Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  “I want to do it right this time,” I say. With my mom, I wasn’t there.

  “You have a lot to focus on. A lot of people to take care of.”

  “I don’t want to regret not talking to him. Asking him questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  I watched my dad watch Aaron return from the hospital. “Welcome back, babe,” he said. “Thanks, man,” Aaron said, and then they went about their days. What was behind that circumspection? Respect? Denial? Empathy?

  “Like, about his mental health.”

  Stu nods.

  “Aaron’s dad was pretty unstable. He had PTSD. Aaron thinks he was suicidal. Now Aaron has this schizophrenia diagnosis. I mean, it still doesn’t feel totally right to me. But it feels right to Aaron, at least a little. And my mom used the same word about my dad. I want to know—did he really have it? Does he? I mean, I have kids. Mental illness can run in families.”

  “Sure.” He looks at me over the tent of his hands. “Ask him.”

  “Stu. We like, never talked about this in my family. I don’t even think my brothers know.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  I glance around the room. “Like, he was at Bellevue. What was that like? Was he ever on any medication? Why were he and my mom in therapy? There was this whole time when I was, like, eleven. He and my mom had this family friend who was a doctor, and they saw him for therapy. It was all hush-hush.”

  “A lot of times, when people are at the end of their life, they find it’s a relief to answer questions. To set things right. It unburdens them. I’ve seen it with many of my clients.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “Ask him. You won’t regret it.”

  * * *

  November goes on with its slick chill. Dad hates the winter. He sits bundled on his couch in his bathrobe. I bring him coffee and ice cream and his favorite, biscuits and gravy, but he can only manage a few bites. He used to come into the kitchen while I was cooking dinner and we’d listen to Bob Dylan and drink wine, but now he stays in his room, kind of hunched over, staring at the floor between his feet. I wonder what he’s thinking. I want to ask, but my jaw feels heavy. I am scared. I don’t want to ask him how he feels about his own death. And asking about his schizophrenic episodes seems absurd. He is tired, confused. I don’t want to bring him back to a place he doesn’t want to go. I don’t want him to bring me to a place I don’t want to go.

  “You okay, Daddy?” I ask him instead.

  He nods, takes my hand. “Just weak.”

  I kiss his dry scalp. Then I go dump his pee bottle.

  My brothers have been planning to come to Ithaca between Christmas and New Year’s, but in the last days of November, he takes a steep dive. On Thanksgiving, I text my brothers a picture of Dad asleep at the table after dinner. We buy a Christmas tree and put it up the next day, in the living room, where Dad can see it.

  “Maybe they shouldn’t wait,” Aaron suggests. My brothers agree. It was so fast with Mom.

  They come up the first weekend of December. Pete and his wife, Cameron, and their two boys arrive first, from North Carolina, late on Thursday night in a snowstorm. Will there ever be a good time for them to come see our dad for the last time? No. But it’s a bad time. Aaron is breaking out. The next day is a new moon. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “Don’t worry about me. Take care of your dad.” I feel the giant force of it all moving along without me, the moon orbiting the earth, the earth orbiting the sun, other people’s bodies doing what they please.

  Pete and his family come from the hotel the next morning to be there when the hospice nurse arrives to do the intake. As she’s settling in upstairs, I check on Aaron in the downstairs bathroom. He is naked, distressed, raving with pain. He rubs his distended belly. A metallic ooze pours out of his navel, like silver spray paint.

  “Aaron, I can’t do this right now. I’m sorry.”

  “Please,” he begs. “You don’t understand what’s happening.”

  “Hospice is here,” I say. “I have to go.”

  And I roll the sliding door closed.

  Upstairs, while the boys play in the snow with their cousins—it’s novel to the North Carolina nephews, all this snow—Pete and I help Dad move from the couch to the dining room table. He sits in his smart green cardigan and the navy knit cap he’s never without, trying his best to answer the nurse’s questions, but he’s slow, disoriented. Pete jokes that he could probably beat him at Jeopardy! for the first time in his life. Dad asks about morphine. The nurse assures him he will have plenty. She tells us about the drugs, the phone numbers, the equipment that will be delivered—the bed, the oxygen tank, the commode. I fill out forms. Family history. Heart disease. Diabetes. I pause at the box that says “mental illness.” Then I check it. I don’t specify that he’s the family member who had it. What does it matter? He probably has days to live. Probably the nurse will be the only person to glance at this form. But I feel a quick flame of having righted something. I doubt he ever checked such a box in his eighty-six years.

