by Kelly Rimmer
16
Kelly Rimmer
don’t like her feeling sorry for me, and that hug today was a
strangely awkward experience.
“Visit him?” Dad says, immediately perking up.
“Another day, Dad. Soon,” I promise. Between my siblings
and our spouses, at least one of us will visit Dad every day from
now on. My sister Ruth pinned a roster for the first two weeks
of visits to the fridge in Dad’s house, but for some reason, she’s
left me off it. Ruth has a lot on her plate so the mistake is un-
derstandable. I noticed it a few days ago. I just keep forgetting
to call her to sort it out.
I help him from his wheelchair into the car, but just as I move
to shut the door, he reaches up to hold it open. He pauses, frown-
ing as he concentrates. I scan his face—those beautiful blue eyes,
lined with sadness, lips tugged down. Tim helped Dad shave this
morning and his cheeks are smooth. I’m suddenly besieged by a
memory, of snuggling close to Dad for a hug after I’d fallen on
this very path rushing out to meet the school bus one morning.
I’d skinned my knee pretty bad, and Dad had waved the bus
driver away, promising me he’d make it all better then drive me
to school himself. I remember his cheeks were rough that day
with stubble, but his arms around me were warm, and his gentle
kiss against my forehead gifted me instant courage to deal with
the blood that was trickling down my leg.
That moment feels like a million years ago. I just wish there
was some way I could return the favor, to make him feel as safe
as he made me feel so many times over the past four decades.
But hugs can’t make this better. Nothing can change the real-
ity that our time with Dad is coming to an end.
“Come on, Dad—” Tim starts to say, but Dad shakes his head
fiercely and he looks right at me as he says,
“Beth.”
“Yes, Dad?”
His entire expression shifts in an instant—from determina-
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tion to a sudden, crippling sadness. His gaze is pleading and his
eyes fill with tears as he whispers,
“Sorry.”
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I do,” he insists, and his gaze grows frustrated, presumably
at my blank look. “I…the mistake and of course I didn’t. Be-
cause I’m sorry and she’s gone.”
What strikes me first is simply how much I miss Dad being
able to speak easily. His speech has been getting worse and
worse over the past few months; most days now, it’s just frag-
ments of language that are, at best, related to whatever he’s try-
ing to express.
“Dad…” I’m trying to figure out what to say, but I can’t, and
Tim and I just stare at him in confusion for a moment as he tries
to explain himself.
“I, when Gracie…alone. Remember? What’s it called?
When…and she came and I tried…” There are tears in his eyes
again, and he looks from me to Tim desperately, as if we can
help him somehow.
“That’s enough now, Dad,” Tim says firmly, then he adds
more gently, “You’re okay. Just relax.”
Dad’s language issues stem from a form of fronto-temporal
atrophy called semantic dementia. His memories are intact, but
his language skills have been devastated. Tim sighs heavily and
runs his hand over his salt-and-pepper beard, and I belatedly
notice how weary my brother looks. For the first time all day,
he seems to be struggling more than I am.
This situation is awful and it’s been hard on all of us, but I
know Tim, and it’s not the stress of a sick parent that’s giving
him anxiety. Tim’s habitual over-responsibility is slowly driv-
ing him crazy this week. Despite being the one to miraculously
win Dad a place in the hospice ward of an amazing new nurs-
ing home on Mercer Island, he’s still been trying to find some
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Kelly Rimmer
last-minute solution that would enable us to decline the place-
ment anyway.
“We’re doing the right thing,” I assure him softly. We’ve been
using a combination of at-home nursing care three or four days a
week, supplemented with a rostered system of sleepovers for me
and Tim and our siblings Ruth and Jeremy on the other days.
This has mostly worked for the past six or seven months, but
it was never going to be a long-term solution, especially now
that Dad is well into the “end stage” of the heart failure process.
Tim’s apartment is a forty-minute drive from here, in down-
town Seattle close to his hospital. It’s a lovely home, but it’s on
the twentieth floor of a high-rise tower—not at all a suitable
place for Dad to live out his final days. Plus, Tim works insane
hours, and his wife Alicia isn’t exactly a nurturing soul. And
Ruth has three children of her own and runs the family con-
struction business. Jeremy is an earth sciences professor and when
he’s not teaching, he’s traveling. Right now he’s in Indonesia,
reading seismic waves or something, and I know he’s supposed
to spend the second semester of next year teaching in Japan.
