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“Pops, which shoes should I wear
with
this?”
My dad’s eyes dart up from under his glasses,
and he gives me, then my feet, a quick glance as I lift up one foot, then
the other. “Oh wow, I like that dress.”
“Thanks — which shoes should I
wear?”
He looks again. “I don’t know; they both look really
good.”
He is sitting at the kitchen table with bills before
him. His glasses sit at the edge of his nose. They look like something to
be worn by someone far past his 54 years, but there’s no use telling
him that. He’ll just proudly tell you that they are from Wal-Mart and
cost him less than $10. “OK, but which one goes best with this
dress?”
I sway my dress a little, as if this will help him
make a decision. “Well, which ones are more
comfortable?”
I move across the kitchen’s tile floor, testing
their comfort. They both hurt. “I’m not asking you which ones are more
comfortable, I’m asking you which shoes look best. When you first
look at me, which ones do you like the best?”
“The black ones, I guess.”
My dad and I have always
been close. He jokes that when I was little he would have to sneak out of
the house because I always wanted to go with him, even if it was to just
ride in the car with him to run errands. In recent years that closeness has
been heightened by shared tragedy — my mother, my dad’s wife
and only love, has been slowly dying as a result of a brain tumor. The
malignancy was first diagnosed in 1998. I was 13 years old. It has been an
awful nine years, but something fine also has come out of it: At age 22, I
believe that I know my dad better than most children will ever know a
parent in their entire lifetimes.
I sit down next to him, watching as he strains to get
the right angle to see through his low-sitting glasses. I move over to the
couch, right behind where he is sitting. I turn on the TV and start surfing
the channels. I mute it, because my dad hates it when I surf the stations,
and surf in silence. I come across the movie Sleepless
in Seattle. Perfect. I know that as soon as I
turn the sound on my dad will recognize the movie and hurry to finish his
paperwork so he can watch. My dad is a self-proclaimed lover of chick
flicks. I suppose he picked up the taste from my mom, sister, and me, but
now my dad watches chick flicks even when he’s alone.
Just as I knew he would, he quickly finishes up and
moves from the kitchen table to the living-room floor in front of the TV. I
have never seen my dad sit on our couch. Really. Maybe it comes from his
childhood and growing up in a family of seven people with not enough couch
space, but he never sits on our couch. Today he grabs a pillow and lies in his
usual spot. The glasses come off and he goes back to looking like the
youthful middle-aged man that he is.
The first signs of my mom’s sickness came in
the form of extreme headaches. As the headaches grew in strength, she began
having spells of lightheadedness and nausea. An MRI revealed the tumor in
her right frontal lobe, spreading to the left frontal lobe. The doctors
said that they did not foresee my mom making it through the upcoming
holidays. It was already September. The eventual surgery was considered a
success, but the person it left behind only slightly resembled my mother. My mom’s health has been steadily decreasing
since that day. Mom’s memory is all but gone, as is her ability to
hold a conversation. Mom rarely speaks above a whisper, and when her voice
can be heard it is often gibberish. She lives in the nursing home, only
five minutes from our house in Monticello. We know that the end is near,
and two months ago, entering my last semester at the University of
Illinois, I moved back home to help my dad. I have plans to move out
someday. I want to move to New York City and work in magazines. But right
now home is where I need to be. My mom has been eating less and less lately, and
whether she should be fed through a tube has become the pressing issue of
my dad’s life. A few months back he had a feeding tube surgically
inserted through my mom’s stomach as a way to increase her protein
level for one of her many surgeries. After that particular surgery, doctors
suggested that it be left there in case my mom couldn’t eat on her
own in the future. My mom now has days when she’ll eat enough to
call it a meal, but her appetite is waning. My dad could tell the nurses to
use the tube, but there is one very important factor to be considered. In
the hundreds of talks my dad and I have had, he has often mentioned that
although he and my mom did not know what to expect before her going under
the knife, she made one thing clear: She did not want to be kept alive with
a feeding tube. Because she is unable to vocalize her opinion now, the
decision is left to my father.
