The Inheritance I Had Not Earned
I was fifty-one. I had been office manager for the Ostrum Falls Area School District for twenty-four years. I had a small yellow house on Birch Street with a porch swing, and a pension I could see the end of, eleven years off, like a lit window across a field.
The social worker handed me a binder about nursing homes. A good one in our part of Wisconsin ran about eight thousand dollars a month, and Medicaid would not touch it until Pop had spent himself down to nothing. That meant the forty acres. That meant the house where my mother’s apron still hung on the pantry hook. Pop looked at me from the hospital bed with the half of his mouth that worked and said, very slowly, “Not. A. Home.”
So I said all right.
I told myself it would be a season. I put in my papers at fifty-two, ten years short of a full pension. I sold the Birch Street house, and the money went into Pop. A stairlift. Rails in the bathroom. A ramp that Harlan Pruitt from down the road built for the cost of lumber. A hospital bed in the front room where Mama’s piano used to be, after Harlan and his boys carried the piano out to the machine shed under a tarp. I slept on a daybed beside Pop’s bed, because upstairs was too far to hear him.
By the second year his mind had started to slip, the way a snowbank goes in March, from the edges. Some nights, around three in the morning, he would wake and call out for Dorothy, so clear and so frightened that I felt it in my teeth. For the first month I told him the truth, and each time he took the news fresh, like a wound opening.
After that, God forgive me, I let him have her. When he called, I sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand and said, “I’m here, Walt.” And he would settle, and sigh, and sleep. Some nights I was Dorothy for an hour so that my father could have an hour without losing his wife.
People imagine caregiving as sitting, a cup of tea, a Bible read aloud. There is a little of that in every day, and those are the days that save you. But mostly it was lifting. A man of a hundred and eighty pounds who cannot hold his own weight has to be moved, bed to chair, chair to commode, commode to bed, and it is done with your back. In the third winter something went low in my spine with a pop I felt in my teeth. I finished the transfer because there was no one else to finish it. A surgeon later told me I needed an operation and six weeks with no lifting. I laughed at him out loud.
And the nights. A person who cannot move must be turned every two or three hours, around the clock, or the skin breaks down and a sore opens that can kill a man. I turned my father at eleven, at one, at three, at five, for six years and seven months. I learned to change a bed with the patient still in it, rolling him like a log. I learned the sound of his breathing the way you learn a song, and could tell from the next room whether it was a good night or a bad one.