My Father's Footprints (2 page)

It starts in 1996.

I’m with my father, on a spring afternoon in West Hartford, Connecticut, where we all live, watching my son, who has just
learned to ride his bike.

Where we live, the forested reservoir lands are also parks. Paved roads, dedicated to hikers, joggers, and bikers, curl and
course through the gorgeous woods.

I see Joey launching himself onto those roads, sailing away in looping arcs, out to where my father cannot follow.

Joey is adopted. He is Mexican, and his skin is the beautiful color of coffee ice cream. In the summer, it deepens into a
coppery chocolate. His eyes are wide and brown and startling.

My father’s hair is white as summer clouds, and his skin is ruddy from rosacea and Irishness. His body is thickset. In appearance,
he has been compared, variously, to Chet Huntley and Spencer Tracy, although neither was ever as handsome, or as fey, as my
father in his prime. His face is craggy, rugged. Merriment and sadness play across it in constant shifting patterns, the way
those summer clouds, moving in the wind, might push light and shadow across the land.

I help my father from a car to a chair. He is stiff with spinal stenosis, shaky from late-onset diabetes, clutched by congestive
heart failure.

There is something else I cannot see and do not know. Cirrhosis from secret late-night drinking sessions is scourging his
liver.

In two years, he will be gone, and I will join the Dead Fathers Society.

At the moment, I feel only the twitching of life’s giant clockworks. I feel as though the very mechanism of life requires
my father to slow down as my son accelerates.

It feels satisfactory and right.

Maybe it is, too, but not in the nice, neat way I’m imagining.

Now it is 1997.

Mockernut. Pignut. Shagbark. Tulip Poplar. Red Oak.

There are little signs on some of the trees as you roll through the roads of the reservoir. A year has passed. Today Joey
is on foot, and Bob is in a wheelchair. He has grown sicker, and I take him on outings.

Today I am trying to wheel him along the 3.6-mile course of the reservoir, which takes in some pretty steep hills. Descending
them, I lean backward at sharp angles, like a man walking wild boars on a leash. Occasionally I pop a hand loose from one
of the grips to either throw or catch a squishy little football Joey and I are playing with as we walk.

I have come to think of these excursions as the Sandwich Generation Triathlon. Walk, Push, Throw.

My father has now been diagnosed. He is terminal. We don’t talk about that. We don’t talk about anything unpleasant, but my
father can see that I have, for months, devoted my free time to him. I have driven him to medical appointments and taken him
on these walks and slogged through shopping trips.

One day I take him to an art museum and dilate upon the meanings of the paintings. In front of a Winslow Homer, a pretty woman
smiles at us, and I think she likes me for taking such good care of my dad.

A minute later I realize she was gently amused, because my pedantic lecture has sent the patient into a deep sleep.

Still, when he gets home he tells my mother, “It was like a different world.”

My dad is mainly housebound.

One day I wheel him around the neighborhood in the sleepy afternoon sun, and I sing Johnny Mercer songs to him. “Skylark,”
“On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive.” He likes that a lot.
I’ll never forget that day, singing to my father.

Occasionally, as we wangle the wheelchair through a tricky doorway, he will mumble, “Who would have thought… that you would
turn out to be so useful.”

If you have a spouse, a child, a dog or two, a sick father, a worried and very tired mother, one way to get through a long,
hard Sunday is to make a list of tasks. You start it at 6:30
A.M.
and keep crossing items off, glancing down to the bottom of the list where there awaits, you presume, a paradise. You will
park your tired self on a sofa and maybe watch
The X-Files,
because at least the guy who is part-fluke and who lives in the sewers will have a life slightly worse than your own.

Even under the iron rule of a list, Joey and I sneak in a bit of fun, tossing a football in a deserted parking lot and walking
at dusk, with the dogs, into spooky, empty, snow-dusted woods. Just as the air around us fades from gray to black we stand
in the pie-powdery snow on the banks of a chilling stream. And it’s so heartbreakingly weird and beautiful you wonder why
people don’t come here by the hundreds.

And then back to work.

Last thing on the list: Bake cookies. I forget why. For school?

I’m halfway into the baking when my mother calls.

It’s 8:45
P.M.

My butt is feeling a sort of magnetic pull toward the promised land of the sofa.

“Can you come over? Something is wrong with Dad.”

