Dear Cary:
My elderly father had been ill. After improving, he went directly from the hospital into a nursing home.
We never told him he was never coming home.
My mother said keeping up some sort of illusion of his eventual return was a way to keep him busy there, but it ended up being something that seemed so cruel in reality. With that "return" in mind, my father would plan to the best of his ability in order to be prepared for the big day. For instance, my mother would keep telling him he would have to do an increasing number of stair climbs to be allowed home, so he would do as she said -- working up to 20, 50, finally 100 and more, as many as she required -- and talk excitedly about how, when he had met her goals, he would get to go home.
For my part, I just felt like a coward in this whole situation. I had no power of attorney and no decision-making authority in any of this, and my mother had the legal power to place him straight from the hospital, even though I offered to try to find in-home care if anyone felt it was needed for any rehabilitation. I feel that she charged ahead with the nursing home plan, in part because she was bitter that he had frequently left her alone when he traveled for his job and she had found an ideal, ironic opportunity to get back at him (a lonely divorce-by-nursing-home: something his nurses told me was more common than anyone would believe).
My father never complained, but he would sometimes ask me if I knew when exactly he was going home. I always said that he would have to ask Mom (who never visited, but spoke with him on the phone about his "progress" and whether it was good enough for him to return). But I was just too weak to say anything else.
My father finally died after two years in the nursing home, having received the best care possible from his nurses, but never having heard the truth from us. Would he have been better off knowing he'd never go home again?
I hope I'm not the only one affected by this dilemma, and that others may be helped by your advice. On the other hand, it would be nice if I really were the only one who has had to deal with something like this. Thanks.
Powerless Daughter
Dear Powerless Daughter,
This is one of the saddest things I have ever heard.
But in this story can be heard the laughter of the gods. Hear me out, please. I mean no offense. Laughter and death go hand in hand.
Day after day a dying man dreams of going home. He wants to die among his loved ones, near his daughter, his wife, his family and his cherished possessions.
He is glad that his wife and daughter are taking care of things, making arrangements for him to return home. He is grateful to them. He imagines them fighting for him with the nursing home staff. No doubt, he knows, the nurses would like to keep him there. They're making a pretty penny off him. But his wife and daughter are going to get him out. They're working night and day to get him strong enough to return home.
It is painful and exhausting to do the exercises. But he completes them.
Some days, he feels himself getting stronger and thinks, Any day now, I'll be going home. Other days, he feels weaker and hopes they don't think he's not trying. He is trying. He is fighting. He's going to get out of there and come home.
It's his final battle and he's determined to win.
How long has it been now? Why haven't they come for me?
One day he takes a turn for the worse. He grows weaker and no longer can perform the exercises. If he can't perform the exercises, he'll never get out. He tries harder but he can't even get out of bed now.
How long has it been now? Why haven't they come for me?
One day he finally understands: He's not going anywhere. He never was. This is where he has been taken to die.
The true horror of it strikes him. One day, she used to say, she'd ... one day! She wasn't kidding, was she! He always dismissed her complaints about his work-related travel. True, some of it was required, but some trips he could have turned down; at times he took the trips as a welcome respite from a difficult home life. And he lied to her about those. Of course he did. It was a marriage and a love affair but it was also a battle. Marriage is not just a partnership, he thinks. It is a battle. It is a battle to the death.
Amid his horror at what she has done comes a flicker of admiration. She has done it! I should have known she would! She has finally done it! She's having her revenge!
It comes over him in an instant. He gets the punch line of the world's longest joke. He is so weak that he can barely make a sound, but he begins to laugh. Maybe it happens in the middle of the night as he lies awake hoping for a sign from the heavens; maybe it comes in nearly inaudible shudders as those standing around watch, asking, Is he trying to say something? Maybe it is in a dream that the laughter comes to him. But rest assured that at the end, when he understands that his brief imprisonment in a nursing home is just one more blown scene in the blooper reel, he laughs and he hears the angels singing -- for this quality of hers he loved, too: He loved her treachery as well as her virtue. He can laugh about it. He is free. It is the funniest thing he has ever heard.
It may not be not as funny to us as it is to him. We are of course still constrained by our sense of taboo, and our grief, and our loss; we are still striving for a sense of the sacred, and we tread carefully lest we offend. But to him, who stands on the precipice of that very sacred leap, who is leaning over the edge and letting go of all that is burdensome and illusory, to him it is beyond hilarious. He thought he was going home! What a joke! He can scarcely imagine anything more ridiculous.
In the end, it all comes home to him.
The Best of Cary Tennis
"Since You Asked," on sale now at Cary Tennis Books: Buy now and get an autographed first edition.
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