February 8th, 2010
Keeping watch
It’s quiet, save for the humming refrigerator and the soft, rhythmic sighs coming from the recliner in front of me. From where I’m sitting I can see his reflection in the hall mirror, can see his mouth twitch as he sleeps.
He had a series of small heart attacks last weekend. Suddenly, the strong, persistent patriarch of my husband’s father’s family was laid up in the ICU with a slew of new and unfamiliar ailments.
Suddenly, everything is different.
Being here reminds me of my mother’s last days. I’d sit on the couch with a notebook in my lap and a pen in my hand, her sleeping on the chaise lounge beneath a hot-pink afghan, and I’d write. The printed lists of new medications, the clusters of bright orange prescription bottles dotting the dining room table and the foil-wrapped casserole dishes in the fridge…seeing those things, still so familiar, takes me back to twenty-four, the year that I spent floating, living in suspension.
He’s dreaming. In the mirror, I can see his legs jerk beneath the blanket draped across his lap. He raises his hand and waves it aimlessly around his face. A few days ago he told me, from his hospital bed, that he’d been dreaming of his wife. How he saw her in the street and ran after her, but could never catch up.
He isn’t the man this week that he was last.
I wander throughout the house, picking up here, wiping down there. I fold a load of towels and start another one. I glance at old photos on my way upstairs, black and whites of Dave’s Italian ancestors and portraits of him and his brother as young boys, clad in checkered shirts and polyester jumpers. This place is full of history.
I am comfortable here. I knew I would be. Once again I am care giving, keeping watch; a pad of paper in my lap and a pen in my hand. I sit on the couch, my husband’s grandfather sighing away in the recliner in front of me. I watch his reflection for a long while, and then, in the quiet, I write.
