Sweeping me into
the room he shines his flashlight on my mother, illuminated by the
beams emanating from the T.V., which has been on since T.V. was
invented. She’s stretched out on one of the many lazy boys populating theatre number one and I’m forced to do a double take. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her
recline on one before. She's a dedicated "sinkie". I even wonder if the woman sleeps, as she eats… standing up.
Mom waves and
greets me with a cheery “Hi.” Without more being said, Dad motions me to sit. Like some kind of anthropologist I've been granted the privilege to observe this, at least to me, bizarre, unknown and never before witnessed, nightly
ritual.
He shines the
light on the clock over the stairs, the only way you can see it in this den of
a room.
Dad, like many of his peers, can no longer read the digital watch he still
wears, nor can he hear its alarm buzzing at precisely designated times of the
day for purposes long forgotten.
“So I guess
we’re ready to do this,” he asks.
“Ready.” She
confirms.
Ready, I wonder.
I suspend my breath and watch.
Flashlight in one hand; bottle in the other. He's barely able to control the constant shaking
of his hands. Yet, miraculously for a brief moment they are steady, just long
enough for him to get one exact, gently placed drop to find its mark on Mom’s
eye. And then I exhale, relieved for him that he can still do this small task for
her.
“So that’s it
for the first set of drops.” Dad
explains to me. “Now we have to wait for two minutes before we can put the
other batch in.”
I begin to set
the alarm on my watch but Dad motions that it isn’t necessary. He perches on
the arm of the couch behind her lazy boy and begins to push down on the top of
her chair, setting her in motion. Each rock becomes increasingly far ranging.
She bravely clutches the arms of her mount to keep from being bucked off.
“One, two,
three, ...” they count every push.
“This is how we
do it” they say in unison, counting off the seconds since neither of them can
see his watch.
“I’m hoping I’ll
be able to rock her to sleep.” They both break out into fits of laughter as the
rocking and the counting continue.
“Fifteen ...
sixteen ...”
Speechless, I
leave them to it, laughing and rocking as I go to tend to the medications. I close
the kitchen door silently behind me, make my way over to the counter across the
room and turn on the little lamp.
“Twenty ...
twenty-one ...”
I clamber up onto the counter to reach into the cupboard, to
the back of the top shelf, where
the medicine bottles are hidden. As I pull out the stash, I recall the day when
such precautions became necessary and this ritual passed on to me. A dreaded sound, the ring of a phone in the early hours of the morning, was my awakening alarm. I stumbled into the den to intercept
the call intuiting that I'd hear Dad's voice on the other end.
“Nance, could
you come over?”
“Dad is
everything O.K.?” suddenly I’m wide awake.
“Yes, but, but I
um, can’t remember which medications I have to take.” his words betray
astonishment and shame, for he has been responsible for sorting out his
medications from the day he took his first insulin injection some 25 years ago.
“You’ve taken
your insulin, right?”
“Yes, yes that’s
not the problem.”
I’m relieved that it’s not some kind of
blood sugar fog, but puzzled by this new turn of events.
“It’s the damn
pills. I have to take so many of them… I just can’t remember.”
I arrive to find
him mulling over the unopened pill bottles laying in disarray on this very
counter.
“Forty/fifty ...
forty-one/forty-four ...”
“Edie, come on
now it’s forty-one,” he chuckles. The creaks from the chair having gotten
progressively weaker have stopped.
“No, it’s
forty-four.”
“You made a
mistake back there at forty,” he’s laughing not sure if she’s putting him on or
not. “Now lets start again, forty-four.”
“Well then we
should start at fifty because we’ve been talking.” She, the voice of reason, states.
“Come on Edie
co-operate with me,” he pleads.
They resume,
“forty/fifty-three ...”
A silent pause.
God they
crack me up! I chuckle and shake my head and can take no more of this petty
bickering. “Fifty- three” I yell out.
“What?” Dad
shouts back.
“Fifty-three,
start at fifty-three.”
“Fifty-three ...
fifty-four ...” they’ve been jump-started back on track and the chair’s a
rockin’.
And, I had to
jump start his memory back then…
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