My husband, Hunter, and I probably were the only fam-
ily members who could have cared for Dad given I’m at home
full-time at the moment anyway. We already live nearby, too,
so we could have just moved into Dad’s house, or Dad could
have moved in with us—either home is plenty large enough to
accommodate us all. When Jeremy casually tried to hint at an
arrangement like this, I just told him I was going back to work
soon. That’s a lie, but it was a necessary one. I’ve quietly ex-
tended my maternity leave by another six months, but I have no
idea if or when I’ll go back to my position as a child psychologist
at a community center. I do know for sure that I simply cannot
take on Dad’s care full-time…especially knowing what’s coming.
“I wish there was a way we could keep him at home,” Tim
says, for what feels like the one millionth time. “Maybe I should
have looked into moving here…”
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I step closer to him and slide my arm around his waist, then
rest my head on his shoulder.
“Come on, Tim. Be realistic. The commute would have
killed you.” The commute or his wife. For the past seven or
eight months, Tim has been here with Dad at least one night
a week—usually on his only day off, sometimes making the
journey straight from a night shift. Alicia came with him a few
times, then suddenly stopped helping out. As far as I can tell,
she’s very busy being a “media personality.” Given she hasn’t had
an acting or modeling gig for at least a decade, �
��media person-
ality” seems to mean she spends her mornings at the gym and
her afternoons with her socialite friends, hoping she’ll make it
into the frame of a paparazzi photo so she can complain about
her lack of privacy.
It’s fair to say I was never Alicia’s biggest fan, but her deci-
sion to sit on the sidelines while the rest of us struggled with
Dad’s care is not something I’ll forgive anytime soon. Jeremy
is newly single, but even his ex-girlfriend Fleur made an effort
to help out a few times. And my husband, Hunter, and Ruth’s
husband, Ellis, have gone out of their way to help, too. Hell,
even Hunter’s parents, Chiara and Wallace, have taken their
share of turns with Dad, especially after Noah’s birth when I
just couldn’t get myself here.
It’s been a team effort: Team Walsh Family and Friends—
minus Alicia. And yes, I suppose it’s possible I’m a little bitter
about that.
“Are you okay?” Tim asks me suddenly. I grimace and nod
toward Dad.
“I’ve been better.”
“I don’t actually mean about what’s happening with Dad. I
mean…in general.” He says the words so carefully, it’s like he’s
tiptoeing his way through a minefield. I raise an eyebrow at him.
“Do you realize you’re deflecting?”
“Do you realize you’re deflecting?” he fires back. We stare at
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Kelly Rimmer
each other, then at the same time, both break and reluctantly
smile. “Look, everyone is busy, and we’re all a bit overwhelmed
at the moment. But I just need to make sure you know I’m here
if you want to talk.”
“I’m fine,” I assure him.
“I can’t tell what’s going on with you, Beth. Sometimes I
worry that you don’t realize how little time he has left. Other
times I worry that you’re all too aware of that and maybe…not
really coping with it?”
“There’s a lot happening,” I say, then I glance at my watch.
“We really need to go.”
Tim sighs, then gives me a quick hug before he walks around
to slip into the driver’s seat. I look back at the house one last
time, aware that after today, it’s no longer Dad’s house, but Dad’s old house.
Until this year when his speech started fading, Dad had a
saying— everything changes. For as long as I can remember, those
words have been my father’s default response to pretty much
everything that happened in our lives. He used the words so
much when I was a kid that it felt like a corny, meaningless
catchphrase—but there was no denying that my dad genuinely
believed in the sentiment. Everything changes was his consolation when things were rough. It was his reminder to stay humble
when things were good.
And now, as I sit in the back of the car and the house gradu-
ally shrinks in the rearview mirror, those words cycle through
my brain on a loop—a simple but unavoidable truth.
The years have been rough and they’ve been kind and they’ve
been long and they’ve been short…but everything changes, and
the best and brightest era of our family’s life has drawn to a close.
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Grace
October 4th, 1957
My baby girl turns one today. For some people, a milestone like this is bit-tersweet. After all, a first birthday marks the shift from helpless infant to inquisitive toddler, and inquisitive toddler leads to precocious preschooler and so on and so forth until that helpless newborn is a fully fledged adult who must leave the nest. A first birthday marks proof positive that the innocent days of parenting a child are a finite resource.
I don’t grieve the end of the babyhood era. I won’t miss the milky scent of her forehead, or the intensity of her gaze on my face as I feed her in the small hours. I won’t be one of those mothers who laments the passing of time or coos about being broody, dreaming of going back and beginning all over again. No, I celebrate the closing of this chapter because if history repeats itself, it means that my life will soon improve again.
