Before the Aged

Letting Go of My Father

JONATHAN RAUCH, Atlantic Monthly, April 2010

MY FATHER CAME to live in Washington, D.C., near me, in the spring of 2009... He had Parkinson’s disease... He was falling regularly, which he insisted was no cause for alarm, because falling is something people with Parkinson’s learn to live with... He refused entreaties to use a walker, feeling that it made his balance worse. He insisted on driving, though his weakness and tremor defeated the mechanics of the right-hand turn. Through it all he would insist—insist is a verb I find I must work hard in this context—that all he needed was to be left alone. He would “relearn” how to walk and drive and live. Accepting help, he believed, would only cause his function to atrophy. “Use it or lose it,” he said.

...

Three days after he arrived, I entered his apartment and found in the bathroom a plastic bowl full of feces and urine and soiled baby wipes. The vanity and floor were smeared with brown. This, apparently, was part of his process of relearning how to use the bathroom. He insisted he would clean up the mess himself, forbidding me to touch it, an instruction I defied, since he tended to fall when he bent down. In the kitchen, most of a pint of two-day-old ice cream lay hardened into a sticky goo on the floor where it had fallen, out of his precarious reach. He insisted he would clean that up, too, and just hadn’t got around to it. Meanwhile, he had dropped a sheet of paper towel over the mess.

That was just day three.

...

Shame was another reason he wanted to be left alone. As he confessed to me more than once, he felt ashamed of his condition. One of the few times he ever cried in my presence was when he saw me on my knees, scraping hardened ice cream or jam, or whatever it was that day, off the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I never meant for you to scrub the floor for me.”

...

That was the day I realized that he could not cope and I could not cope and, emotionally, he could take me down with him.

...

As I reached my own breaking point...my father caught sight of my distress. He would not accept assisted living on his own account, but when I told him that he was already in assisted living but that I was the assistance; that I was overwhelmed, underqualified, and barely hanging on emotionally; that I wanted to be his son again, not a nurse and nag and adversary—when I told him all that, and when his sister and the social worker chimed in, he acceded. He was still, after all, my father, and it was still his job, he understood, to care for me.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/letting-go-of-my-father/308001/