The call came on a Tuesday morning, five minutes before my new client was due to arrive.
The Hebrew Home for the Aged had a bed.
I knew this place. Esther had told us about it — prestigious, impossible to get into, the kind of place you put on a waiting list years before you need it. I had taken Dad there a year ago. Though he could still walk with a cane, they made him sit in a wheelchair. I pushed him through the corridors while the tour guides looked past him as if he weren’t there.
Each time his head lolled forward — the stenosis, the CP, the exhaustion of simply being upright pulling at him — one of them would turn to me and ask: “Are you sure you don’t want the Alzheimer’s tour?”
“He doesn’t have Alzheimer’s.”
We moved on. It happened again. Right over Dad’s head.
“Are you sure you don’t want the Alzheimer’s tour?”
“Talk to him. He’s right there. And no, he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s.”
Three people. The same question. Again and again. As if Dad weren’t sitting right there in the wheelchair, listening to every word.
When we left, I agreed with him. He didn’t belong there.
But now there was a bed. And Dad was in Hoboken Hospital, beyond Nora’s capacity, beyond Mom’s, beyond mine. His body was making choices his mind refused to make. My mind, too, was having trouble making it.
The intake coordinator was walking me through the paperwork, the timeline, what would need to happen and when, and I was trying to write it all down and also trying to breathe, when the buzzer to enter my building rang.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Mrs. Oscar, we need your decision today. The bed won’t be held.”
I pressed the intercom to let my client up. “I’ll call you back,” I said. I hung up the phone.
I have to calm down. I closed my eyes. Took a breath. In. Took a breath out.
My client knocked. One more breath. In. Out. Then, I opened the door. My client whirled past me, straight to ‘her’ chair at the small wooden table by the window.
She was flushed, a little breathless. “I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said, peeling off her jacket, setting down her purse. “I am completely frazzled. I am having a hell of a time getting my father into a nursing home. He’s stuck in a hospital and these nursing home people are driving me insane.” She exhaled. Looked around the apartment. Looked at me.
“What a relief,” she said, settling into her chair. “To just come here and sit and have tea and talk with you.”
I put the kettle on - for both of us.
—
This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The previous chapter Coffee, Light and Sweet, is here. If you’re new to the project, read the first chapter here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here. Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend. To receive the chapters by email, subscribe here. To support the writer (me) and the project, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers also get SOSI: The School of (Words and) Images.
