Truths and Deceptions (4)

When we arrived that evening he was lying on his bed, dressed, but made no effort to get up when I walked into his room. Still, his face lit up and he said, “Oh! It’s you!” A practical nurse, wearing a loose uniform top in a teddy-bear print, was in the kitchen with C., who had probably been at the apartment all afternoon.

The nurse came into the bedroom and spoke brightly, with a big smile on her face, “I brought you some nice soup, and some toast – the girl in the dining room told me what you like – she said ‘he likes chicken soup with lots of broth, and toast!’” He smiled up at her. “I want to see you eat a good dinner,” she said. “We’re going to get you back up around here, M.! OK?” She turned to me and smiled, “I’m so glad to see you’re here tonight!” and threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug before going out of the room. I didn’t know the woman at all; so far as I knew I’d never seen her before. I looked at M. in the bed, amused, and raised my eyebrows.

“She’s my friend,” he explained. “She fought for me the other night when the other one was insisting on calling the ambulance and sending me to the hospital. She stood right there in the door and said ‘No! He doesn’t want to go!’ I remember it distinctly."

“Are you going to get up?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, “I’ll come out there,” starting to shift his legs to the side, laboriously and awkwardly since he was on his back and therefore not in a good position to push himself up. His walker was parked halfway up the side of the bed, blocking his legs.

“Do you want this, or your cane?” I asked. He shook his head no. “Then, here, let me get it out of your way,” I said, rolling the walker to the end of the bed as I watched the slow process of his rising, wondering how he ever managed to do this by himself without tipping right out of the bed onto the floor, but as usual, he was very careful. He got out of the bed and propelled himself slowly into the sitting room, grasping a handhold on each chair and table as he moved along, bent nearly double. He greeted his son and settled into his chair with a huge exhalation of relief.

Almost immediately, C. was standing in front of him with his hearing-aid box, handing him a cotton swab dipped in the special oil required before he inserts the devices in his ears.

“No,” he said, flatly.

“I insist,” she said.

“No! I don’t want to!”

“It will make it much more pleasant for all of us,” she said, not budging.

He looked at her and uttered an Arabic curse under his breath, and then blinked his eyes, slowly, giving up. “How about if I put ONE in?” he bargained.

“Both. Please.”

“They help you, Dad,” said J. “Without them you can’t understand anything I say.”

He grimaced, took the swab and swirled it in his ear, and picked up one of the hearing aids and turned its control; it emitted a loud high-pitched sound as he put it into his ear and turned the control again. He repeated the process for the other ear and sat back, looking at C. defiantly.

“Thank you very much,” she said. He didn’t reply, but we were all relieved; his “ears,” as he calls them, don’t solve the problem but they do make a big difference in the quality of conversation as well as his own sense of being left out, or not. This pair, by far the best of several he’s had over the last decade, had been a generous gift from C., and also a means of self-protection for her: since a devastating car accident many years ago that left her with lingering disabilities she has had trouble speaking clearly and loudly. With M., that was of course a particular problem, which he blamed on her, not on his own lack of hearing: people simply didn’t speak clearly or directly, or so he complained.

I went into the kitchen and talked to her while she heated the soup. “You brought more sushi tonight,” I said, seeing a small tray with maki on it.

“Yes, I like it, but I’m not very hungry. Do you want some?” I shook my head. “You know he ate the wasabi yesterday,” she said.

“What?? No!” I said, opening my mouth in horror, and then starting to laugh. “So that’s what happened! Ohmigod.” C. started to giggle too.

‘What are you two laughing about in there?” he called.

We both walked out into the living room. “I was telling Beth that you ate the wasabi yesterday,” she said. He looked at her blankly. “The green stuff, with the sushi.”

He straightened up immediately and shuddered. “Yes!! It was horrible! What was that? I put the whole piece in my mouth and tried to chew it, and then I got really ill, it was terrible!! It does awful things to you!”

We were all laughing so hard by then that he started to laugh too, his shoulders shaking up and down. He shook his head in disbelief, grinning. “People eat that voluntarily?”

“Yes!” we said. “But not all in one gulp, just a tiny amount dissolved in soy sauce!”

“Amazing,” he said. “The world is full of craziness.”

C. told us about their afternoon trip to physical therapy, with many comments and elaborations from my father-in-law; one of the exercises apparently took place on a large double-bed-like surface, and when the therapist had said, “OK, next we’re going to move over to the ‘bed’,” M. had said, “We??” in a tone that had cracked up all the people having therapy. They had also run into some old friends, former parishioners of his, in the hospital lobby, and he’d enjoyed that, once they’d told him who they were.

So the levity produced by the wasabi story prevailed, and the conversation never turned back toward the serious questions of the night before. After the meal a different nurse came in with his nightly medications; this was the one who had sent him to the hospital against his will, and although he was perfectly cordial we could tell he was annoyed by her presence. After that he seemed very tired, and we got up to leave. For the next few weeks, any further conversations would be by telephone.

“Au revoir,” he said, as we put our coats on. “Now that you’re French speakers.”

“Au revoir, a la prochaine. We’ll talk to you soon.”

“Insh’allah,” he added, and had already looked away when we closed the door.

(This is the fourth of four parts, and is the latest in a many-year-long series of posts about my father-in-law, collected under the title "The Fig and the Orchid"; please click on that name under Pages, in the sidebar at left, for the whole series.)

Comments

[Kaycie]

These are such a pleasure to read, Beth.

[language hat]

They sure are, and there's more to come! Christmas in March!

[Kat]

These are exquisite, Beth. Thank you for sharing them with us.

[Szerelem]

Beth, these are truly wonderful to read. There's nothing that I can really add that hasn't been said before or doesn't sound banal, but thank you for sharing these.