First Things Last

The end of the story is clear: the end of my parents as I once knew them. But where exactly did their end begin? I have worried the question for years. I feel like the little boy in the Sesame Street episode I used to watch with my nephews. The boy happily sets off from home for a brief adventure on his bicycle, passing random objects along the way—a street clock, a plastic house, an animal fountain—before suddenly realizing he has no idea how he got to this strange place. “I don’t like it here,” he says. “I’m really, really lost.” 

Was there a moment when the casual journey of my life—and the life of my parents—took an unexpected turn, marking the beginning of an end? Call it the end of my innocence, my fall from grace. The grace of a lucky child who had lived threescore years in a kind of Eden. At the time, I didn’t recognize it as Eden. It was simply my life, complete with the requisite bumps and sorrows of all lives. But a life more fortunate than most, in part because my parents were busy living theirs. One of the greatest gifts parents can give grown children is to live their own lives, freeing their children to live theirs. 

In the midst of his lostness, the boy encounters an odd, top-hatted creature and pleads with the creature to “Help me get unlost!” But rather than lead the boy back home, the creature gives him advice: “Try to remember everything you passed. Make the first thing the last.”  

Remember everything I passed? How many markers did I miss along the way? Or if I did notice them, I unconsciously chose to ignore: my parents’ weight loss; the empty refrigerator when I visited them in Indiana; the opened mayonnaise jars in the cabinet; bills piling up on the dining table; my mother’s constant repetitions each time I phoned—as I did every few days from my home three states away. Not to check on them, just to hear their voices. Both voices at the same time. Stereo parents, I often joked. 

“Pick up, Juanita,” Dad would call from the phone in the den. And as we waited for my mother’s voice to come onto the extension line, I could hear his breathing—oh, what I would now give to hear my father’s breathing—and his “Hold on, she’s upstairs” or “Hold on, she’s in the kitchen.” Then I’d hear the click of the second phone and my mother’s “Hello, and which kid is this?” These were the years when she still remembered that she had kids, and grandkids, and greats.

“Not so loud,” Dad would say to Mother. “Juanita, there’s an echo. Back off a little.” And she would, for a minute or two. Then she’d be back at full volume, reporting the news—Dad had changed the spark plugs on the snow blower, she was sorting through stacks in the basement, and did I want the wok because they never used it anymore. 

“Oh, yes,” she added one day. “Your dad had a bit of an adventure last night.” As I soon learned, my father’s adventure was a middle-of-the-night tumble down the hall stairs, landing headfirst on the vase that sat on the rug beside the piano. I wouldn’t know for months that he’d not only fallen before but had also suffered several mini-strokes.

“Fourteen stitches to prove it. Blood was everywhere,” Mother continued. “But he wouldn’t let me call 911.” 

“Waste of money,” Dad snapped.

As Mother explained it, after she had taped up the wound, he finally agreed to go to the hospital and to let her drive—a rare concession. Dad prided himself on his driving. He loved everything about it—the dashboard knobs and meters and gauges, the speed, the control, the feeling of floating between ground and sky. Driving suspended him not only in space but also in time, returning him to his decades of military flying assignments—from lighter-than-air gliders to solo night flyers to two-man fighter jets to transports that could hold 100 passengers. 

Dad wasn’t the kind of father you could scold, so over the phone that day I jokingly asked how many stitches the vase had required, which brought a smile to his voice. I love that you can hear a smile, even over the phone. I love that there was a time when even this sort of news did not signal the beginning of the end. 

 

Fast-forward a few years. Mother’s diabetes and balance problems had worsened; she was now what her doctor called a “wall walker,” steadying herself by grabbing whatever she could reach—an arm, a chair, a table, the wall. In the meantime, her mind had become even more fragile than her body. She kept lists everywhere: her children’s names, reminders to “turn off stove” or “lock door” or “put keys in kitchen drawer.” 

One morning my cell phone rang and I answered with a twist on my mother’s accustomed greeting. “Hello, and which parent is this?”

