The door to our station wagon slams shut with the heavy hand of a child eager to be in the company of his friends. Our son, Sam turns to us, leans in through Kristin’s open window.
“Say hi to Grandad,” he says. His eyes droop. The corners of his mouth twitch. “And Grandma too, though…..” He hesitates, waves briefly, turns quickly, then hoists his knapsack onto his shoulder.
Kristin and I wait in the idling car watching Sam walk up the path.
“Do you think he knows?” she asks.
“I hope not.”
The front door opens and four boys his own age but of different shapes and sizes cascade down the steps. They engulf him, relieve him of his physical burdens and sweep him down the side of the house towards the backyard where they’ve erected their tent city.
Sam doesn’t look back. With any luck he’s forgotten we’re even still here. At least, that’s what I’m hoping. Because if he’s forgotten we’re here, it would mean that his life is still about looking forwards, about exploring and discovering. I know that one day he’ll face a situation that etches itself in his psyche, a decision perhaps that will haunt him, forcing him to return again and again to that moment wondering what he could have done, said or been to make things turn out differently. Fortunately today is not that day.
Today Sam is nine and a half years old. He is spending the weekend with friends. I am hoping that his only concerns are the latest video games, hotdogs and whether or not his football team wins. I am hoping that he hasn’t overheard our whispered conversations; hasn’t accidently uncovered the nursing home brochures; doesn’t yet realise that today marks a turning point for his family.
Kristin stares into the boy-less front garden. “He must sense something.”
“Yes,” I say. “But sensing something and knowing it definitively are two totally different things.”
I sigh, grateful that this sleepover gives us some space. It means we can do this thing without his knowledge, without tainting his childhood with an adult reality, without making him an eye witness to that first monumental change in his life. *
****
I indicate and pull away from the curb. Suburbia bustles with Saturday morning activity. Bare-chested men push lawnmowers; frazzled women pop open their boots and begin the transfer of shopping bags that bulge and strain with a week’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, dinners; children on bikes race down driveways, along footpaths. Just a normal Saturday morning. Except it isn’t.
“Izzy cried when Sam was born,” Kristin says.
“Yes.” Izzy, my mother, Sam’s Grandma, did indeed cry when Sam was born; and when he took his first step and when he started kindergarten and then primary school.
Kristin says, “She knitted him mittens.” “So he didn’t scratch his face,” I add.
Kristin smiles. “She was so clever, so creative, so capable.”
“Yes.” I try to forget the word that’s now bouncing against my skull: was. Was. Was. As in past tense, as in isn’t anymore, as in missing, defunct, lost.
“This will kill your father.” Kristin states the obvious. She knows it. I know it. Yet this ubiquitous knowledge doesn’t bring alternatives. That’s why my voice is emotionless, flat, devoid of all hope, as I say, “Do you have another suggestion?”
Kristin doesn’t reply immediately, but I know what she’s doing. She’s searching her mind for a different solution: she’s adding up sales from assets, deducting debts; tallying daily responsibilities against energies available; allocating bedrooms; assessing our available resources against those we’d have to bring in on a daily basis; calculating the cost of extensions in time, money and patience; and then peering optimistically at the bottom line.
I hold my breath, hoping, praying, begging that this time the bottom line might be black, rather than the vibrant red we’ve been getting for the last three months. When she speaks, Kristin’s voice rasps as though it’s scraping against a huge prickly chunk of regret.
“No,” she says, “I don’t.”
Neither do I. But it’s what you do isn’t it? When you’re faced with the one thing you never truly believed in – the mortality of your parents? You keep striving to work out a way to avoid the reality that’s trying to slap you in the face. I mean other people age, suffer illnesses, lose energy, activity, voice. Maybe even your parents, but not mine. My father doesn’t have cancer cells in his body. They cleared them all out last year. Not a single one left. Not even the shadow of a single one. And my mother never forgets who I am. Why would she? I’m the son she carried for nine months, the son she’s nurtured for decades. Those things are just scenes from B-grade TV dramas. I won’t acknowledge their presence in my life, in the lives of my parents.
Instead, I let my mind wander back to the pivotal moment of my first major decision, because surely that choice marked a fork in my destiny. Pick A and travel to the left. Pick B and travel to the right. Did I choose correctly or incorrectly? Or did I make a critical error that made my life chocolate when it should have been vanilla? I don’t know; I may never know. But still my mind skips back.
*****
It happened when I was ten years old. I don’t remember the finer details; they were always irrelevant to the outcome. What I remember is this: When I was ten years old I killed my dog, Rufus.
I can’t say I didn’t mean to. I did. I killed him with purpose and deliberation. I killed my dog because my father gave me that decision, forced it upon me like a plate of Brussel sprouts, unwanted, repugnant, daunting.
