I no longer have any idea whether I was a good daughter.
It seems to me that good daughters would have insisted on their aging parents moving in with them, or, at the very least, would spend most of their days making soup and changing sheets. Instead, I called every night, checked in, and went visit once every two weeks or so.
My brother was there far more often, in part because he lived only twenty minutes away in Brooklyn, but mostly because he had risen to the occasion and accepted responsibility for the day to day running of my father's existence as he died, three years ago, from what my father called the "trifecta": epilepsy, Parkinson's,and cancer.
My brother did most of the work, wheeling him from 17th street up to the NYU cancer center on 34th because my father was too crumpled, his body too unyielding, his fear of physical pain too great, for him to be loaded into a taxi. It was my brother who took him for chemo and radiation, making the seventeen block wheelchair-trek in the snow, in the rain, before the sun was up, as if my father was a letter that my brother,the undaunted postal carrier had to deliver.
The part my father hated worst about being in the Army Air Force in WWII was not that people were shooting at him, but that somebody else had the right to tell him when to wake up, or go to sleep, or have a smoke. At the end of his life, there were healthcare aides taking care of him and so, by necessity, telling him when to eat, sleep, and take his medication. Seneca, the philosopher, once said: "Sometimes in seeking to escape our fate, we leap to meet it." My father, who never remarried after my mother died in 1974 because he didn't want to end up being beholden to anybody, ended up being dependent on everybody.
The last time I went to the city to see my dad, it was 101 degrees. I had a small suitcase containing frozen lasagna, which I brought to tempt my father's diminishing appetite. My brother, my father and I met at NYU so we could all talk to the oncologist.
When I'm in Manhattan, I usually have a sense that whatever I'm doing, somebody else within thirty blocks is doing the same thing.
Not that day. For once I was sui generis. Even in Manhattan, there weren't too many middle-aged women wheeling frozen lasagna around town as a sort votive offering to the gods of illness and old age.
You know what it's like dealing with a loved one who's very sick?
It's like taking somebody to the train station where you're supposed to drop them off, say your fondest farewells, and wave goodbye from the platform as they head out on the next part of their journey.
You think you know what's going to happen.
But you don't. Because it's like getting to the station and seeing that their train has been delayed. You don't know when they'll be leaving and you sit around waiting for the departure, not knowing quite what to say apart from the usual comments about whether the bags are packed, what they enjoyed about their visit, and what they think about where they're going.
For the last year of his life, I sat next to my father, looking up at the departures board so that we could both figure out when he was actually going to get on that train.
I don't know what else a good daughter, a better daughter, would have done. But I think about it, close to Father's Day, and wonder.
