alone and terrified and an orphan again; adopted before she could remember a damned thing and now the progression of life and the endless cycle leaves her bed-ridden and drunk and miserable and so, so lost. With a good half of her life before her. With a devoted if horrifyingly rageful husband and a dreamer of a daughter. With family.
I am her only flesh-and-blood. What I feel is almost survivors' guilt.
But is also almost incompetence.
I was not enough. I am not enough of a daughter, enough of a companion, a compatriot, an ally. I was not enough to keep her from wanting to die.
Her spiral downward was slow, molasses slow. Papa fell down the stairs – at 93 – and didn't break a bone but bruised something terrible and hospitalization revealed an invasive UTI. He recovered in a nursing home. He was not himself when he finally came home. The drugs they put him on, or the dosage, I don't know what – he forgot where he was. It broke my heart to see him this way, this man who was a pillar of strength and reason and assurance to me, for my entire life until that point. He thought he was in his childhood home – on Elzy Street in Elmont. But not quite. He knew he was somewhere else – but that going home meant going there. Not Surrey Drive in Merrick, where he had lived for over fifty years.
And beyond this,
“Why am I wearing all these clothes? Might as well take them off.”
“No, Papa, you'll catch a cold.”
Hunchbacked and skinny in a wheelchair, dividing curtain only barely concealing the much more ill man who shared the room.
Corralled into the cafeteria all day long, horrible fluorescent lighting gaping every cheek and throwing into relief every wrinkle, every sun spot, every miserable little hair protruding from once smooth, once pink skin, a third of the inmates slept slack-jawed, a third unresponsive, a third chatting and sad. And then Papa.
I am her only flesh-and-blood. What I feel is almost survivors' guilt.
But is also almost incompetence.
I was not enough. I am not enough of a daughter, enough of a companion, a compatriot, an ally. I was not enough to keep her from wanting to die.
Her spiral downward was slow, molasses slow. Papa fell down the stairs – at 93 – and didn't break a bone but bruised something terrible and hospitalization revealed an invasive UTI. He recovered in a nursing home. He was not himself when he finally came home. The drugs they put him on, or the dosage, I don't know what – he forgot where he was. It broke my heart to see him this way, this man who was a pillar of strength and reason and assurance to me, for my entire life until that point. He thought he was in his childhood home – on Elzy Street in Elmont. But not quite. He knew he was somewhere else – but that going home meant going there. Not Surrey Drive in Merrick, where he had lived for over fifty years.
And beyond this,
“Why am I wearing all these clothes? Might as well take them off.”
“No, Papa, you'll catch a cold.”
Hunchbacked and skinny in a wheelchair, dividing curtain only barely concealing the much more ill man who shared the room.
Corralled into the cafeteria all day long, horrible fluorescent lighting gaping every cheek and throwing into relief every wrinkle, every sun spot, every miserable little hair protruding from once smooth, once pink skin, a third of the inmates slept slack-jawed, a third unresponsive, a third chatting and sad. And then Papa.