  I try to focus on my dad, my brother and sister-in-law, on the paper before me, on the nurse’s gentle voice, but one ear is listening for Aaron, in the bathroom directly below us. I can hear him moaning, mumbling. I know they can, too. When the boys come in from the snow, I bring their snow pants and jackets and mittens down to the dryer and check on him again.

  When I roll open the bathroom door, he’s on his knees, sobbing, holding a rag in his hands. “I can’t do this anymore,” he cries.

  “Shh! They’re right above you.” I’m whisper-yelling. “Please.”

  “You don’t understand. I can’t take this anymore. Please.”

  We both plead. Please please please.

  “What is that?”

  I try to take the rag from him. He holds it. I yank again. I recognize the old faded beach towel. It has been cut and fashioned into a noose. I yank harder now, and he lets it go. Then I whip him with it.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  He’s kneeling, crying. Another day I might have held his hands, helped him to bed, given him some medicine, kissed his eyelids, and sat by his side until he was safely asleep. Today, I am furious.

  “My father is up there dying. You want to die too? You both going to leave me?”

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Please,” I beg. “Do not do this. Not right now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I have to be with my dad.”

  “Go be with your dad.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be with your dad. Don’t worry about me.” He exhales a long cry, and is still.

  “I can’t,” I say.

  And I close the door again. I bury the towel under my jeans in a drawer.

  * * *

  Sam arrives from D.C. that afternoon with two of his three boys. His wife, Keri, is home with their oldest, who has a tuba competition. We all take turns sitting by Dad’s bedside, in the hospice wheelchair. The boys admire the functions of the hospital bed. We feed him morphine and Ativan. It’s a familiar ritual, sad in its ritual and sad in its familiarity. On Dad’s eightieth birthday, when we all gathered at Sam’s, we watched my mother’s hospital bed delivered, learned how to operate the equipment. With her it was lung cancer, but there was morphine and Ativan then, too, the hospice paperwork scattered everywhere, the photo op of all the grandsons gathered around the grandparent wearing the oxygen cannula, the quick, ugly, merciful decline, the shrill joy of boys in the background.

  By Saturday, Dad stops eating altogether. I make him a cup of coffee in the morning, pour in a half cup of French vanilla creamer, the way he likes it, in the clear glass mug. I hold it to his lips. Gently, he shakes his head. I burst into tears. I have made him a cup of coffee every morning since he’s been unable to do it himself, at five thirty, when we were the only ones up. He’d take a sip and say, “Boy, is that good.” Now the coffee sits untouched on the hospital-bed t
able, growing a cold film on top. I can’t bear to pour it into the sink.

  We make Christmas cookies and do the handmade Christmas tree puzzle we’ve done every year since we were kids and Pete tickles Nico and Henry until they scream. Aaron has recovered enough to shower and get dressed and entertain the nephews with the little electronic noisemakers they love. I try to keep them out of his office, but they marvel at it, all the music equipment and monitors, the bow and arrow and Fushigi ball and Rubik’s cubes. There is junk stacked in plastic bins up to the ceiling and blood smeared on the walls, but they don’t seem to care.

  Pete and Cameron leave that afternoon in order to avoid a freak snowstorm that will drop ten inches of snow on North Carolina shortly after they arrive home. They say good-bye to Papou. On Sunday, Sam and I take our kids out to lunch and for a walk down the gorge near Collegetown. The sun has come out, and it’s a warm day for December. We leave Dad and Aaron alone at home, Dad sleeping, Aaron sleepless. We bring Aaron a sandwich. Dad still won’t eat. He can barely take a sip of water.

  When we get home, while Dad sleeps on, Sam helps me clean up the kitchen. He’ll be leaving that afternoon. We collect all the empty bottles and juice boxes and cans.

