Figuring It Out One Step at a Time
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Figuring It Out
Madison, Wisconsin
“What is comes down to,” my father said to me as he rested from physical therapy, and waited for something to happen in his hospital/nursing home bed, “is simple. I have to figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”
The nursing home does things, to help him learn to walk again after the broken hip of a few months ago. They take him to meals. They take him to therapy. They clean his room every so often. But that’s about it. Actually, they don’t do much.
And so he has lots of time to think and lots of time to wonder. The absence of activity makes these reflections a necessity.
Our conversations are heartfelt.
“I’m 91,” he says.
“I know,” I say.
“The strange part of this is seeing others who can walk, who can drive, who can do pretty much what they want to. They just do it. I wonder how that’s possible. How can they do it?”
His reflection takes me back 25 years. I wasn’t yet 40. But for some time I’d had a deep ache in my left arm, leaving me to wonder what I’d lifted that could have caused such an ache. And my chest, it ached too. I’d walk up Broadway, and notice how effortlessly other people walked in and out of doors, how quickly they moved up and down the sidewalk. How could they do that so easily? I wondered.
I just couldn’t keep up. A gulf between me and everyone else had arisen, spread, and deepened. A few days later I was in cardiac intensive care. Now I knew the reason for “distance.” So when my father watches others, and wonders how they can move so easily, I am at home with the his perception. I get it.
We’re both aware that we cannot turn back the clock, though we would both like to do exactly that. We both must adjust to a “new normal.”
We may not even be aware when we have done so. Our culture’s addiction to cures means living with one disability or another is second best. It is so pervasive that we are not aware that maybe, just maybe, our lives can still be a blessing.
We’re in the rehabilitation room, and he is walking with the help of two parallel bars. In college he worked the rings in gymnastics. And here, all these years later he’s working the parallel bars. Then physical therapists wants him to walk down a very, very, very long hallway. He puts a strap around dad, and asked me to keep the wheelchair close, just in case.
We walk the first ten feet. A man, perhaps in his late 60s, sits beside his mother, who looks to be in her late 90s. He sees my father take one, two, three, four slow steps. He looks over to his mother. “That’s you tomorrow, mom,” he says.
Who would have thought four steps would inspire hope in another? Here we are, figuring out what to do with the rest of our lives.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
And you?