Almost every day I get the same phone call from my
dad. It usually comes between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m., as he is leaving work.
During these less-than-a-minute conversations, I find out whether my dad is
going to stop in at the nursing home to feed my mom dinner, which he often
does. Then he asks whether I have any ideas for dinner. Every now and then
I will have cooked some kind of meal, often a casserole, and will tell him
that I have dinner covered. If there are no casseroles or some kind of
leftovers, we do a quick search of options. We often settle on grilling
burgers, which we always have on hand. If we’re feeling extra-lazy,
we resort to eating out — pizza, Mexican, or Chinese. After the meal
plan is decided, we go on to figure out our jogging schedule. I’m
training for my first marathon, and I usually run in the morning. My dad is
trying to “get back into the habit of running,” as he often
phrases it after coming in winded from an evening run. On the days when he
says he has decided not to run, I usually throw in a couple of words to
guilt him into running. And he often throws in a couple words to guilt me
into running with him. Wednesday night, 6:15, my dad calls as usual: “Hey, Claire Bear.”
“Hey, Pops.”
“I’m going to stop in at the nursing home
to feed Carol Lee. Do we need to figure out something for
dinner?”
“No, I made something. A casserole. It’s
new.”
“Sounds great. Have you run?”
“Yeah, I just got back. I’ll wait a while
on dinner so you can run, though.”
“You know what? I don’t think I’m
going to today — it’s been a long day. Would you want to run
with me? I really gotta get back into shape.”
“I already ran.”
“Well, just a short run — you know
I’m not going to go too long.”
“OK, fine. I’ll see you when you get
here.”
My dad finally gets home at 7:45. I stick the
casserole in the oven as I hear the garage door open. I set the timer for
half an hour. My dad sorts through the mail and then changes into his
running clothes. I stand in the kitchen in my running clothes to let him
see that I’m ready. We head out for our run. “So she’s not eating again today,”
my dad says. I know that he is thinking about whether he wants to
keep the feeding tube. We go through the same pros and cons we’ve
discussed a million times. In his voice I hear that he knows what he is
going to do. I agree with him, but I don’t say that. I just listen.
On Saturday morning, I wake up to a man with a plan.
My dad is on a mission to find frames and pictures to put on the walls of
my mom’s nursing-home room. As he digs through a pile of frames, I
start looking for pictures. I find high-school senior pictures for each of
us kids, and my dad matches each one with a frame. I go through the bag
full of family pictures. I find one that takes me back to my childhood. The
picture was taken in front of a cornfield out at my uncle’s house. My
parents are sitting with the three kids strewn across their laps. We are
laughing and teasing one another while my mom tries to maintain us. Without
the fact of my dad’s age and size, you’d think that he was one
of the kids for as much as he is tickling, laughing, pinching, and leading
the horseplay. Then I find a picture of my mom and dad at a college dance.
My mom is tall, thin, and dark. Her light-brown hair matches her tanned
skin. She doesn’t wear much makeup. She never needed to. I laugh out
loud at my dad’s premature baldness. “And she still married you!” I remind
him. He smiles, knowing that it’s true. My dad and I head over to the nursing home, hoping to
feed my mom some lunch and get the pictures arranged on her wall. I sit on
the bed next to my mom as she lies facing away from me while my dad goes to
work setting up the pictures. My mom hasn’t been moved from her bed
to her wheelchair, but I can tell that she is awake enough that she can
hear me, and I hope that means we will be able to have something resembling
a conversation. To get her initial interest, I begin by asking her
questions. Sometimes I know that she won’t have answers for me, but
after years of experimenting I’ve learned that asking her questions
is the best way to pique her interest. “Mom, I got a really fun e-mail
today.”
Her eyes are open, but she doesn’t look in my
direction. “It’s from your nephew.”
Her eyes begin to move a bit, as if she’s
trying to focus on something — a sign that she’s trying to
listen. “It’s from your nephew in Baghdad. He
sent this e-mail all the way from Baghdad, so it’s got to be
exciting.”