  “I’m worried about you, Nellie,” he says. “You’re taking care of everyone.”

  “I guess.” I jiggle a juice box and take the last slurp. “I mean, Dad took care of us, too.”

  Sam knows what I mean. Dad lived with him and Keri for twelve years, the first six of those years with Mom. He’s been living with me and Aaron for only ten months. Our parents helped care for their grandchildren, and in turn they were given a home. We know that we’re mostly caring for our parents, not the other way around, but as parents ourselves now we know there’s no balance sheet. Our father worked for forty-five years to care for us. Our mother made us twenty thousand forgotten meals. And even in the last weeks, nearly every night, Dad called Henry into his room to slide next to him on his couch, hair wet from the bath, to read him Peter Rabbit. “What’s that rascal gotten into this time?” We know we’ve been lucky.

  “I know,” Sam says. “But still. You’re doing everything. You going to be okay?”

  I’ve resented it, sometimes, taking care of all these boys. The feeding, the cleaning, the ferrying to doctor appointments. Recently I emailed Meredith a list of all the fluids I cleaned up that day. Blood, shit, vomit. Aaron’s, my dad’s, the kids’, the dog’s. We agreed that the piss of our sons’ friends on the toilet seat was the worst.

  Then the creatures I was taking care of started dying. In October we lost our dog, Zabby. Shortly after his twelfth birthday, he collapsed on the concrete floor of our bedroom and couldn’t get up. “Time to put that old boy down,” my dad said. The vet came to our house and gave him the shot while Nico and Henry bravely petted him. I wanted my kids to be there, and they wanted to, too. We watched his eyes close. I was thirty-nine and had never seen anybody, any animal, die. I felt I was being given some rite I’d been denied. We all cried and held each other and held Zabby, the shocking eighty pounds of his lifeless body. Even the vet cried. “We love you, Zabby,” we said. Henry was practical. “He can’t hear you,” he pointed out.

  Now I tell Sam, “I’m scared of him dying in the house.” It’s an illogical thing to say. What else might happen, except our father dying in this house? Our mother died at the hospice center in Alexandria, shortly after arriving there. Some people want to die at home. She wanted, I’m sure, to die in a hospital, where she would be out of the way, not any trouble. What I mean is that I’m scared of our dad dying when I’m alone with him, that I won’t know how to recognize death, or what to do about it. It’s the same way I felt about other life passages—sex, childbirth—what if I just didn’t know how to do it? I wish for the traveling vet, her gentle syringe.

  “I know,” Sam says. “Look, I can stay if you want.”

  I want him to. I want both my brothers to stay and never leave. “I’ll be okay,” I say. They have their own lives, and I’ve chosen this one.

  “But how’s Aaron, dude?”

  I toss the bottles we’re collecting in a paper bag. “Not great. I’m sorry you have to see him like this.”

  When something happens that will embarrass you, that will expose you, that is out of your control, the shame is like a puddle of piss you stand in. There’s the terror of peeing in your pants, the shock of the hot piss on your cold leg, but then there’s the relief, the warmth.

  “What’s going on with him?”

  I give him the broad strokes of the story. Lyme, Morgellons, co-infections. The hold it has on his body and his brain. The cycle we’ve been trapped in for the last year. The mania, the hallucinations.

  “He was watching this spot on the wall in his office,” Sam says. “He was like, ‘What is that? Is that thing moving?’”

  “Yeah. He does that.”

  I tell him about my attempts to get him into the psych ward, then his getting forced into the psych ward.

  “Jesus, Nellie.”

  “Yeah. It’s been kind of nuts.”

  “How was Dad with all that?”

  I take a sip of an almost-finished beer. “Great. Understanding. Like, they got each other.” I realize we’re using the past tense. “They kind of took care of each other.”

  “Yeah?”

  It’s hard to describe. Dad has been neither approving nor disapproving of Aaron’s illness, or the way he handled it, or the way I handled it. If he was concerned, he kept his concerns tightly buttoned, except to occasionally suggest that Aaron not eat so many eggs. It’s as though he recognized Aaron’s helplessness, his inability to be anyone but himself, and accepted it. I wonder if he saw my own worry, my panic, my need to fix, and saw my mother. If he did, he accepted that, too.

