If you’re an expat living far from elderly parents, you’re always waiting for that phone call, the sibling’s voice saying, “It’s time to come back.” And you park your life indefinitely and go back. The wheel turns.
My father had a mild stroke early this year. He seemed to be getting over it, then relapsed, then rallied, then got an infection. I kept asking if I should return; not yet, said my sisters. Then came that call, “You’d better come now.” And so began ten weeks which in retrospect were the most precious of my life so far. A time when the margins between parent and child dissolve into a borderless pool of unconditional love, endless work, laughter and tears.
Ken, my father, was out of the hospital again when I arrived. At first he seemed as lucid and funny as ever, but I saw that he tired quickly. He leaned to one side and couldn’t put his shoes on. He never knew what day it was (but that is a tricky question; neither do I, most of the time). He could tell me exactly how his infra-red headphones worked, but not what he’d had for breakfast. Sometimes he was not lucid at all. None of this bothered him as much as the fact that he had lost the ability to read. He was very bored and frustrated, and television didn’t work for him any more either. His ambition was to be able to read the Economist again. I borrowed a large-print book from the library, cut a hole in a piece of cardboard that revealed one line at a time, and we sat together every day until he could manage a full page. Then we used a ruler to focus on each line. By the end of three weeks he could read several pages of the book at a sitting and a paragraph of the Economist. We celebrated with a glass of sherry.
The days were exhausting. I made appointments with doctors and therapists, drove Ken to meet them, kept notes, took him for walks, helped with his occupational therapy, monitored his meds, talked to the home care workers and did all the paperwork. My mother Peg, also 89, was so overwhelmed by it all that she surrendered her jealously guarded kitchen to me. I shopped for and cooked all the meals, did laundry, took blood pressures… it was an endless blur of activity from morning until dark, when I collapsed in bed. But we had a lot of fun. We decided that there had to be a lighter side to all of this, and we kept on looking until we found it. We found the humour when both my parents lost their hearing aids the same day, and when Ken tried to fit both feet into the same pyjama leg. We’ve been looking for the lighter side of incontinence, but we haven’t found it yet.
Peg, always a bit impatient and difficult to please, was astonished to find herself married to a suddenly elderly and delusional man who listed slightly to starboard. She rebounded with humour and grace. After 62 years of sparring, they were sweetly tender with each other now.
Ken was anxious at night and would get up at three in the morning, dress himself and sit by the front door so he wouldn’t be late for his morning appointment at physiotherapy. The sedative his doctor prescribed was evidently not working, so we increased the dose. The next morning I came into the bedroom to find my sister and mother tucked into one bed together sipping their coffee and my father prone in the other. “Perhaps we’ve gone too far,” we mused. “My children are turning me into a junkie,” muttered Ken into his pillow.
We went out for dinner one sunny spring evening and Ken managed his meal as if the stroke had never happened. He asked me that night if there was anything I wanted from the house before it was put on the market. All I wanted was his old Morse code key; he’d been a radio operator during the war but hadn’t used his ham rig for years. Two days later he developed a serious blood infection and we rushed him to hospital. He lay there for a week, off with the fairies most of the time, with a catheter in his heart. But he recovered from that too and was home for his birthday. I went out for groceries after we sprung him from the hospital and returned to find he’d already ditched his walker and gone into the basement alone. “And I have to go again,” he told me determinedly when I reminded him of his promise not to use the stairs. I escorted him slowly down the steep steps and into his office, where he pointed a shaky hand at the Morse code key bolted to his desk. He had remembered. (I brought it home to Bali and mounted it on a piece of polished coconut wood.) But the infection had scrambled his eyes again and he could no longer read. This time, he wasn’t even interested in the Economist. The wheel had turned beyond reading now.
By the time I left after the first visit, they were both back in some kind of balance. There were home care workers, meals being delivered, all kinds of helpers and neighbours to keep an eye on them. I went back again two months later to move them into an assisted living facility, which is a bit like a cruise ship that doesn’t go anywhere. We put the house on the market on a Tuesday morning, had three excellent offers by Friday and signed the papers that evening.
I went back to the house to pack for the last time. As I walked from one empty room to another I remembered the day we moved here, growing up, returning to stay as an adult and the recent months of nursing my parents. When I closed the door behind me for the last time, the wheel had turned full circle.
’Dragons in the Bath’, a collection of Ibu Kat’s stories,
is now available in paperback from
* Kuta : Dijon
The Bali Advertiser office
* Seminyak : Ganesha at Biku
* Ubud : Ganesha Books, KAFE, Threads of Life, Eve Body Treatment Centres
