Caregiver's Diary: A Grand Affair

My brothers and sisters and I stayed up late at the motel, drinking and smoking and telling stories, remembering. We all agreed it was just the sort of party mum would have enjoyed, and that a grand time was had by all. The next day, after a boozy lunch for 25 at a local pub, we went to the small cemetery where my mother’s parents are buried, and where her name had been added to their gravestone.

Seeing her name carved in stone stopped me in my tracks. It was no longer academic, ephemeral, debatable or questionable. My mother was dead and would never come back. I would never share the foibles of passersby with her, never tell her about the hawk in my garden or the early blooming of the crocii. I hadn’t cried yet, not since I learned my mother was dying, but I had to gather my faculties before we all planted a lilac at the stone. My mother loved lilacs, because, when she found them on her walks in the woods, she knew there had been an old homestead there.

My father was frailer than when I had last seen him in June, more translucent. The summer of death had taken everything he had left. He was using a cane, favouring a leg he had gashed in a fall. These falls were what worried us the most; they usually came after two martinis, and he often didn’t remember them in the morning. We knew we had to get him under supervision, somewhere closer to us.

We squired him around the entire weekend, doing everything for him. He became accustomed to the help. He visited several assisted living facilities in the Niagara area with youngest sister, and chose one, very splendid, with a splendid name and white tablecloth meal service three times a day. He paid a deposit and started thinking of what he could fit from his long life, his extensive music collection and all his books into 600 square feet of space.

He got on the plane, to go back to his empty house in the Maritimes. He had left the dog with youngest sister, and had only Kathie Rose, his daily helper for company. What would happen to his decision to move into assisted living? My wife said “Wait. It’s not over yet”. Turns out, it wasn’t.

Keywords: caregivers, diary