Six years earlier, I was the one who signed the papers to
move our father into Willowbrook Senior Living. My brother Andre called me from
three states away to tell me I was "taking the easy way out." My
sister Colette, who lived twenty minutes from Dad and visited maybe twice a
year, told people at church that she'd never do that to her own father. I
didn't correct her. I didn't correct anyone.
What nobody knew was that I visited him every single day.
It started small. Dad had fallen twice in his house, the
second time lying on the kitchen floor for six hours before a neighbor found
him. He needed more than I could give him alone, working full time with two
teenagers of my own, so we made the decision — I made the decision, since Andre
was too far and Colette had "her own stuff going on," which was the
phrase she used for not wanting to.
I remember the day I drove him there. He sat in the
passenger seat with his hands folded like he was waiting for a verdict, and he
said, "Your mother would be disappointed in you."
That one stayed with me longer than I let on.
But I kept showing up. Every evening after work, I'd stop by
Willowbrook with his newspaper and whatever small thing he'd asked for the day
before — a specific brand of peppermint, a new deck of cards because he swore
the old ones were "cursed." We'd sit in the common room and he'd
complain about the food, and I'd let him, because it gave him something to hold
onto besides the fact that he wasn't home anymore.
I never told my siblings about those visits. Partly out of
spite, if I'm honest — let them think what they wanted, since they'd already
decided. But partly because Dad asked me not to.
"Don't make this a competition," he said once,
when I mentioned that Andre hadn't called in a month. "Let them be who
they're going to be. Just keep coming."
So I did. Even on the nights I didn't want to. Even the week
my own marriage was falling apart and I had nothing left to give anyone, I
still drove those twenty-three minutes because the alternative was him sitting
alone with a newspaper he couldn't finish because his eyes were going.
He died on a Thursday in March, quietly, in his sleep, the
way he always said he wanted to go. At the funeral, the pastor mentioned that
Dad had left a letter to be read aloud, which surprised all of us, since none
of us knew he'd written one.
It was short. He thanked Colette for the birthday cards. He
thanked Andre for the phone calls, sparse as they were. And then he said this:
"My daughter Marielle came to see me every day for six
years. I asked her not to tell you, because I didn't want my last years to turn
into a scoreboard between my children. But I want you all to know now, because
I won't be here to stop the argument. She sat with me on the nights I couldn't
remember what day it was. She's the reason I wasn't lonely. I hope, someday,
she forgives me for letting you believe otherwise."
The room didn't gasp. It just went still, in that specific
way rooms go still when something true lands in a place that was expecting
something else.
Colette found me afterward by the coat check, and for a
moment I thought she was going to apologize. Instead she just asked, "Why
didn't you tell us?"
"Because he asked me not to," I said. "And
because I didn't think you'd believe me if I had."
She didn't have an answer for that. I don't think there was
one that would've made either of us feel better.
Andre called two weeks later, the longest conversation we'd
had in years, and he didn't apologize outright either. He just said, "I
should have asked more questions before I decided what kind of person you
were," which, from him, was as close to sorry as I was going to get, and I
decided to let it be enough.
I visit Colette more now, not because everything's resolved,
but because I understood something at that funeral I hadn't let myself
understand before: I hadn't kept those visits secret to protect my father's
peace. I'd kept them secret because some small, unkind part of me wanted them
to keep believing the worst, so that someday I could hand them the truth like a
verdict of my own.
I don't feel proud of that. But I understand it now, the way
you understand a wound only after it's finished healing.
Dad's peppermints are still in my kitchen cabinet. I haven't
been able to throw them out, and I'm not sure I ever will.