  “I don’t know if you ever knew this.” I can hear the kids’ voices from Nico’s bedroom, the Darth Vader sigh of the oxygen tank from Dad’s. I can feel the now-or-neverness. I lower my voice, lower my body over the counter. “Dad tried to kill himself once.”

  “What?” Sam drops to his elbows across from me. “When?”

  “Before we were born. When he lived in New York. He took a bunch of pills after some girlfriend left him. His friends found him days later and took him to Bellevue.”

  “No shit.”

  I tell him everything else I know and have never said about our father. It comes tumbling out. I tell him about Dad telling me he was going to move out, about Mom telling me, years later, that they’d been in therapy, that she’d chosen to stay with the family rather than visit her dying brother, that Dad had had “paranoid schizophrenic episodes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure. I asked Mom and she said, ‘I would never say.’”

  “I think I know,” Sam says. Then Nico comes into the kitchen and all the other boys follow him. Can Henry and Cormac play Batman: Arkham Knight? What’s it rated? No, they cannot. Well, can they watch Nico and Will play it? Fine. Sure.

  I nod toward the back door and Sam and I gather the recycling in our arms. Outside, he tells me, “I only remember one time where Dad was crazy like that. At your softball game.”

  “My softball game?”

  “You don’t remember this? You were probably like ten or eleven. Dad had picked me up after school and we were meeting you and Mom at the field. It was kind of lightly raining and when we pulled up we could see Mom was sitting in the bleachers next to some guy under his umbrella.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t remember. Just like the dad of one of your friends, I guess. I’d seen him around. It was really obvious he was just being nice and letting her sit under his umbrella.”

  “Oh, God. I don’t know if I want to hear this.”

  “Dad saw them and just jumped out of the car. He marched over in the rain and was like, ‘I see what’s happening here. I’m not a fool.’”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Mom was like, ‘Bill, don’t
do this.’”

  “No.”

  “He was just out of his mind, yelling. Mom had to calm him down and get him out of there.”

  We’ve dumped the recycling in the bin, and we are standing behind the house in the snow now, no jackets, hands stuffed in our pockets. I wonder if that was the “paranoid schizophrenic” episode, if there were more. Surely there’s more we don’t know. My kids don’t know everything about Aaron’s episodes, but they know enough. I want it that way. I don’t want them to grow up with secrets and silences.

  I asked Stu if I should talk to the kids frankly about Aaron’s mental illness. I worried about what they’d think when they learn about it someday. He said, “It won’t be a surprise to them. They’ve lived through it.”

  For me, though, standing in the cold beside the recycling bin, it is a surprise. My mother pretty well contained the fire of my father’s episodes. That was the way she wanted it. I suppose now it was a kind of gift. We knew our father, for the most part, as a healthy and capable adult. It was only partially a fiction. I needed that fiction of my father, whole and sane, even as he lay dying. Maybe I even needed my mother to craft it for me.

  I have some answers now. They are enough.

  There’s the rush of relief and regret, of sudden emptiness, that comes after throwing up.

  “Sorry to dump all that on you,” I say to Sam.

  “Me too,” he says.

  “Jesus.”

  “Damn.”

  Before Sam leaves, he helps me change our father’s diaper. We lift his narrow body, fragile as a newborn’s. We try to clean a bit of shit off his groin. It is a birthmark, we realize, large, not handsome, but beautiful. We never knew it was there.

  * * *

  That night, I drag the beanbag into my dad’s little room and sleep on it beside his hospital bed. I sleep the sleep of the new parent, waking every half hour to check if he’s still breathing. He talks and grunts in his sleep. He sounds as though he’s working out something difficult. Who is he talking to? In the morning, he doesn’t drink his coffee. He barely wakes up. When he does, his blue eyes settle on me like a baby’s and his face blooms into a smile, as though he’s been somewhere far away, and is surprised to find himself here, and me with him.