“He’s your dog, son,” my father said. “This is your decision.”
It didn’t matter to my father that I was ten and wanted the memories of my dog to be of him chasing Frisbees, his ears flapping as he cantered across the park; or barking with palpable frustration as the neighbour’s cat taunted him from the safety of a tree branch; or lying at my feet, his body solid, warm, alive.
My dog broke and I killed him as surely as if I myself had injected the green fluid that oozed through the syringe into his veins. The ‘green dream’ the vet called it, as if to assure me that I was sending Rufus to a happy slumber; or at least freeing him from the lethargy a speeding truck had foisted upon him.
It didn’t seem real, that need to kill. Rufus was just tired, and so simply resting on a towel that just happened to be set upon a sterile stainless steel table. He was okay, really. Any moment he’d leap up, lick my face and beam the smile he kept for me, all gums and jagged-teeth and dripping tongue.
“He’s broken on the inside,” the vet said.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
The vet pointed to the x-rays, backlit blobs of white and gray and black; meaningless smudges that seemed open to artistic interpretation. The vet proffered only one opinion: “It would be for the best.” For the best.
Who’s best? I wanted to ask, but didn’t.
I stroked his head and Rufus opened his eyes, or at least dragged his eyelids upwards to reveal irises the colour of dark chocolate. They weren’t my dog’s eyes; not the windows to Rufus’s soul. They’d lost their spark somehow, as though the essence of my dog had already left, like a hermit crab discarding an old shell as too worn, too small, too confining. The essence of Rufus was elsewhere, searching perhaps for a more complete body.
“Okay,” I said.
I was ten years old when my dog Rufus broke and I killed him.
*****
Kristin stares through the windscreen like a mannequin might gaze out from Macy’s window. Even her skin seems waxy, polished, unreal, as if having become emotionally overloaded, she’s retreated behind a plastic façade. But her eyes at least are alert because she turns to me. “You’re going the wrong way.”
“Am I?”
Kristin opens her mouth, I assume to protest this detour that she knows will cost us twenty minutes. She is about to speak, then stops. Perhaps she’s realised this diversion is no error. I am taking the long way round, putting as much time and distance between me and this thing as might go unnoticed; except Kristin has noticed. She faces out her side window, pretends to tuck a wisp of hair behind her ear. But I know what she’s doing. She’s wiping away the tear that’s escaped from the dam behind her eyes. One tiny leak will bring a whole ocean surging out of her. That can’t happen. We are adults. We must hold it together, to carry on regardless of any overwhelming conditions, either internal or external. We are duty-bound to plug the holes that our decisions make in the fabric of our lives – and the lives of others. And so we bury our anger, confusion, hurt, perhaps for reassessment at a later date, perhaps not.
Of course some decisions are frivolous, light, perhaps even playful. Like deciding between ice cream or cake; garlic bread or herb focaccia; pastrami or peanut butter. See, no life and death there – unless you’re allergic. Still, anaphylactic shock aside, there are decisions that don’t damn you if you do and damn you if you don’t; there are decisions that work out for the best, whatever you decide. But I’m not faced with one of those decisions. I’m faced with a choice that brings me again and again to the ten-year-old me; to the moment I keep pecking at like a vulture plucking a corpse; but there’s no nourishment in my pickings.
“Ty, she wanted you to make this decision,” Kristin says. “That’s why she gave you her Medical Power of Attorney.”
“I know.”
“She trusts you.”
“I know.”
My mother trusts me the way Rufus trusted me. Rufus broke and I killed him. I think that’s why my mother trusts me; she knows I can make the hard calls. Or maybe it’s because I know that every decision has consequences that will become my permanent bedfellows, welcomed or otherwise. It’s because I know that decisions colour your life. The question is: What colour? Is it the drab gray of muted pain? The pitch black of an emotional abyss? The bright yellow of relief because surely no future choice could ever be as soul-fracturing? But whatever the colour or rendering, the underlying canvas remains fixed: Decisions have consequences and sometimes the question is not so much “What do I want to do?” but “What can I live with doing – or leaving undone?”
See the decision I have to make, have almost made, will damn my mother to a nursing home where she’ll get the 24/7 attention and care that late-stage dementia demands; it will damn my father to the hollow shell of his family’s home or to our spare room with its cheerful daisy wallpaper. At least he’ll get that choice.
I ache to give my mother the choice. To have her answer the question: “Do you want to live in a nursing home, away from your life memories, away from your husband, surrounded by kind and caring strangers? Or are even the most familiar things alien to you now?” A month ago, I dared to do just that. Her answer was a blank stare of incomprehension.
