Please pardon me

“Pardon me, but you dropped this,” she said as she handed me a ketchup packet that had fallen on the ground near my feet. She was gone before I could focus and place the familiar voice or even say thank you. It all happened so quickly that I was not sure it was real.

But I was moved by her kindness. 

The ketchup was for fries and the fries were for my Dad. I was headed on my shift to spend the night with him. He wasn’t eating well, so I always tried to tempt him with stuff he used to like to eat. It rarely worked, yet he seemed to appreciate the attempt. Sometimes he asked for stuff he was never going to eat, just to prove that he was on Team Recovery, though he really wasn’t. As he was fond of saying, at 78 years old, he was 6 over par and his score was not likely to improve. So on my evenings with him, I prepared a meal (of sorts), checked his meds, cleaned him up, tidied his room and the kitchen. Then we usually watched Jeopardy.

I didn’t think he would be interested, but for some reason I felt compelled to tell him about my encounter with the kind stranger. He looked thoughtful for a minute and then said “it was probably an angel.”

“Hunh?!”

“An angel.”

Alrighty then. Dad was not a religious man but he was superstitious, so I let that one percolate. Maybe one day he would explain, but the commercial break was over, and Alex was about to ask the final jeopardy question.

A month later . . . 

The doctor moved Dad to a rehab hospital to work on building up his appetite and strength. He couldn’t walk any more and even though he was  thinner than normal, he was still a big man. Getting him into a wheelchair was tricky. 

The rehab for elderly people was a confusing place. Cheerful and depressing at the same time. At first glance, the old person walking around looked perfectly healthy and delightful but was actually a dementia patient. The further I walked down the hall, the more I witnessed the real deal.  Most of the residents were hidden in the shadows hiding their infirmities, loneliness, and sadness. This place was not intended to make Dad better.

And Dad did not like this place. He was uncharacteristically clear and a bit surly.  By the second day, however, he became more circumspect, less testy, but he wanted to go home. He let each of us know how much he wanted to go home. In response, we did our best to chat up the staff to give our collective concerns some weight while we worked on a plan B. We were obnoxious for sure. Secret that’s not a secret at a care home: no visitors, no time or love from the staff. 

One evening at the rehab, the occupational therapist made her rounds and demonstrated some new exercises. Dad was comfortable with her. He liked her. So he went through the exercises with some commitment. When the therapist finished the exercises, he said some encouraging things to Dad and then she pointed to me while still speaking and said: “That one worries too much. Blue aura. Everything is gonna be okay. “

A month later . . .

Dad was home for a while, had some ups but mostly downs, so he was sent to a new place. 

It was Mother’s Day at the new place. Since Mom passed, Dad was less and less interested in holidays. Made sense. Still I thought that he'd need some company on Mother’s day; even 10 years after her death she still felt present. As it turns out, he had something to say.

“I had a dream so clear,” he said. “Your Mother was talking to me and telling me how things were going wherever she is.That’s the best I’ve felt in a long time.”

We let that moment settle between us. I don’t know if we talked much more that day. I rarely sat still for more than an hour, but that day I was not anxious to move. So we sat together engaged in our own thoughts.

Mine were as follows: 

Re-living the day Mom asked me to euthanize her. Her exact words. She has one of those cancers where you can’t tell if the treatment or the cancer killed her. And she was so brave. But that was an ask too many. What on earth would we do without her? I was never her kind of brave. 

The next day . . . 

Dad had a respiratory event so they moved him to a hospital near the rehab. It was a nicer place, but the doctors had opinions I had not heard before. Maybe I had been told, but I didn’t choose to hear.  

When I was growing up–actually even as an adult– Dad always shared life lessons or hard truths in the car, me riding shotgun while he said things. That. I’d. Rather. Not. Know. 

The moment had come for him for us to take a virtual car ride so that he could tell me what he wanted done or more accurately, not done. The time had come to let him go. 

I needed to think about that. The hospital had a small chapel that looked out on a serene green space. When I opened the door I saw a woman with her head bowed and her shoulders shaking with sobs. She looked up when she heard the door.  

I asked “Pardon me. Can I help you or get you something?”

After a moment or two, her sobs subsided. She wiped her eyes and pulled her glasses up from the chain on her neck and looked at me closely.

“No, but thank you,” she said.  “Your face is kind, and you remind me of a friend of mine.”  She stood stiffly, smiled sadly, and added. “She has a blue aura, too. You’ll be alright.”

Then, she was gone.