Mystical Spring

                        Since my mother’s death, my father has endured what can only be described as ‘The Long Fall.’ Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s weeks after her funeral, it became clear to us that our mother had been keeping this little piece of personal information hidden bolstered by an unparalleled level of cooperation from our father.

A couple who fought with one another for over fifty years and called it marriage, the eerie peaceful atmosphere that descended on my childhood home felt strange to me one afternoon after walking in the front door.

I greeted my father. Following a phone call to hurry home, I felt knocked off my emotional balance, as if I had entered someone else’s house. If it hadn’t been for the large lump that could only be my father, seated in his usual brown rocking chair in front of the TV where I had left him just two months before, I might have become disoriented, turned around and walked back out the door. But the tears flowed down his cheeks when he saw me, and I knew this time it would be different, a visit that would change my life.

I was told that my mother was in her final hours of life, and arriving home I expected everything to be suddenly different.

Thinking that the walls, floors, doors, roof and quite literally the earth itself that formed the foundation around my home would have shifted, caved in, fallen apart, or blown up, I was disappointed by the silent utter devastation I felt as my insides shook and trembled. My world was falling apart, my life as I had known it ending, my history being changed and lost. There would be no more mother stories; no more mother and daughter fights over my kids, no more horror stories of the long drive home for Christmas, no more of my mother’s charcoal burned green beans. It was over, gone, completely destroyed and coming to an ending where the only thing I would be left with was my father, a man it occured to me for the first time, was one I barely knew.

 Inside my house he sat waiting for me, a calm, quiet, accepting peace upon his face which had I been quicker would have triggered a suspicious firing of my synapses, like the joining together of colored threads that clash when I knit.

I should have stopped, looked down into the bag of yarns to see if I was tangling several things together. I should have but there was so little time to think and only enough time to react.What was unraveling around me was being accomplished slowly as we daughters became fixated by funeral expenses, insurance policies, and who was to ride in the hearse.Our mother died and our father was left behind. It somehow didn’t seem right. Didn’t studies usually tell us that women are the ones who out live men? Hadn’t my nursing experience shown me that I had twice as many female patients to care for than men? Hadn’t all of my mothers’ friends out lived their husbands? My mother had been the strong one, my father the hypochondriac. My mother had to be forced to go to the doctor, my father ran in the doors of the office so often they kept his file on top of the office desk. My father was sickly for years, had a bad back, gout, was blind in one eye, took pills for anxiety, and slept on the couch a lot. He saw as many as six doctors at a time. Terrified of being ill, he hated any talk of death, denied it, rejected it, and had absolutely no use for it. She on the other hand faced up to it with an equal dose of controlled terror and southern dark humor. For her to die first wasn’t fair, it simply wasn’t right, not that I wished him ill, not at all, but this felt like an insult to my training and intelligence.My parents were very proud of both their nurse daughters, one who lived two hours away, and the other twelve, both with jobs, obligations and families of their own. Being the youngest and the one who lived the farthest, I had taken care of countless patients and their families who faced the demon Alzheimer’s but my own father’s condition had escaped me, blown right by me, hiding behind smiles, tears, and an occasional head shake. Secretly my parents had made a pact between them, in the midst of their warring days together, to keep their daughters ignorant of their plight.“Ah, I can’t remember right now,” he’d say, whenever I asked him a question and I would give him a pass. Why not? He was over eighty after all.But as we attended to her, he would sit in his rocking chair in the living room, watching TV, drinking his occasional soft drinks, generally taking care of himself all the while keeping his little secret tucked away deep inside a back pocket along with his handkerchief, comb, and empty wallet.It wasn’t a month after the funeral, when everything was placed out in the open at last, thanks to a neighbor who had seen him walking down the street at midnight and called us. Medications helped break his long fall for awhile and one day he perked up and asked, “Where’s your mother?”“She died, Dad. Do you remember?” I replied.“Oh, yeah,” he tells me and shakes his head adding for no reason, “she was a good wife.”“Do you really think that, Dad?” I continue, trying to hide my shock. “You and Mom did nothing but fight all those years. She used to call you some terrible names.”But he sits in front of me and shakes his head again, “Oh sure,” he says, “Sure she did. She said all those things, but she never meant anything by it.”That was the first time I learned of my father’s generous nature.It is some comfort to me, his youngest daughter, the baby of the family and the one who tends to ruminate over family history mining for gems of meaning for all of our lives. It makes me feel as if the struggle that went on inside my family structure had not really been personal but more situational, that if they had been wealthier things might have been different between them. It is comforting until the moment when I call him on the phone. I hold my breath, trying not to cry, which would only alarm him more. Where is she, he might begin to wonder? Why isn’t she here, why is she upset, is she hurt, is she in danger, but then, mercifully, his brain synapses fire once more and he stumbles over the consonants until he lands on S. Then he utters my name. “Susan, Susan, is that you? Well, I’ll be.” This is all I ever get. These few words are all that fire between the synapses.My physical visits to him are much more painful. Never the heroic figure that many kids spoke of as their fathers, I still admired mine for simply being there. He worked at a job; made sure his daughters had good educations, and had an honorable reputation. I never had to look the other way when I went to school every day. Our bills were always paid, food always in our stomachs and we lived in a safe and pleasant structure. Certainly all of these were average expectations for a father and he fulfilled them with nothing much else to spare. He lived up to the idea of being just an ordinary man, never having enough money for fancy trips, content to be at home with his TV set and its bent take on a world.One afternoon during my visit, he sat in his rocking chair watching me and my sister sorting through bills at the dining room table. I was hurrying to leave, wondering if I could make it through the big city traffic that lay ahead of my drive two hundred miles away.I glanced over to where he was seated. He was smiling, his pale lips curled up at one side, his eyes far away, even as he looked right at me. “What are you looking at, Dad?” I asked.“My two daughters,” he said without hesitation, without pause, without struggle. It was a direct answer, straight from the synapses.“I need to leave here soon, Dad. I’m leaving in a few minutes but I’ll be back in the spring.” This time would be especially difficult since I lived so far away, it would be six months before I could get back to see him after the winter snows.He nodded and smiled that strange smile again. “It’s all right. I see you right here.”Placing his index finger to his temple, he tapped. “I see you here all the time.” There it was, the second time I had experienced my father’s generous nature. Despite his being incapable of expressing himself, he still understood my pain at being so far away. He was allowing me to go because he trusted in my word to return.I have often wondered many times what life would have been like if my mother had lived longer. I have wondered what life would be like if my father did not have Alzheimer’s and had just continued to putter on his own around an empty house. I know that one day he will forget my name entirely along with my sister’s name as he has already forgotten our mother’s. When that day comes, the history of my life, along with all the father stories, will stop and will end as well.But in the meantime, great gifts have been given out, gifts that might never have been given if it hadn’t been for his disease.There is the gift of clarity in love that goes for years unspoken until it pushes its way to the surface where it demands a moment of urgent expression. There it is unleashed in the synapses of the brain, moved along by the intensity of its simple endurance.And when that happens, the unity of such purpose reaches toward those who need it where it stretches itself beyond every human boundary.