Ohhhhhhhhh. For a brief moment, I am unsure which is the greater tragedy—my father’s ill health or the fact that I’m not going
to sit down and watch television.

I drive over, and, indeed, he is failing in some ineffable way, dead on his feet, muddled in his head. I bring him into the
bedroom and try to get him settled into bed, but his body flops and sprawls, starting to slide toward the floor.

I haul him up again.

“Let me try to get your head in the right place,” I grunt.

“I’ve always wanted my head in the right place,” he murmurs slurrily.

He’s about ten synapse-firings this side of a coma, and he’s still funny.

The next day I discover the interrupted cookies. They have congealed into a rubbery texture. Eating one would be like a hyena
eating Gumby.

Things are worse, much worse.

I sit down with my mother and my father’s doctor.

“We should get hospice involved,” I say.

There’s an awkward silence. The doctor has to authorize this. He has to say that the patient is terminally ill. He has to
say that the patient will not live more than six months. You can get extensions. They don’t send a guy in a hood with a scythe
if you miss the deadlines. All the same…

“I’m reluctant to take that step,” he says. “When you say the word ‘Hospice’ to a patient, it’s almost like a death sentence.”

I look at him.

“Well,” I say, “he is dying, isn’t he?”

The doctor kind of shrugs.

He is an old-school guy, operates out of a big white house on a main avenue. He was taught that you fix people until you can’t
fix them anymore. Then you let Nature take over and hope it’s quick. This idea of giving Death an extended booking, two shows
a night with a pit orchestra, is hard for him to grasp.

My father, by all rights, should be dead by now, but my mother refuses to let this happen. When Dad begins to sag into a coma,
she ignores the doctor’s advice and summons an ambulance to take my father to a hospital, where he is transfused and revived,
just as Death was set to swoop in and claim him.

My mother is a small, unassuming woman with downcast eyes. In a room full of people you might miss her. I think it’s possible
that Death underestimated her. She wears her hair permed up and back in a kind of sixties bouffant, dyeing it this shade and
that, making all the stops on a subway line from blonde to auburn. My wife’s hair, by contrast, turned a silvery white in
her forties, and she let it stay that way. Her face is utterly unlined, making her white hair seem as anomalous as my mother’s
ash blonde hair hovering over an older face. My mother’s voice has stayed musical and girlish, in defiance of all the cigarettes
she smoked, a pleasant echo of the beauty she once was.

The doctor now believes he is caught in an unpredictable crossfire between Death and this very tiny woman. He has absolutely
no idea what to do, and his plan is to meet with us as rarely as possible, return few phone calls, and check the obit page
to see if this mess has, by any chance, resolved itself.

It takes a few weeks of my jiggling the handle, and then my father is a hospice patient.

This means we are all resigned to keeping him comfortable, easing his pain, soothing his soul, letting him die.

Except my mother.

“I made a commitment,” she says, repeatedly. No one can remember hearing her make this commitment, but apparently it has the
force of something you might say while pulling Excalibur out of a rock. The commitment includes keeping my father at home
and administering medicines and meals with a precision and doggedness no hospital could achieve. My mother is
Star Trek
’s Borg Collective, a flying cube of quasi-mechanical imperialism. My father will take his medicine at the exact time prescribed.
He will eat balanced meals, three times a day. Assimilate or be destroyed. Resistance is futile. My father lives an extra
nine months or so because he is almost too busy to die.

Paid caregivers from the outside are held to rigorous standards of conduct.

“Where’s the hospice aide?” I ask one day, darting into the apartment in between work and home.

“I fired hospice,” my mother says.

“Very funny.”

“I did.”

“Nobody fires hospice. That’s like… I mean… um… they’re the last word in… last words.” I concede that this is not exactly
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I’m kind of babbling while my mind bids farewell to all those brisk, competent
hospice workers who were—I had thought—going to get me through those moments when I’m weak and exhausted and afraid, like
right now, for instance.

“Hospice are the people who take care of you when you have nobody else,” I try again. “Everybody likes hospice.” (Possible
title for final
Raymond
episode?)

It’s no use. My mother is scared. Her response to fearfulness and isolation has always been to set up an even more fearful
and isolating situation. The hospice people are
not helping enough.
So they must go.

We find a different hospice agency and reenlist.

“You have to promise not to fire them, even if the aides show up late,” I beg.

“I’m not promising anything.”