“Have I been good?”

One moment in a father’s amputated life

The conference room’s dark, heavy bookcases were packed with red-spined volumes. I savored a moment of quiet before everyone walked in hauling boxes of files. I was meeting again with my parents’ lawyer, Sonia. We were working to get my mom and dad properly situated in the nursing home. They were already there physically, but bureaucratically was another matter. Since my dad’s accident, the chaos of my parents’ life had become my inheritance, and navigating the world of eldercare, my new education.

I don’t remember which one of the mundane tasks preoccupied us that morning. It definitely wasn’t akin to the strange surprise on the day we found the Mexican divorce papers in one of my dad’s old files. Who knew my mother had been married briefly in 1962, besides my dad, I guess. I could only imagine her traveling to Mexico to secure the end to her surreptitious betrothal gone wrong. What was Mexico like then for a young, alabaster, red-headed, Jewish beauty from the Bronx? She had always told me things she probably shouldn’t have shared with a daughter, but this, her first marriage before she’d met my father or given birth to her children, she had managed to keep a secret.

Nor was the time eaten away that morning the way it was on the day we forensically tracked all eighteen of my father’s meagerly rewarding life insurance policies. I knew he was not the most common sense sort of person, but his diffused strategy for leaving something behind defied all logic. I think he must have said yes almost every time he received some type of promotional offer targeted for the elderly.

No wonder he had been stressed. Paying eighteen life insurance premiums each month, along with two mortgages, a home equity loan, premium cable, and all the other average American bills, was enough to raise anyone’s anxiety level to a point of cataclysm. Peering through this window into my parents’ life left me grateful that, at this point in my forty-three years, I was without life insurance, without spouse, without cable, without extraneous objects congesting my apartment, and living a simple, low-impact existence.

On this particular Tuesday with Sonia, two days before Thanksgiving, a different kind of drama than unearthing my parents’ secrets held me captive as the hours passed. This was the day he was scheduled for surgery — my dad’s rotten tree trunk of a leg was being excised from his body that morning.

I wondered what they would do with that severed limb. Does it get incinerated? Does it go into cold storage for some undisclosed amount of time? Does a pathologist slice it into thin rings hoping to discover, under the microscope, something about the life to whom it belonged? How many pounds would my dad lose that day, his long struggle with his weight suddenly lightened by the loss of a limb?

Obviously there were better ways to approach weight reduction. But his leg never recovered from having no blood supply for sixteen hours, permanently damaged from his mind-boggling accident of a fall in my parents’ bedroom one night. He stumbled, landed on his knees as if in prayer, and just stayed there, not moving for sixteen long hours, rescued, just shy of kidney failure, by the arrival of the nurse’s aide the next day.

All throughout that vigil of a night, my parents talked, my mother unable to reach the phone due to her own disability. She dismissively recounted later that my dad kept saying with a calm resignation in his voice, “I’m going to die, I’m going to die.” She, of course, didn’t believe him. In our family, dramatic proclamations were reserved for her alone.

The doctors, mystified, wondered why he didn’t just roll onto his side and avert all harm. Tests showed no neurological deficits or any other cause that would have allowed him to stay transfixed for so long in that deadly position. But truth be told, my dad never did things the easy way, and maybe he was praying for a change from a life that had become untenable.

Over the months as they tried to save it, his leg turned shades of green and purple that would be beautiful as a glaze on pottery, but not so good for flesh. His toes started to blacken. His kidneys were severely compromised. It was becoming clear, dead flesh, still attached, was killing my father. The doctors said they needed to remove the leg to save him.

Thoughts moved through my mind all that morning on the day of his surgery. I’ve always been terrified of paralysis and amputation and probably blindness, too. For as long as I could remember, my survival depended on being completely independent, needing no one. This survival method was not a perfect science, its success often left me isolated. So I wondered what it would be like to be in proximity to his leglessness, his prison sentence of a body, his inexorable need.

Since the accident, my father had already given up most will to control his physical being. Not like a death wish, but more a complete abdication of self-responsibility. He accepted the dialysis, accepted the catheters, the diapers, and someone else washing him. He threw his hands up embracing defeat like he had finally earned a much sought after medal. His turn now, he’d taken care of my bedridden mother for going on two decades. He was ready to be the passive recipient of all personal care and attention even if it was from strangers, a full regression to an elderly infant status.

My stomach turned at the thought of all of it, his survival after being so close to death, having two parents neither of whom could care for themselves or each other, the burden of their need, the detachment of my brother six thousand miles away, the whole mess of it. All this played in the background of my mind as they sawed through his flesh and bone and wrapped his desiccated limb like a baby, someone carrying it from the room to its mysterious disposal.

Time with Sonia drew to a close and I knew the moment I dreaded most had arrived. I was the only one who could or would go to see him, meet him in the recovery room and offer him a hand of connection to a world outside his own fear.

I drove the two miles up the road to the hospital. When I entered the post-surgical recovery he was already there, starting to emerge from his twilight. I didn’t know which side of his body to stand on, the leg side or the side where the sheet just fell against the gurney. He opened his eyes and for some unknown reason I said, “Dad, you did so good today, you did so good.”

I was afraid to touch him, to get too close to his unwinding. But a wave of something broke over my heart when I saw his fear. He was no one’s father then. He was a scared, fragile person set adrift into a territory completely unknown.

He locked onto my eyes and held them in a gaze that was not common between us. From the other side of control, of planning and knowing our stories like they’ve already been written, he started asking me in a voice just beyond a whisper, “Oh Andrea, have I been good? Oh Andrea, have I been good?”

Despite anything that had ever passed between us, there was only one answer. He held my hand so tight, grasping at it like a drowning man or an infant whose fingers close with an involuntary strength. Despite my desire to be anywhere but there, I stayed in his gaze, held his hand, reflected his goodness, and felt the crushing in my own heart.

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