Where the Light Gets In

by Kimberly Williams-Paisley

  The four of us spent the rest of the afternoon floating in life vests and splashing one another, getting our toes nibbled by tiny minnows. My dad introduced us to an adventure we hadn’t known existed, right in our own backyard. Most importantly at the time, we felt as if he were ours again.

  It had been challenging getting him to leave home long enough for a visit. He was with Mom most days, feeding her and helping with showering and bathroom tasks. He even started working at her residence voluntarily, assisting with training the staff. He gave a class on the technique of “soft eyes,” a Zen-like global mindfulness of what’s happening in any environment.

  Years earlier he’d written an article on how to teach children to protect themselves, and interviewed a martial arts expert about how kids and others could expand their senses to anticipate danger. Dad thought that educating the employees of the dementia-care floor on the practice might help them keep tabs on many residents at once, allowing them to be aware, for example, that someone all the way across the room might fall.

  My father had become a part of the fabric of Mom’s new home, making friends, learning names, and listening to stories, helping in whatever way he could every time he was there. He did this because he appreciated the unique challenges in a community like this, and the people who were responsible for handling them. And also because he believed that his continued involvement would ensure that my mother would get the best possible care. He still loved her deeply. He kissed and hugged her, and danced with his arms around her waist to help hold her up. He sang her favorite songs.

  “I’m so glad I married you,” he said to her during every visit. “And I’m so glad you didn’t marry that Bill guy,” Mom’s boyfriend before she met Dad. Sometimes she responded with a smile or a laugh, though it didn’t really seem as if she was processing what he was saying.

  So it took me by surprise when he made a confession to me privately that summer in Tennessee: He wanted to find a compatible partner to spend the rest of his life with. He missed having someone.

  “Actually,” he said, “I’ve already been on a few dates with women.”

  Oh, God, I thought. I sat opposite him at the kitchen table in the cabin, suddenly very uncomfortable. We were alone in the house, and that was probably why he’d brought it up. I shifted in my seat and tried to take in what he was saying. But this was not what I wanted to hear. Mom is still alive, I thought. You are still married.

  “I’m just starting to meet people,” he went on. “And I want to have your blessing.”

  He told me he’d recently encountered a classmate at his college reunion in a similar situation. The man had fallen in love with a woman while his dementia-ridden wife was still living with him. The wife was completely dependent and mostly unaware of anything, as Mom was. He told my father the success of the new relationship depended largely on family support.

  “You have it,” I told my dad, not knowing if I meant it. “I want you to do what you need to do to be happy.” Truthfully, though, I was dying for the conversation to be over. I added, “Maybe I don’t need to hear details unless it gets really serious.”

  It was just too painful to think about at first. Part of me felt as if I owed it to my mother not to support my dad in this new endeavor, although from a logical standpoint in more lucid times, I supposed she would have been okay with it. She wouldn’t have wanted him to be unhappily alone. I didn’t know for sure, though, since they’d never discussed the possibility of such a scenario.

  Could Dad’s dating life get in the way of his remaining duties as my mother’s husband? Why wasn’t he content with getting to know his grandkids and having adventures in our backyard? We’d just gotten him back. And what kind of person would be willing to be with a man who already had a wife?

  I selfishly hoped he wouldn’t find anyone.

  As the months passed, his dating life started to feel like the elephant in the room. Dad was able to discuss it openly with Ashley and her husband, Neal—they celebrated the fact that he was meeting people and cultivating relationships. But Jay, Brad, and I had a harder time embracing it. Dad and I had always been close, able to discuss anything. Now I’d asked him not to share details of a big part of his life with me. I wanted to know, but at the same time I felt uneasy every time he tried to talk about it. I am my mother’s daughter.

  “I had a nice evening last night,” he’d say over the phone cryptically. “With…somebody that we don’t need to talk about if you don’t want to but if you do let me know.” Ugh. He was dying to tell me. While he was trying to be respectful, his dancing around it made me feel even more awkward.