If that summed up her illness – an inability to understand the question and thus respond with an appropriate answer – perhaps I could fool myself into believing the situation is manageable. I know differently. It’s one thing to forget how to get dressed or clean your teeth; it’s entirely another to throw a saucepan at an eighty-year-old man or to turn the knobs of the gas stove to ‘on’ then wander to the shops. What is she searching for? How can I help her find it? How can I help her find herself? How can I lead her back to me? To my father?
I can’t and so I am damned. As damned as my father was when he gave me the Rufus Decision. It’s true. What sort of father would make their ten-year-old son choose between the life and death of a cherished companion? What sort of father would take that decision away? See, either way he was damned. As I am now damned; either way, whatever I choose, there’ll be some do-gooder standing on the sidelines screeching, “Unfair!”
But what does unfair mean? A disproportionate allocation of fairness? An absence of the justice we consider to be our basic human right? Yeah we love to fool ourselves that justice exists. We convince ourselves that we actually see right and wrong. Perhaps sometimes we do. But what I’ve come to know is this: The scales of so-called justice don’t balance fairness; they don’t even balance rights; the only thing their pans would hold is pain. And really, how can you dispassionately allocate pain to people you love? I can’t. I
love my mother. I love my father. So why can’t they both live with us? Because our house is too small. Because Sam is too young to watch his Grandma crumble in on herself. Because I need to work and can’t spend endless hours scouring the neighbourhood for a woman who doesn’t know she’s lost. Because most of the responsibility would fall to Kristin and that’s too much to ask her to accept. Because I’m not strong enough to watch the woman who was my decisive mother waiver.
My mother is the woman who sewed me a superman costume for my first fancy dress party; the one who wiped the blood off my knees and soothed the grazes when I learnt the hard way that wearing a cape with a big S really doesn’t mean you can fly; the woman who kissed my tawny curls and made me a hot fudge sundae to ease the pain; the woman who knew the first time I mentioned Kristin’s name that she was my one. That woman sits in my memory, but only there. She’s not to be found in the shell that parades in my mother’s clothes, eats off her crockery, shuffles around in her slippers.
So a nursing home is for the best. Because how can I watch my mother’s soul drain away? And equally, how can I not?
*****
Twenty minutes after our predicted arrival time, I park the car and Kristin and I walk to the front door. I am about to knock when my father opens it.
“Tyler,” he says. He pauses and in that fragile moment I look past him to where my mother stands in a pool of her own urine. She stares at me with lost eyes; another hermit crab gone in search of a better place.
Kristin squeezes past us both and leads my mum out of sight, probably to the bathroom where Kristin will ‘help clean her up,’ as though my mum is some artistic pre-schooler who’s smeared herself with non-toxic paint. My father stares at me as if trying to read my mind, or perhaps already suspecting the story that lurks there.
I want to ask him why Mum gave me control of her medical decisions. Why not him, her partner of fifty-six years? Five years earlier when she thrust the legal documents at me I asked, “Why?” She simply patted my arm. That was it. No words. Just a series of gentle taps, a Morse code I couldn’t interpret. I didn’t ask again. Perhaps I was afraid of what she’d say; afraid that she’d remember the ten-year-old boy capable of killing his best friend; afraid the picture she held of me was of a decisive slaughterer rather than a loving father, husband, son. I still want to ask, why me? But in truth I don’t want to know someone else’s answer. I want to believe it’s because she loved my father too much to torment him with this choice. Because even though there is no other choice, no other viable option, my father would wind himself a noose of guilt and strangle away the fleeting happinesses that might still grace his life.
I look at my father now with his crushed-cotton skin, his white fairy floss hair, his moist eyes. He gestures towards me with a shaking hand. I step closer. He grips my arm and pulls me towards him. He clutches at me as a drowning man might claw at his saviour. I want to tell him that I’m not his saviour. I haven’t brought an effective remedy, an optimal solution. There isn’t one; at least, not one that I can find, can implement for everyone’s best, because when you cut away the rhetoric, when you pare away all the non-essentials you can see clearly that I am no one’s redeemer. I am simply here to allot pain parcels to my father, my mother, my wife, my child, myself. I’m here trying to make sense of the nonsensical.
My father pulls away, straightens his spine, clears his throat. “Daffodils are starting to bloom,” he says.
And that is when I know for sure that he understands what will ultimately come to be; if not today, then one day soon in his diminishing future. I want to cry, to throw myself into my father’s arms and sob out every last aching drop. I want to do or say something that will create the miracle we need. I want to be someone I am not; I want to be my family’s hero.
*****
I am forty-five years old and my mother is broken. Will the decision I choose to make, or leave unmade, break my father too?
ENDS