The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [91]
The rest of his life, of what he did to us, there was nothing left. Of who or what his daughter were or became, nothing. Of my mother, their courtship - he did have images. In a loop. Like film. Of his greatest architectural achievement, a shopping plaza in Trinidad, and the steel drum music and warm wet air and white sand and dark skinned women he’d found comforted his rage and disappointment, nothing.
My father lost his memory in the arms of his daughter the swimmer.
My mother was his caretaker in Florida until she got cancer and died. So in 2001 there he was, all alone in a house he barely recognized, facing the prospect of the State taking ownership of him and depositing him in a nursing home for the rest of his life.
Have you ever visited nursing homes in Gainesville, Florida? I have. Let me put it this way. Walking in the door of one brings a disgust to your throat like someone grabbed it. They smell like urine and dead skin and Lysol. The creatures tooling around in wheelchairs or “walking” down halls look befuddled. Like hunched over zombies. In the dining room women whose hair and lipstick are not on straight and men who’ve wet themselves shove pureed gruel in their mouths. But what makes them particularly hideous in a Floridian sense is the heat. The humidity. The air conditioning that doesn’t work quite right. The mold on the walls here and there. Cockroaches. Sometimes the old meat sacks sagging toward death in their beds are restrained.
Whoever I am, I am not a woman who could leave someone to rot in a place like that. Even him.
The grief I carried about my mother’s death lodged in me like a baseball I’d swallowed whole. Inside my treehouse sanctuary with Andy and Miles, every night I would dream about her. Every morning I would wake up feeling vaguely like I had been crying. But something else wedged itself between me and my new life. A word. Father.
The man I’d pulled from the sea and breathed life into.
The man without memory.
And so I saved his life a second time, or Andy did, in act of unmitigated compassion and heroism. He flew to Florida to get my father. Then they rode a plane all the way to Oregon together. Briefly they were detained at the airport security arch because my father would not let go of the faux metal box containing my mother’s ashes. He sat in his wheelchair and gripped them and shook his head no. Finally they let an old man through with what was left of his wife.
When Andy brought my father back to me I felt cleaved between two Lidias. A daughter, a tormented and damaged girl. And a woman, a mother, a writer whose life had just been born.
Andy and I found an assisted living facility about 20 minutes away from our sanctuary in the Bull Run Wilderness. The rooms were more like apartments than dungeons. His apartment had a giant window through which you could see fir trees and maple and alder - the Northwest. It was something I could give him that didn’t hurt.
My father lived a quiet life there for two years until he died. In the morning he would watch T.V. In the afternoon too. Sometimes he would just stare out the window at trees and smile. This man who took the place of the father I’d known before was sweet and docile and kind. Even his eyes were kind. Sometimes, I’d let him see Miles. I never saw the happiness that spread across his face like it did when he was with Miles. I mean in my life with him. Though I rarely let him hold my son, when he did, he looked like a miracle had happened. A boy.
A few times Andy and I brought him out to our house in the trees. He marveled at the architecture - muscle memory, I guess. He spoke of the way the light cascaded down the hand crafted wood stairs quite eloquently. The forest took his breath away. He said, “I love it here so much. I wish I could die here.” I think he meant to say “live” here, but I let it go. It was not something I could give him anyway.
I’d ask him about things when I’d drive him to do