  “That’s great!” I’d say as cheerfully as possible, and promptly change the subject.

  One friend who’d had parents in a similar situation told me, “People are meant to be together. Your dad shouldn’t have to be alone if he doesn’t want to be.”

  Many others agreed. “Good for him,” they said.

  But some people pointed out, “The vows say ‘in sickness and in health’ and ‘until death do us part.’ ” They were encouraging me to nudge my father away from this path. “This is the ‘in sickness’ part,” they said. “Don’t just sign off on this.”

  One of those people had been married for years to someone who had divorced her first spouse, and it made me think.

  Would we have been more able to accept Dad’s dating if he had divorced my mom? After she bit him for the first time, maybe, or almost pushed him down the stairs? My father had stuck by my mother and been loyal to a fault. He still loved her. And yet he was declaring that he also needed companionship and intellectual and emotional stimulation. The more I wrestled with it, the more I found myself starting to defend his choices, even as I didn’t want to know about them.

  Brad played devil’s advocate, joking with me one day after I told him about a particularly awkward phone call with my father, “Your mother would be rolling over in her grave right now—if she were dead.”

  I found the irony very funny.

  She wasn’t dead, of course. If she were, I could look up into the starry night sky and imagine her whole and vibrant again, my guardian angel. I could let her go. We could move on. Would it then be easier for me to let my father go, too?

  I thought back to when I was younger, and the first time I left my parents to go to kindergarten, to date boys I liked, to travel to a college far from home, to move to California, to manage my own finances, to marry. To do something they didn’t necessarily approve of. Every departure of mine was as it should have been. I was finding my own way.

  I thought about my own kids. I loved inhaling the smell of Jasper’s hair as I kissed him in his sleep after a long summer day of play—the scent a perfect mixture of dirt, sunscreen, and sweet cookie. I loved holding up Huck’s tiny palm to my own.

  “One day your hands will be bigger than mine,” I’d tell him. “And you’ll look down at me and say, ‘Hi, Mom.’ ” He’d giggle at my mock-deep voice and then I’d nibble his neck.

  They’d already left me for their first days of school. And I’d left them, too, to go to work, to vacation, to take respite time from parenting. Now I usually got a “See ya—love ya!” and a quick hug. No more little arms wrapped around my pant leg as they begged me not to leave. No more crocodile tears. We would have many more goodbyes between us.

  This is the arc of a family. Over the years, there are a series of arrivals and departures. And in the midst of that, part of the challenge is encouraging the people we love to become independent, and to love them as they are. Dad deserved to be happy the way he wanted to be. Realistically, I hadn’t ever “had him back.” He wasn’t ever mine to have. I needed to let him go, as he had let me go. I needed to let him jump into the water.

  I allowed myself a passing flash of a thought: Maybe Dad will meet someone that I’ll love, too.

  I summoned enough courage one day to ask him about a woman I knew he’d been dating for a couple of months. He was startled by my question
and my willingness to talk about it. To my surprise, he didn’t say much. Right after we got off the phone, though, he sent me an email.

  Before he could tell me more about her, he wrote, he wanted me to do something. “Please read a little of the first chapter of a book called In Lieu of Flowers. This style of writing matches what you were talking about, what you’d like for your book.” Huh. Okay.

  I was beginning to think about writing a book about this experience. I’d gotten some attention for a magazine piece I’d written, and the response to it made me realize I had an opportunity to help people by sharing my story. I was reading everything I could to see how others like me had told their stories. I didn’t know why Dad’s request took priority over my question about his dating life, but I was happy to put off the other conversation. Immediately I found and read the first chapter of In Lieu of Flowers: A Conversation for the Living, by Nancy Howard Cobb. I discovered that it was a book about grief, love, and loss. Both of the author’s parents had had dementia.

