought became a compromise with changing times until he stopped compromising. He would let his cars get no smaller.

I arrive at the Presbyterian church in which I was raised where the funeral will take place. I have barely been to this church since I left home three decades ago, but when I walk in, it feels like it did when I was a child. The same beveled wooden cross hangs over the curving brick wall at the front of the sanctuary. The forest of silver pipes still moans somber organ music. Sunlight spills through the same stained glass windows. I find no comfort here. This church wasn’t designed for comfort.

I see my old friends across the crowd. They’re identical twins, but friends could always tell them apart, and I still can. I haven’t seen them since the day we graduated from high school thirty years ago. Their relationship with their father couldn’t have been worse then. As I see them now, they look so little changed, sitting alongside their mother with heads bowed. After hymns and prayers, they stand and recount how a difficult relationship with their father healed. “A few weeks ago, he said he was proud of his kids,” one of them says, pausing as tears rise.

Is it cruel that I feel a twinge of jealousy? My relationship with my father has never been as strained as theirs, but it has not healed as much, either. A gulf of generations still separates us. His reserved nature kept me at bay. His politics appalled me, and mine him. He lived in a realm of business deals, and I yawned at his lectures on compound interest. Our love was the love of letter salutations. But today I am wearing his watch, and his shirt, and the jacket he bought me, and I am driving his car, to show him that, whatever form it has taken, love still binds us.

*

When I arrive at my childhood home, I find my father reading the local newspaper with a magnifying glass. He wears sweatpants that sag below his hips, revealing adult diapers underneath. I think back to the man I used to know, who wore neckties even on weekends. It shocks me to see how that man has become this man. He cannot dress himself anymore. He’s too weak to put on shoes. He can’t bathe himself.

My mother took on these tasks until they overwhelmed her and she hired a caretaker. Sometimes, when I visited, they became my job. It seemed like a cruel reversal for a son to bathe his father, to pad dry his thighs and his scrotum. A man who had lived his life so closed was now embarrassingly open. His old age has brought more intimacy with his body and his frailty than I ever imagined. I look at him in his wheelchair and realize the things we never did together will never be done now. Will this be my own end, I wonder? A slow failure of organs and limbs, a molting of layers of identity and pride until all that remains is biology?

“Oh dear,” my mother sighs. “Life isn’t a bed of roses.”

She wants to make sure she’s packed everything he’ll need. On the bed where he’s been sleeping—alone, since she moved out of the room a few months ago— my mother has set a weekend bag, as if he’ll be back in a few days. She runs her hands through it and checks its contents against the list in her hand. Sweaters. Sweatpants. Slippers. Hospital socks with the rubber grips on the soles. She’s packed his toothbrush and toothpaste and razor, his shaving brush and mug. A travel bag from their bus trip in France a few years ago is filled with his multiple medications, organized by day and night. Eye drops for his right eye after surgery removed tumors from his eyelid. Pain medication for the leg cramps he’s started complaining about in recent days. Pills for his tremors.

My older brother, Rob, rings the doorbell and I answer it. “Do you think you two can manage him?” my mother asks us. We say we can and go to our father, sitting in the family room.

“I always think there’s something I want to say to each of you,” he says, “and I can never remember what it is.”

We pause for him to recall, but he doesn’t.

“Well,” I say, “we’ll be around.”

“What time is it?” my father asks.

My brother checks his phone. “About ten after two,” he says.

“Well, I guess we’re ready to go,” he says, brightly, like he’s ready for an afternoon appointment. I cannot tell if it is a brave face, or if it is denial, or if it is confusion. I cannot tell if he can even tell.

I grip the wheelchair handles, turn him around, and push him to the passenger door of the Cadillac he used to drive.

The automatic doors of the nursing home swing outward and usher us from the cold, white world into a hallway papered pastel blue and hung with farm scenes. Along the walls, residents sit in wheelchairs and watch the day’s action cross the corridor. Others pad down the hallways, using their feet to pull their chairs along. They are bones and skin and sinew, and I can’t help but feel my father doesn’t belong here with them. He looks healthy. His hair holds on to flecks of black. He’s still an encyclopedia of names, dates, and relations once and twice removed. Yet these skeletal people can move their wheelchairs on their own, which is more than he can do.

Two of the nurses lead us down the hallway to a room where an empty bed waits beside a single chair. Across the room is a worn dresser with a lock but no key, and a closet with no hangers.

We stay with him for a few hours before leaving him alone. After dinner, my mother and I return to say goodnight. As we cross the parking lot, she seems to feel both guilty and relieved.

“He’s fine from the waist up,” she says.

More like from the neck up, I think. No, not even from the neck up. His mind is eroding.

*

When we visit him the next day, he’s having lunch in the cafeteria. A woman at a corner table is shouting. “I was offered a house today! For free!” My father struggles to cut the beef on his plate. Food stains ring his mouth. This is not the way he ever believed he would be, I think. This is not the way he ever would have tolerated allowing himself to appear.

He slept well, he says. His doctor came to see him. “I asked him why I’m here,” my father says. “He says, ‘for therapy.’”

Because you cannot dress yourself, bathe yourself or lift yourself, I want to say. Because you can’t remember the previous president, even though you’re reading a book by him. Because you have secondary parkinsonism and it sometimes makes you think you’re someplace you’re not, think you can walk when you can’t, think doors are swaying when they’re perfectly still. Because it will gradually get worse. Because you don’t even understand why you’re here.

After lunch, my mother and I get up to leave. The head nurse flags us down and tells us my father did well his first night. “Do you think he’ll ever come back home?” my mother asks. I’m not sure what answer she wants.

“Probably not,” the nurse says. “If he does, he’ll be back here again soon.” She says it kindly, and I appreciate her candor. She’s seen it before.

I drive my mother home in my father’s car and follow her into the house they built for a family, not an old woman living alone. “I never wanted this big house,” she says.

I spend the night in my old bedroom so my mother’s not alone. In the morning, I wind my father’s watch. I fold his white shirt, place it in my backpack and sling it onto the passenger seat of my father’s car, where he sat as I drove him to the nursing home. I hug my mother goodbye and sit in the driver’s seat. I turn my father’s key in the ignition and place my hands on the wheel. They hang like the hands on the watch I wear on my wrist.

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