My Father's Footprints (3 page)

My mother does most of the work and grows so tired that we arrange a five-day respite for her. My father will go to a beautiful
nursing home in the woods.

Early one morning, I drive my father out to the McLean Home for this short stay. I step through the sliding doors and behold
the sunlit atrium, the California fireplace, the greenhouse, the smiling and friendly staff, the soft jazz playing in the
lobby. It is impossibly peaceful and cheerful.

“You don’t happen to have a second bed available, do you?” I inquire weakly.

The soft jazz turns out to be a man playing, perhaps a little dementedly, the Natalie Cole version of “Avalon” over and over,
but in all other respects, McLean appears to be paradise on
earth for the middle-aged, the weary, the sandwiched. I don’t want to leave.

Conversation between me and my son, who is eight.

“Does anybody live to be one hundred twenty?”

“Not very often.”

“How old will I be when I die?”

“Old, I hope.”

“Will you live to be one hundred? How old will I be when you’re one hundred?”

“Sixty-five. We can be old men together.”

I get a lot of this these days. It’s evening, and Joey and I are driving back from McLean. He’s a trouper about visiting my
father, but spending a lot of time around the very old, around the near-to-death, has stirred up questions in him.

“Do really old people want to die?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes people who are ninety or one hundred say they feel they’ve lived enough; they’re tired in some way we
can’t even begin to understand.”

We come up over a rise in Simsbury, and Hartford surprises us, twinkling in the distance. Life is long, life is short. We’re
just guests here, checking off tasks, getting through our lists. The car surges through the night. There’s a lot to talk about.

When the five days are over, I drive out to bring my dad home to my mother. I have slipped into some horrific high-functioning
mode, where my voice booms out cheery good advice to him and my manner is that of a bustling and businesslike male nurse.

This is precisely what my father does not need. He needs some humanity from me. He needs to visit with me in the kind, intensely
personal way that a father may visit with a son. I do not
give him that. I give him an officious, hearty, no-nonsense parody of myself

“I thought we might eat lunch together,” he mumbles weakly.

“No time for me to eat!” I boom, with a big false smile. “I’ve got to get you all packed up, load up the car, get everything
squared away with the people here while you eat.”

I have become a Sim. “The Sims” is a computer game in which you build digital people and orchestrate their lives. They marry,
have babies, get sick, lose jobs. They seem to set themselves on fire by accident a lot. You assign personal traits to each
one, but the palette of emotional colors is pretty limited.

I read that in 2001, the people who play “The Sims” noticed an odd phenomenon. Their fake people would begin to cough and
then die, in uncommonly large numbers. The players began discussing this on Internet message boards and discovered a common
denominator. The game company’s Web site allowed players to add new furnishings, accessories, and other items not originally
included on the disc. The people whose Sims contracted this unexplained Simtheria had all downloaded an extra pet, a guinea
pig, and had been delinquent about making the Sims clean its cage.

The company admitted that, yes, the guinea pigs were programmed to give the people, in some circumstances, a fatal disease.
Behind that lay a deeper, more troubling truth. The “things” in the Sims world were all impregnated with programming that
elicited certain responses. The Sims appeared to have rich identities, but that was an illusion. They were pretty empty, but
their environments were just loaded with invisible personality fragments that could be activated if touched.

This is how I feel, during these trying times. Not like a person with real emotional depth but like the framework for a person.
Some kid’s hand on a mouse is moving me through my days, and when I brush up against a wheelchair or a wristwatch, I may
smile or cry, but it’s just the thing I touched doing a data dump into my hollow self.

Even so, there is no excuse for my fake joviality here in the elysian nursing home. But have you ever had that feeling? That
if you gave one inch to your true emotions, you’d be in a free fall? Easier to be a Sim.

The next day, I bring my faithful and true twelve-year-old mongrel dog, Roy, to the vet for more tests. He appears to have
liver problems, as does my father, which makes one wonder if I have somehow offended the Liver God.

By bedtime, I am so tired that I have my father and Roy’s problems hopelessly conflated in my head. I know one of them is
under strict orders not to eat any more dead animals in the woods.

Conversation between me and my son, about our aging but preternaturally young-looking dog.

“How old is Roy?”

“Twelve.”

“How old would that be for a person?”

“I’m not sure. Do you multiply by seven? If so, he’s… eighty-four.”

“How can he be?”