  “My parents are my guideposts,” she writes. “Losing them made me a bit braver about saying what needs to be said, to people who are dying, to people who are grieving, to people who are afraid to talk at all….If you give yourself permission to talk about your experience, you’ll find that other people will want to talk about theirs.”

  I wrote my father back right away.

  “I love the writing in this book,” I said. “She is terrific.”

  She, he told me then, was the woman he’d recently become very involved with. I’d known nothing about her. They’d been introduced via email through a mutual friend. They met for the first time at an Italian restaurant near Grand Central Station in New York, and talked and laughed for such a long time that my father was uncharacteristically late for an appointment. They found common ground about growing up as only children, caregiving, and writing. On their second date, they were so engrossed in each other that the waitress came over to their table and told them she’d never seen a couple so “romantic.”

  My father’s way of initially introducing his new partner was a good idea. I already liked Nancy Cobb as a writer. About two months later, we met in person.

  I was nervous, and as I rode the elevator up to her Manhattan apartment, I was resolved to step cautiously into this new territory. But all of my hesitations dissipated when Nancy opened the door and hugged me tightly. She stepped back, and I noticed that her bright hazel eyes were tearing up.

  “I want you to know, I honor you,” she said as she held me by both shoulders. “And I honor your mom. And I know this is hard.”

  She led me past my father, who seemed to be giddy. He looked younger, cooler. Handsome. He was wearing properly fitted trousers maybe for the first time in his life, and a classy rose-colored button-down shirt I’d never seen before. Nancy and I sat together on her couch with glasses of wine in front of some snacks she’d laid out. Almost immediately we began talking and laughing like old friends.

  Later, as my dad and I left to go to dinner alone, they kissed each other goodbye. I had to look away. It was the first time I’d ever seen my father be affectionate in that way with another woman, and it tugged at my heart. Nevertheless, I was encouraged. She actually seems great.

  —

  Later that summer, I got a call from Dad. He’d been diagnosed with stage 1 prostate cancer.

  “This is eminently treatable,” he insisted on the phone. He would receive low-level radiation treatments weekdays in fifteen-minute sessions, close to his home, and be finished in about two months. There would be minimal side effects—“probably,” he told me.

  I asked him if he needed me to come to New York. He said that Jay was going to be with him for a few days, and other than that, with Nancy’s help, he’d be fine. I largely put it out of my mind.

  In September I hosted a baby shower for my sister. Ashley was the last sibling in the family to have a child, and she’d shared with me over the months that she was grieving not having Mom there for her pregnancy and early motherhood.

  She told me she’d visited our mother and struggled to tell her that a new grandchild was on the way. She wanted to feel Mom’s hand on her belly, to celebrate what was happening. You were pregnant with me and now I’m pregnant with him, she thought. A mother-daughter milestone. She wanted a photo of the moment.

  But Mom wasn’t cooperating. She kept her hands curled up next to her and opened her mouth to bite my sister’s finger every time she tried to move one of Mom’s arms away from her body. Finally, as my mother started to drift off to sleep, her hand twitched out within reach. Ash grabbed it and slapped it onto her stomach. She tossed her phone to an aide to get the picture. It was a terrible memento. She left feeling silly and awful.

  “I so badly wanted her to register what was happening,” Ash told me. “But she couldn’t. She just slumped there. She missed it.”

  I wanted to make up for the family celebration she hadn’t had, to spoil her. I also loved any excuse to spend some time with her. We met up in California with nine of her girlfriends for a relaxed spa-type weekend. Her friends and I hired a team of women to offer reflexology and henna tattoos, and a chef to cook for us, and we spent two days swimming, napping, hiking, eating, and talking about men, babies, labor, parents, books, movies, and everything else we could think of.

  Before the weekend began, Ashley handed me a present that I opened privately, in my bedroom. I lifted the lid on the square brown box and saw a necklace. It was Mom’s. It brought back a flood of memories.

