The Father Who Found His Voice

What Family Means When It Is Convenient

For the first month after the stroke, Maurice stayed at a rehabilitation hospital in Kettering, and the family took turns visiting the way families do when a crisis is fresh and everybody still feels the obligation keenly. Kelly went most days. Phil went when his work schedule allowed, which by his own account was less often than he would have liked, though I noticed his work schedule allowed for a men’s golf trip to Hilton Head in April.

When Maurice came home in late April, the visits fell off the way visits do once a crisis becomes a condition. Chronic things do not hold anyone’s attention the way emergencies do. A stroke patient sitting quietly in a wheelchair by the window is not urgent. He is just there, day after day, needing the same things at the same times, and it turns out most people, including people who love someone, are built for sprints and not for this particular kind of marathon.

I was the one who was there.

It happened gradually enough that I did not notice the shape of it until it had already set. I worked from home doing bookkeeping for two small businesses in town, which meant I had “flexibility,” a word Kelly used approvingly and often, as though flexibility were the same thing as free time. Somewhere in May, I started coming by three mornings a week to help with Maurice’s transfers, because the home health aide only came twice a week and Kelly’s back “wasn’t up to the lifting.” By June, three mornings had become most days. By July, I had moved a set of my own clothes into the guest room closet because it no longer made sense to drive the forty minutes home most nights, only to drive back at six the next morning.

Nobody sat me down and asked if this was what I wanted to do with my summer, or my marriage, or my own work. It accumulated the way water finds the low place in a yard, quietly, without anyone deciding anything out loud.

I want to be honest that some of it, in the beginning, I gave willingly. I liked Maurice. I felt for him, trapped behind a face that could no longer say what was clearly still moving behind his eyes. There is a particular kind of ache in watching someone you respect get spoken over in his own kitchen, and some stubborn part of me wanted to be the one person in that house who still spoke to him like a whole man instead of a patient.

But willingness has a way of getting mistaken, by the people benefiting from it, for a permanent arrangement.

By August, Kelly had stopped asking if I could come by and started simply mentioning what needed doing, the way you would to staff. “His two o’clock medication is on the counter.” “He’ll need turning before you leave tonight.” “Somebody should be here in case the new home health nurse is late again.” She said all of it pleasantly, with the same tone she used for planning a church potluck, which somehow made it worse.

Phil, for his part, had developed a genuine and I think not entirely performed difficulty being in the room with his father. He would stand in the doorway sometimes, say a few too-loud words like “Looking good today, Dad!” in a voice that fooled nobody, and leave again within ninety seconds. I understood some of that. It is hard to watch your father disappear behind his own face. But understanding it did not make it easier to be the one left holding the washcloth every single night while my husband found reasons to be anywhere else in the house.