“Good care, good food, lots of love. And I think he has good genes.”

“What are genes?”

“The parts of your body that say a lot about your health and how you’re going to be, in general.”

“Do I have good genes?”

“I think you do.”

“Do you have good genes?”

“Um. Probably only so-so.”

“Who has the best genes?”

“I don’t know.” (I refuse to say Michael Jordan.)

(Said with amusement.) “Maybe God. He’s been alive so long.”

Later. Son, Mexican-American, regarding his brown-haired, brown-eyed guinea pig: “If I were a guinea pig, I would look just
like Edward.”

And now I recollect a conversation from a day in 1996, before the terrible sickness set down its giant scaly foot on us. My
wife is telling my father that Roy is slowing down.

“That’s what big dogs do. They slow down. They sleep more. They get quieter. It almost helps prepare you for the fact that
they’re going to die.”

My father smiles fiendishly and inclines his head toward my mother.

“Could you please tell this to Barbara? It’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do for years, and she won’t let me.”

My father is slipping away, so that he can only answer the most basic questions. Are you hungry? Do you want to go to bed?

It’s 2:00
A.M.
when the phone rings.

I rush to my parents’ apartment because my father is having a bad spell.

I get him settled in bed, get him calmed down, all very
Marvin’s Room.
He looks at my mother and says, from his delirium, “How did Colin know how to make the spooks go away?”

“The spooks? What spooks? There are no spooks.”

Have you ever noticed that dementia makes a person rather attractive to talk to? You can’t stop yourself. It’s kind of obsessively
fun to argue them out of their delusions because, for once, you know you’re right. There
are
no mauve bats flying barrel rolls in the room.

Sometimes, on lovely days, I offer the park or the woods, and he makes me take him to depressing discount stores. He wants
to buy a watch. He has dozens. He wants some writing equipment, but the work he is determined to write—some last gasp having
to do with Dante—never comes to anything more than a few words scribbled here and there as his mind melts into a puddle.

“I’ll pick those up for you,” I say. “While you have me, why don’t I take you someplace pretty, so you can get some sun and
fresh air?”

He looks dejected.

“That’s not fair,” he says.

Exasperated, I load him and the wheelchair into my car and head off for Service Merchandise. He looks and looks at watches.
He buys a certain one and takes it home. But it is the same as all the others. It shows time running out.

Two years after his death, I tear a quadriceps tendon playing soccer and Life finally teaches me what I refused to learn back
then. My friends are willing to fetch me anything, take me anywhere; but one day, a couple of weeks after surgery, I sneak
out, stagger to the corner in my full-leg brace before the neighbors see me and offer to help, and I catch the bus, go to
a coffee shop, and buy myself lunch, just for the existential thrill of asserting myself in the consumer economy. I take out
my wallet, pay the bill, get the change. This is very fulfilling, in a way I had not expected, as if it restored substance
to the phantasm I was becoming.

In a capitalist age, I spend, therefore I am.

That’s what my father craves. The ritual of the transaction.

By the time I understand this, he is long gone, and I remember, with rue, how edgy I was on those sunny days when I thought
I knew what he needed better than he did.

“Is he in pain?” the aide wants to know.

“No,” I tell her distractedly. “It’s something else.”

We are standing in my father’s bedroom. He sleeps more and more, and from his sleep he issues peculiar sounds. Short wordless
vocal bursts in a single tone, easily mistaken for a groan, but closer—in their sporadic pattern and duration—to the gentle
undersea songs of whales. What do whales say? “I’m here.” “You’re there.” “You’re there.” “I’m here.” Perhaps that’s what
my father does, from the half-sleep of life’s end: announces himself to the world, trumpets out a hopeful sound, and listens
for what bounces back. He gives a hoot.

When he gathers his wits, he often wants to talk—heretically—about God. In a public park, as I push him in his wheel-chair,
he suddenly stirs, rears up, and pretty much bellows, “What I don’t understand is, if God wanted a son, why didn’t he just
make one? Why did that poor girl have to get
knocked up?
”

Today is the Super Bowl. I have rooted for the Green Bay Packers since I was about fourteen, which means I have endured twenty-five
years of really awful teams until quite recently. I never had the chance to see them get near a Super Bowl until last year,
when I was assigned a Sunday night radio show, so I missed the whole thing.

Care for the dying is as amenable to crass bargaining as any other human activity.