“I know,” I said. But I didn’t want to think of my father living in some facility, and I didn’t want to worry about who was taking care of him and how well they were doing so. What was the point? We’d been told that this was our option, and this facility was the best we’d seen.
“I mean the whole situation,” my mother said. “It’s the pits, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is, Mom. It really is.”
“Your father worked so hard all his life, and for what? He’s going to end up here? It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
It truly did, and that was as close as I’d ever come to hearing my mother question her faith.
22
We didn’t go home to think it over. My mother and I filled out the paperwork that afternoon in Shirley Farley’s office. My mother chose a room with a western view. “Your father enjoys the sunsets,” she said.
My parents’ health insurance would cover most but not all of the costs. I saw no way that my mother could afford the difference, but when I mentioned this, she dismissed it. “Money will not dictate your father’s comfort,” she said.
We moved my father the next day, and after my mother and I got him physically situated, I told her I needed to run some errands and would pick up staples for his refrigerator. Ernie and Mickie were waiting for me at the house when I arrived with a small U-Haul trailer. Ernie and I loaded up my father’s beloved recliner, side table, and lamp while Mickie boxed up framed photographs from the mantel. We also rolled up the throw rug in the living room and took a couple of paintings from the walls. I’d cleared this with Mrs. Farley but had not told my mother.
When I knocked on the door to my father’s room, my mother opened it to find Ernie and me straining with the weight of the recliner.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“If Dad can’t come home, we’re going to bring home to Dad.”
Ernie and I set down the throw rug and recliner along with the side table and lamp. After my mother composed herself, she and Mickie arranged the photographs around the room, hung the paintings, and put away the kitchenware, pots and pans, and cutlery. By the time Mickie was finished, the refrigerator and shelves were stocked. It wasn’t home, but it was the next best thing.
“There’s only one thing missing,” I said.
My mother looked at me inquisitively.
“I think tonight would be a good night for your lasagna,” I said, and I pulled out one my mother had frozen.
Despite my mother’s insistence, Mickie and Ernie did not join us for dinner, wanting to give us time alone. The three of us sat together at the table, my father listing in his wheelchair. My mother reached and took his hand as we created our traditional circle. “Dear Lord,” she said. “Though we do not know your ways, we accept that everything that happens is your will. Help us to accept that which we cannot change, give us the courage to change what we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
I humored her and said, “Amen.”
My mother served me a wedge of lasagna and said, “We shared our first moments together, the three of us, in a hospital,” and she told me again about the day I was born. I listened and asked the same questions, sensing that telling the story was cathartic for her. After dinner, we helped my father into his recliner, and my mother read the newspaper to him. Then we turned on the television for him, and my mother sat on the couch to say her rosary. Her continued devotion in the face of all that had happened amazed me, but at this point I had concluded that I no longer shared her faith in a God who controlled the universe like a puppet master pulling and tugging strings and making us all dance. Our lives, I believed, were more like billiard balls on a pool table, ricocheting randomly with the impact of the cue ball. To believe otherwise was to believe that a God to whom my mother had devoted her life had responded by striking down her husband and causing her so much pain. I couldn’t accept that.