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Yesterday
April 7, 1994 my father was taken by ambulance to the hospital. For some reason, maybe a small stroke, my father did not get out of bed for two days. He was an alcoholic and 48 hours without a drink threw his body into delirium tremens. When he couldn't get out of bed without falling and he was incoherent, my mother reluctantly called my sister and 911, in that order. Later that day my sister called to say he was in the hospital and they weren't sure what was wrong yet. That night my mother, for the first time in 38 years, slept alone in the house. No children, no husband, not even a dog. Worried as she must have been about my father, I wonder if this was the first time in all those years that she slept, really slept. She didn't have to listen for the floor squeaks and the bathroom door shutting, as a child or a husband was up in the middle of the night, possibly sick, needing her help. She didn't have to worry about my father getting up in the middle of the night to smoke a cigarette and starting a fire. They hadn't slept in the same room since shortly after I moved out in 1981; my mom bought a new bed and moved into my old room.
My father never returned home. While his body healed, his mind never returned to a functional state. He went from the hospital to a skilled nursing facility, where he died on Feb. 17, 1999. No matter how disoriented he was when my mother visited him, she still spoke to me as if he might be coming home. It took more than four years to convince her it was okay to sell his truck and put the farm up for sale. She needed the money. She still had hope (or was it fear) that my father might yet come back to himself and he would be so angry with her. Selling HIS truck, selling HIS farm, she was sure he would leave her. It took four years of visiting him and seeing only deterioration before she finally agreed to put it on the market.
I started this with the intention of writing more about how my father might have felt leaving his home under duress; instead I could only think of my mother's feelings The brain is a tricky thing, taking me away from where I didn't want to go, even when I thought I did.