They sent the wrong man back from the hospital.
The skeleton with the vague blue eyes they decanted out of a wheelchair couldn’t be my father. Covid had meant that I had not seen him in over a year but I knew that just the last three weeks in hospital had done most of the damage.
Our joy at having him home again was soon tempered by a growing dismay.
I met my mother’s eyes over his head, a whole unspoken conversation was had complete with questions, answers, worries for the future.
The hospital said he was just depressed but when he declared he needed to pee he had to be helped up and, once standing, he looked at me helplessly and said: “What do I do now?” I tapped his left foot gently with mine and said: “I want you to put that foot just there,” and tapped a place a few inches to the front. I then tapped his right foot and indicated where I wanted it to go and so we slowly, painfully, made our way to the bathroom, just through the kitchen but somehow many miles away.
If I became distracted, he just stopped, waiting to be told what came next, and if I didn’t tell him to turn his toes outwards or in, he just went in a straight line rather than going round the corner….and while we slowly moved toward the bathroom I stared down at his feet and realised they were the only part of him that had not changed.For that matter, they were the only bit that had not changed since I was a little girl and, like every little girl ever, had stood on my father’s feet, giggling up at him while he walked around the living room.
It’s a trope that life comes full circle and that in old age we become like children again but there is nothing to prepare you when this looks like it could happen to your own parent.
After the first shock we just did what he did, concentrated on one little step at a time. We contacted social services to ask for help, we brought a bed down stairs and made it up in the dining room, we made him comfortable and then, in the next few days we took it in turns to talk to him, look through photograph albums, do puzzles together or do his exercises with him.
It was exhausting, he was depressed and when he was tired and down he slurred his words. He would become fixated on trying to work out what was wrong with him and why he was in the dining room rather than upstairs in bed and I’d endlessly repeat that he needed to work on his strength, be kind to himself and just try to walk a little further each day.
It is hard to be sure whether he was going to get better or if that was just something we told ourselves to make the whole situation bearable.
As the days passed he was able to enjoy home cooked meals and there were conversations about evolution and Jay Leno’s Garage, the progress of the Icelandic volcano. He almost seemed like his old self, until he asked for the sixth time in an hour what day it was.
And then, just like that, it was all over. He fell, he hit his head and was taken back to the hospital he had grown to hate.
I’m going to tell myself that he didn’t know he was there and that he knew he was loved and we were there with him, in spirit, if not in body. Anything else would be unbearable.
And so, without him, we are left to just take one little step at a time until things get better.
Sent from Outlook
Erica Madelin 