For the sake of my marriage and my sanity, this day really couldn’t have come soon enough.
We didn’t have the money for a gift, which I feel so sad about. I’m
sure for my first birthday my parents lavished me with toys I would have been too young to understand or appreciate, but my daughter’s childhood circumstances are very different. She’s growing up in a modest house in a modest neighborhood. She shares a room with her sister because although they constantly wake each other up, there are only three bedrooms, so in a family of six, everyone has to share.
I grew up in a house so large my sister and I never had to be in the same room unless we wanted to. This baby is growing up in public housing where just scraping by is the norm, and when she makes friends, many of them will be used to birthdays where a cake is about the extent of the expense spared. I grew up in a place where fathers were bankers Truths I N_9781525804601_ITP_txt_275977.indd 21
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Kelly Rimmer
and lawyers and politicians, and mothers outsourced the cleaning and
cake baking so they could spend their days at the salon. My mother was busy with her charity work and her self , and while she was very formal at times, I can’t ever remember doubting her love for me. She was steady and dependable in both mood and temperament, strong and capable as
a mother and a woman. She wore the titles of wife and mother as a crown, not as an oppressive yoke over her shoulders.
If I could change anything about the life I’m providing my daughter,
it wouldn’t be gifts on her birthday or a nicer house in a better street. No, if I could change just one thing about our circumstances, I’d choose to change the mother in her scenario. I’m grateful for all of my childhood comforts, but I’m most grateful for the steadfast dependability I saw in my mother, and I just cannot offer that kind of certainty to my children.
They deserve a better mother than the one God or fate or providence be-stowed upon them, but I am selfish enough that I’ve prayed not to change for them, but for the courage to walk away. Motherhood has left me feeling both helpless and worn, and I am trapped here by my fears and failures. Like the skin on my stomach after all of these pregnancies so close together, I feel as if I’ve been stretched far too thin to ever go back to the way I was meant to be.
It feels hopeless. I feel hopeless. But feelings, even loud feelings, lie sometimes, and I know that all too well after the past three years. Beth is one now, and history has proven that a first birthday in this family means the beginning of the end of the seemingly endless chaos in my mind and my soul. I’ve held on this long—by the skin of my teeth this time, perhaps, but I have managed to hold on and when the misery breaks, I’ll be proud of myself for that.
Just a little while longer and I should start to feel human again. Warm emotion will gradually seep back into my soul and color will come back into my world. Silent tears will give way to genuine smiles. Sobs will Truths I N_9781525804601_ITP_txt_275977.indd 22
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give way to laughter. Fear will give way to hope. Rage will give way to calm. The urge to lash out and hurt will once again become a compulsion to love. If I can dam up the chaos…if I can hold back the storm…if
I can just
keep my grip on this life for a little while longer, the sun will come out from behind the clouds and life can begin again.
Happy birthday, my darling Beth.
May this year be the year life really begins for all of us.
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Beth
1996
It’s Sunday, and Sunday has always meant an open invitation
for dinner at Dad’s house. Once upon a time, Dad would cook
a huge roast with all the trimmings, and he’d sit at the head
of the table and remain the center of the conversation. Today
Ruth’s done the cooking, and for the first time ever, Dad isn’t
even here. He’s been unsettled since the move last week, and
the doctors have asked us not to take him out on day-leave until
he’s adjusted to the new arrangement. In his place at dinner to-
night is a heavy, awkward grief. I suspect everyone else is try-
ing just as hard as I am to be brave, but conversation has been
through a series of violent starts and stops ever since we arrived.
We just can’t get the chatter to flow the way it usually does…
the way it should. There’s a sporadic throb in the center of my
chest. My gaze is constantly drawn back to that empty chair at
the head of the table.
“I’m just going to put something out there,” Ruth says sud-
denly, breaking a silence that stretched long enough for us to
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devour the meal she’d prepared. “Dad gave me and Ellis the
company. The rest of you should decide what to do with the
house.”
Jeremy arrived back from Indonesia this morning and he’s un-
kempt, jet-lagged and cranky. He sighs impatiently and stands
to slide a bottle of merlot out of the wine rack Dad built beside
the sideboard. Jeremy and Ruth are twins, and even now in their
forties, they are close enough to fight almost constantly. Dad
used to say they were ‘just too alike’, and I think there might
be something in that.
“What?” Ruth prompts him, snarky and defensive.
“Stop trying to be a hero,” Jeremy says impatiently. He rum-
mages for a bottle opener, removes the cork, then starts filling
glasses in silence. As he moves toward me, I set my hand over my