My dad chimes in, “Isn’t that exciting,
Carol Lee?”
Her eyes have now gained focus. She still stares
toward the wall, but with a purpose, with attention. She’s now part
of our conversation. “What nephew do you have that is in Iraq?”
I ask, and her eyes dart in all directions while her mind seems to digest
the question. “What nephew do you have who’s overseas working
with the Army?”
She continues to stare toward the wall, but her eyes
settle on a single spot. “John Patrick,” she says, barely above a
whisper.
“Yeah, Mom, John Patrick sent me an e-mail
today. Do you want to hear it?”
“Yes, very badly.”
Her voice is more audible and her words are
enthusiastic, but there is no enthusiasm in her tone. Her enthusiastic
words come in response to my tone of voice. The more excitedly you say
something, the more likely she is to respond with excitement. You could
tell her that the end of the world is here and get an excited response if
you said it with excitement. As I read the letter, Mom occasionally gasps and nods
in response. Each time, I look to my dad and we share the excitement of her
attentiveness. After finishing the e-mail, my dad asks, “So what do
you think about that, Carol Lee?”
“We should be very proud of him,” she
says at a barely audible volume. “I think so, too,” I tell her.
The next Saturday morning, I wake up and hear voices
coming from right below my bedroom window. It’s my grandpa and my
Uncle Pat, my dad’s dad and older brother. The three of them get
together for coffee nearly every Saturday morning. My grandpa and uncle
farm just outside of town, so they are permanently cursed with the
inability to sleep in, as most farmers are. The three sit out on our front
porch, glad that the nice weather still allows them to do so. Of course the
weather is discussed on each of these mornings — how much rain we
got, what my uncle’s Doppler radar screen revealed this morning, how
much warmer or colder it is than this time last year. As I bumble out onto
the front porch, one of them says, in a louder voice than I can enjoy at 8
o’clock in the morning, “Good morning, Claire Bear.” I
don’t know which one of them the greeting came from, because they all
call me Claire Bear. “Good morning,” I groan and grab a seat
on the porch swing next to my grandpa. A few questions are directed my way. They ask about
weekend plans and ask questions to get updates on anything new among the
Feeney cousins. There are 16 of us cousins on my dad’s side, and we
often joke that I am the social coordinator for the lot. After a quick
update, I’m left to sit and listen. As always, the conversation eventually turns to my
mom. They discuss the fate of the feeding tube and the decision that lies
on the horizon. My dad runs again through the pros and cons. His voice
makes him sound as if he is undecided. I know better. I know that he has
made up his mind but is not quite ready to admit it to anyone or to
himself. After our guests leave, my dad and I find our spots at the kitchen
table. “How did you sleep last night?” I ask.
This is a relative question. My dad hasn’t slept well for nine years.
“Just fine, thanks.”
We go on to talk about our plans for the day.
I’m meeting up with friends for dinner, and he is planning on mowing
the lawn. “Do you want to watch a movie later
tonight?” he asks. “Yeah, sounds good.”
“Do you know of anything out I would
like?”
I rack my brain for a couple seconds, thinking of the
new chick flicks on video. “Yeah, I’m sure I’ll find
something.”
“Let’s get something fun. I don’t
feel like something heavy.”
He says this as if it’s not already assumed
that we’ll be watching a romantic comedy. “All right, yeah, I think I know of a
couple.”
He pauses for a long second before adding,
“I’m going to have them take the feeding tube out, Claire
Bear.”
“Yeah, Pops, I know.”
We sit silently at the kitchen table for a few
comfortable minutes. Then I head for the shower and my dad heads for the
lawnmower. That night, we watch The Wedding
Date. I sit in my usual spot, on the
couch, and my dad assumes his, with his pillow, on the floor. The movie is
funny enough to make us laugh out loud at times and predictable enough that
we don’t need to think. It’s perfect.
Claire Feeny is completing her journalism degree at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She spent this past
semester living with her father in Monticello.
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2007.
