His eyes are mischievous and Adrianne, my wife, is worried. He isn’t supposed to be here, but he won’t listen to her protests. “I’ll go back soon,” he tells her. “Just come with me.”
She follows him onto the roofed porch, where music is playing and the sun gleams and so does he. From the upper-floor room that juts off the house and hangs in the air like a nest on a branch, you can see the hills that surround our hollow open up to the western sky. Adrianne remains anxious, but dances with him, and the glint in his eye persists, as if he enjoys breaking some cosmic rule.
“But you’re supposed to be in your grave,” Adrianne says to him. “How did you get here?”
So anxious these earth-bound people, even in dreams. He doesn’t answer and leads her confidently around the airy room. Is this his goodbye to her, a beatific dance with his daughter-in-law who tended him so intimately during his final years?
Adrianne shakes me awake this dark morning.
“Joey, wake up! Your dad came again.”
***
She doesn’t know him as a child, the middle of nine children growing up in a working class neighborhood north of St. Louis, Mo., son of a factory worker and a school teacher; nor as a high school football player, remedial at math but excellent at word-crafting, who walks across the library one day and introduces himself to his future bride; nor as the journalist who prefers covering unions; nor as the young father of three sons – the Catholic, guitar-playing, moon-loving guy who can fix anything around the house.
Her relationship with him commences after he has begun to alter. She never meets Dad in his fullness, only in his disintegration. She gets to see him stop driving, to become mystified by zippers, to become lost at home, to sit on his couch one day, look at the picture on the wall and say, “Huh! We have that picture in our house, too.”
When we go to check out the memory care facility for the first time, she asks for an application. Her first week is the week Dad moves in. His transition is also her transition, her first job as a certified nursing assistant. And so during the last two and a half years of Dad’s life, as his physical abilities degenerate, she comes to understand his needs more intimately than anyone, as even Mom notes.
Working part-time, she learns to redirect his obsessive appetite. She can see when he needs the toilet when he cannot. If he is unresponsive to her suggestion that he use the bathroom, she sings to him, holds both his hands and walks backwards down the hall while he shuffles along, wide-eyed and grinning.
When he can no longer stand on his own, she lifts and guides his body – usually with the help of another but alone if she has to – from chair to wheelchair or from wheelchair to toilet. If he looks frightened after the stress of these transfers, she looks him in the eyes and speaks slowly to him: It’s okay, Jim. I’m Adrianne. I’m married to your son. You’re a good man. You’re safe. Should we get some food?
***
Before he moves into the memory care facility, it is Adrianne who comes up with the idea for the dance party.
We’re all broken up about this moment. We’d planned for Dad to move in with us and now we’re failing him.* What to do when you run up against your limitations, at the terrible experience of not being able to care for your loved one at home? I tend to wallow in it, to philosophize about how deranged our culture is, how you can’t untangle from it if you try, how the derangement is in us all, how weak I am. Adrianne has a different approach, which she suggests to my mom: How about a dance party with tables full of desserts?
My brothers come to town. Our friend makes playlists on his computer, plugs in speakers to his battery pack outside our log house. Adrianne strings lights in a circle on the lawn. Friends begin arriving near dusk. On the folding tables, covered by flowered tablecloths, they set cakes, cookies, pies and desserts of all colors — even a couple of three-tiered cakes. I’ve never seen so many sweets at once. We seem to be in a fairy tale now, not the Disney kind but the Grimm Brothers kind, full of old, natural meaning.
The sky becomes dark. The king is struck with a sickness that causes him to vanish. There is no cure and for years there has been much sadness in his realm, for something in the center being lost. A miraculous healing is not in this story. The vanishing of the king happens slowly over years and will continue for some time, and his people will have to meet this reality in many different ways. Tonight – not every night but tonight – that way is hours of dancing in the darkness, the spring-fed creek running just down hill from the party, the creatures in the wooded hills above wondering at the melodies, and on the tables transcendent amounts of butter, sugar, maple syrup, honey, fruits, chocolate and frosting, enough to launch the hearts in this tale into the starry heavens, at least for a night.
Children are everywhere wild. Mom dances gracefully all evening with my brothers and me and Adrianne and the kids and whoever else and by herself and of course much of the time with Dad. She asks our friend to replay that Rusted Root song. The words are just right for this ceremony:
Well pick me up with golden hand/I may see you, I may tell you to run…/I would like to hold my little hand/And we will run, we will, we will crawl...And then over and over, Send me on my way (on my way), send me on my way (on my way), send me on my way (on my way), send me on my way (on my way).
It’s hard to get Dad off the dancefloor. He’s not as limber as he once was, but he’s got an infectious shuffle-groove and a steady grin. Adrianne brings him plates of desserts and ensures he has open access to the tables. They dance together, too, this time on earth, not yet in the air of that later dream to come.
“Your dad can shake his booty,” she notes. “He’s got moves.”
The two are about to begin a journey together and at the end of that journey, it is she who will resolve the split, help us see that there never was any sundering, no before dementia and after dementia, that the vanishing was an illusion, that Dad, from birth to death, was always a whole human being walking his own way with us.
But we’re not to that part of the story yet. Tonight the party is still going and we’re still wallowing, dancing and feasting in the darkness, sending our suffering king on his way.
*There’s more about this in Number 6 of this Home Burial essay series.
**To hear “Send Me On My Way” by Rusted Root click here.
My lord, how beautiful. Too beautiful! Too much -- put it on paper, not a screen. Put it on dead trees -- on sacred, dead trees. Thank God this is what it's like to be humans together on this planet!!
Ok. This is just too good, too wholesome and honest, too wonderful for words. Yes, a difficult season but transformed into a song-filled evening that will carry all along the trail. May we each learn a little about the joy of simply being together and sharing who we are (at that moment whatever it is), and may we love exceeding. Thanks again, excellent. Tender and sweet and just the way it ought to be.