The ICU Where They Split His Estate

The nurse’s name was Denise, and she was the one who told me that my father had been awake the whole time.

Not awake the way you and I are awake. Awake underneath. Awake in the place a person goes when the machines are doing the breathing and the doctors keep saying the word coma but hedge it with words like sedated and responsive to stimulus and we just have to wait. My father, Cletus, seventy-eight years old, lay in the intensive care unit of the regional hospital in our county with a tube down his throat and a monitor drawing green mountains over his heart, and everyone who walked into that room talked as if he were a piece of furniture that used to be a man.

Everyone except Denise. Denise talked to him. She would come in to check his lines and she would say, “All right, Cletus, I’m going to move your arm a little, you tell me if I’m rough,” and she would wait a second like he might answer. I loved her for that before I knew why it mattered.

I am Ruthann. I was fifty-six the spring my father had his stroke, and I had spent the previous nine years living four miles down the gravel from the farm where I grew up, because after my mother, Marlene, passed, somebody had to. My father is a stubborn Iowa farmer who would rather die in a ditch than admit he needs help, so the help had to arrive quiet and sideways, the way you feed a dog that has been kicked. I drove him to the VA in the city for his knees. I did his books at the kitchen table on Sunday afternoons. I got the call at four in the morning when he fell in the machine shed and could not get up, and I was the one who found him on the concrete and held his head in my lap until the ambulance came up the lane with its lights turning the corn silver.

My brother, Gary, lived three hours away in the suburbs of the city with his wife, Pam, and Gary’s version of helping was a phone call every couple of months where he asked, in a bright voice, how the “old man” was holding up, and then told a long story about his boat. I do not say that to be cruel. I say it because it is the shape of the thing, and you have to know the shape to understand what happened in that hospital room.