Truths and Deceptions (2)

He picked at the pieces of melon and he described his hospital stay: “After I yelled at them, the doctors started coming to visit me in teams. There would be the head doctor, and then a group of other ones – students – younger people. One young woman came back into the room after her team had left. ‘I’m a Unitarian,’ she told me, with a big smile on her face,” – he wagged his head from side to side, mocking her perky cheerfulness – “I guess it must say that I was a Unitarian minister on my chart. I told her, ‘Too bad for you!’ The Unitarians think they’re superior to everyone, you know. But Unitarianism isn’t what it used to be.  Nobody knows that now. Well, never mind. But she kept coming back to see me anyway. They’d come in like that, over and over, the doctor closest to the bed, and the team of residents and student behind, in an arc. Always like that. And ask questions. Then they’d leave. I know what they do.  They go into a room and discuss me: ‘Can you believe he’s 98?’ They were studying me; I’m a curiosity. But they all have the same message: ‘Nothing can be done.’ So in other words, this is it, they can’t do anything to improve things, I have to live with knowing it will only get worse.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s all right, it can’t be helped. But it’s depressing. Until you called and said you were coming, I didn’t get out of bed all day today, I just lay there on one side. I didn’t go down to lunch because I can’t stand the fuss they make when someone shows up who’s been in the hospital. C. called and said she was going to make me get out of bed, and I said I wouldn’t, and she hung up.”

It seemed quite doubtful that his close friend C. would have hung up on him, but we let it go. I decided to try something different. “How about if I make you a little something to eat?” I suggested.

“There’s very little in the kitchen. Some of that awful Japanese stuff – what do you call it?”

“Sushi?” I had seen the tray of leftovers in the refrigerator, and thought it was a pretty odd thing to find in his kitchen.

“ Yes. C. brought it here last night and it made me sick, literally. I ate it and threw up in the sink. How can people eat that?”

“It doesn’t sound like the right thing for you to be eating the first night home.”

“I don’t want to ever eat it!”

“How about a scrambled egg?”

He considered the idea with moderate interest. “I asked them for a poached egg the other morning, in the hospital, and they brought me something totally inedible. It was like rubber, it came in a plastic cup.” He held up one hand, dangling an imaginary quivering blob from his fingers. “It was like that! Horrible! I told them it was overcooked and they said, ‘Ohhhh, we can’t serve them soft, it’s dangerous.’ Of course not, they might get sued. So I sent it back to them, untouched, with my compliments.” He sat back, looking pleased with himself for a minute, and then his brow creased again, but the tension seemed less personal now that he’d sounded off; he spoke in general terms, annoyed as usual with institutional bureaucracy: “What are they thinking? Don’t they have any imagination about how to create a meal people would want to eat? Patients need to feel like they can eat something, they need to be taken care of! The food was the worst imaginable. Awful! How can they do that to people?”

I laughed. “So, would you like an egg now, maybe a piece of toast?”

He shook his head. “Thank you, but it's all right, they’ll bring me my dinner pretty soon.”

I told him about a 79-year-old professor we’d met recently in Montreal, a French priest who is an expert in ancient Semitic languages, and worked for many years as an archaeologist in Palestine, deciphering ancient texts. “He was fascinated to know about your grandfather and his cave in Maalula,” I said. “And he’s an expert on those Assyrian reliefs I like so much – remember the ones in the British Museum?”

His eyebrows went up, approvingly. “Oh yes. So many interesting people seem to end up in that city. Why is that?” he asked. “You two seem to discover a lot of them.”

J. laughed: "They're all oddballs, like us," he said, and his father laughed too.

I said, “Well, it’s very international, you have to like that and be comfortable with the multi-lingual, multicultural nature of the place, as well as with the French overlay. And the winters, of course. But a lot of people come from the Middle East and from Europe, people who've had French as their second language.”

“Well, they probably find you two interesting too. As we say in Arabic, “The pot has found its lid.”

There was a knock at the door and a girl entered with a tray: dinnertime. I took the tray into the kitchen while she went over and spoke to him by name, asking him how he was doing with obvious affection. ("They all try to hug me!" he said with mock horror, after she left.) I unwrapped all the food, bringing him separate plates so that it would look more like home and less like the institutional meals he’d been getting. “What’s this?” he said, poking at the salad of mixed greens. “I told them ‘only the hearts of the lettuce,’ and they bring me these leaves. What do they do with the inner parts? They never serve them to us.”

I didn’t want to say, “The lettuce probably comes in big bags, just like this, not as heads,” since that would extinguish his hope of ever getting tender inner leaves again, but J. announced, “They send them all to Kendal,” referring to the lah-di-dah Quaker retirement community up the road where my mother-in-law had chosen to live and he had flatly refused to go; he’d had antipathy against it and the Quaker business model ever since.

He grinned, acknowledging the joke. “Go along,” he said, waving his fingers in the direction of the door. “Have a good supper and enjoy yourselves while you can. Old age comes soon enough!”

(This is the second 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

[dale]

:-> "the pot has found its lid," what a wonderful phrase!

[jo(e)]

These pieces about your father-in-law are just fantastic.

[Kaycie]

There is such love in these posts, emanating from him as well as from you.

[language hat]

Thanks for continuing the saga. I can't get enough.

[ruth]

hello beth. Sorry, but I didn't want to turn into a pumpkin or get bad karma and because I like you I've tagged you...

[anasalwa]

Beth,
Everytime I read your entry about your father in law, I think I get to know you and your father in law better (hah....hah....hah...that's what I thougt. Your warm, love, caring and compassion show in your writing. You and J are fortunate to have an honor to love, care and be with your husband's father.

[Natalie]

Yes, the love shows. This makes me want to hug him and also makes me want to cry. Beth, do you think he might like to read these wonderful vignettes you write about him? Or some of them, at least?

[Pablo]

Again, Beth, thanks for allowing us to vicariously enjoy your intereactions.

[Pica]

Oh wonderful, Beth.

Thanks for taking the time to put these together.

[Bette]

LOL

[Greg]

What happened to that eco-freak clarke's site?

[elizabeth]

Something kept me circling back to this post, and today our mutual friend reminded me what--'the pot has found its lid.' The saying brings to mind one in the story Hrant Dink tells in this column (and the video I posted on the anniversary of his assassination) about the persistence of Armenian roots in Anatolia. It became a touchstone for those mourning his death: su çatlağını buldu, 'the water has found its crack.'

Here's to a peaceful marriage of water and pot. And thank you again for these stories--I've been prompted to dig up old photos of Ma'alula, and won't look at them again without thinking of your father-in-law.