  I took her out one day as something to do. Were we in LA? We found a shop that offered custom-made charm jewelry, and I helped her pick out a silver rectangular piece on which they imprinted Huck’s name and a bronze piece for Jasper’s name. We chose a tiny heart charm to go with it, but Mom wanted to add more. A dragonfly. She hadn’t liked the simple chain I picked for some reason—was it too short around her neck? When we got back to the house, Dad took the charms off for her and threaded them together with a longer thin silver cable from another necklace she owned. She put it on. We laughed as she hugged me while she bounced up and down, awkward but endearing. The gift was her prized possession for a while.

  I’d forgotten all about it. I asked my sister where it had been.

  “Nancy found it,” Ashley said. “It was in a box in Mom’s chest of drawers.” Dad had long delayed sorting through the jewelry, trinkets, Christmas pins, hats, socks, and other small but powerful reminders of Mom. Most of her favorites had gone with her to her new home. Dad asked Nancy to sift through what was left and put all the pieces on display so Ashley could choose what the three of us might like to keep.

  My heart ached, and again I laughed at the irony of how the necklace came to be back in my hands.

  —

  After everyone left the baby shower, Ash and Neal and Brad and I went out to dinner. We had a great night, catching up and reliving the best moments of the weekend. It was almost eleven as we drove back to our house in separate cars. My phone rang, but I didn’t hear it and it went to voicemail. I listened to it a minute later. It was Neal, trying to sound calm.

  “Please call your sister as soon as you get this.”

  She’d received a message from the assisted-living facility. Our mother had had a seizure—a dangerously long one, maybe four minutes. Afterward she was unresponsive. An aide called an ambulance, and they took her to the hospital. Now the staff member who’d accompanied her needed to leave. He was supposed to have gone home a couple of hours earlier.

  No one had been able to reach my dad since the incident. I had an email in my inbox from Debby, saying my father wasn’t answering calls, texts, or email. They also couldn’t reach Sheelah, his emergency contact. The staff needed to know what we wanted them to do. Mom was stable and asleep. Did we want to hire someone to stay with her or allow her to be alone?

  From three thousand miles away, we didn’t know. Was she in danger of hurting herself? Falling out of bed? Pulling out an IV?r />
  Ash and I sat on the bed talking it through, communicating with Debby, who was at home, all of us trying to get an accurate picture of what was going on. Meanwhile, what had happened to Dad? I had a slight fear he was in some trouble, but my overwhelming sense was that it was something else.

  “He’s with his girlfriend!” I moaned to my sister more than once. “This is not okay. If he is going to go off somewhere with her, he needs to leave his phone on, leave proper backup information. This is completely irresponsible.” I felt as if we were talking about two teenagers. I pictured Dad and Nancy slumbering together somewhere, oblivious. All of the fears and resentments I’d had in the beginning came flooding back.

  Eventually, kind and generous Debby got out of bed and drove forty-five minutes to the hospital to see for herself how our mother was doing. She sat by Mom’s bedside until morning. Ashley and I each had a sleepless night, constantly rolling over in our beds to check our phones. We’d left messages everywhere—for Sheelah, for Dad, for Nancy, and even for Nancy’s daughter Leland.

  Sheelah was the first to respond in the morning. She went to my father’s house and rang the doorbell. He answered cheerfully. He was alone. He was finishing up breakfast and reading a newspaper.

  He’d had his first radiation treatment the day before and was exhausted, as much from the reality of his cancer as the treatment itself. He’d slept much more heavily than he’d expected. His cell had been next to him on a bedside table, set as always on vibrate. But he had been so out of it that he hadn’t even heard any of the calls on it or the house phone.

  Now he rushed to the hospital to be by my mother’s side. And when Nancy found out, she canceled her meetings in Manhattan to be there for Dad. It took him two days to get my mother out of the hospital because of various tests and consultations. It seemed to all of us like overkill for someone with her disease.