“This is your father. Your mother has something to tell you. Juanita?” he called out.  “Can you pick up? And don’t get up from that chair until I get down there!”

I heard the familiar click of the second phone and then my mother’s voice: “Oh, where do I begin?” She’s always been a digressive storyteller and her digressions are often more interesting than the plot. But I’d sensed urgency in Dad’s voice and I was anxious for her to get to the point, which (after several of her side trips involving, among other things, the closing of the YWCA swimming pool, a relative’s garage sale, and a description of the casseroles friends had been bringing) turned out to be this: while Dad was outside washing windows, Mother suddenly decided she’d take a walk (holding onto what, I wondered?) and as she passed some men working on a construction project, the sidewalk suddenly “just came right up” and she fell facedown, hitting “every part of me I could.” Dad knew nothing of this until the doorbell rang and he opened the door to see two strangers in work clothes, one man balancing a cement-crusted wheelbarrow into which a tiny lady was folded. Her lips and chin were bleeding and one knee had already begun to swell. 

As it turned out, the injury was a severe fracture that would require major surgery fraught with complications from which Mother would never fully recover. Over the next few months—and now years—her already fragile mind would continue to splinter into delusions, hallucinations, and blank stares into our faces alternating with occasional glimpses of recognition that at times were more disturbing, to her and to us, than the blankness.

And as the months moved inexorably forward, the mini-strokes that Dad had once hidden from us would continue like roadside flares warning of danger ahead. The danger was still three years away, a series of full-fledged strokes that would eventually land him in the hospice ward where his last breaths broke the silent air. “So sad,” Mother would say hours afterward. “About that poor old man who died.” 

 

But I could know nothing of this yet, holding the phone to my ear while Mother’s voice regaled me with tales of wheelbarrows and casseroles. Should I have sensed in that moment that we had entered a new era? Or were there markers that I had missed along the way, little details that slipped out during other phone calls? She had misplaced her dentures; she’d run out of diabetes medicine; they’d had another close call in the Buick, but no, Dad wasn’t driving too close, he’s always been a good driver you know. 

It’s true; he always had been. Throughout my childhood and up until the last decade of his life, I always felt safe with my father at the wheel. (Stateside, home from his flying missions, he had to settle for one of any number of station wagons that over the years transported our large family across town or across the country to our grandparents’ Midwest farm.) Even in the worst conditions—“a blinding snowstorm,” as weather forecasters called it—Dad was never blinded. Born and raised in Illinois, he expertly maneuvered along icy roads snow-banked high on both sides. Once in elementary school when we were studying similes, our teacher wrote the phrase “pure as the driven snow” on the board, asking for volunteers to explain its meaning. My hand shot up. “It means when everything is white and you drive through the snow without stopping,” I said proudly. “The way my dad does.”

My teacher was a kind woman and her correction was gentle. I remember that she smiled at me, then went on to explain that driven snow was snow that had been driven—carried along—by the wind, forming snow drifts. Drifts, driven: see how the words connect? 

Yes, I did. But the teacher’s explanation held no sway against the image in my mind and still doesn’t to this day. Wind might be the driver, but it is always Dad I see in the driver’s seat, his gloveless hands resting calmly, lightly, on the steering wheel (no tense death-grip for my father) as we sail through a sea of white, cutting a clean, straight path all the way across country and right to my grandparents’ door. We always arrived safely and on time. And we never lost our way. Possessed of a pilot’s sense of navigation, Dad never consulted a map or compass. His mind was his compass, his spatial memory a source of stubborn pride right up until the last years of his life.

The last years. The Buick. Of course, how could I have missed it? I walk backward in my mind to another phone call—before Mother’s wheelbarrow rescue, before Dad’s tumble down the stairs. It was a winter evening, early December, and I’d called to check on how the reunion had gone that day. Mother’s nieces had planned a holiday luncheon at my cousin’s farm about thirty miles from my parents’ house, and Mother and Dad had been looking forward to it. She was taking her famous potato salad and a green bean casserole, the same dishes she took to every celebration the relatives hosted—autumn hayrides, Christmas and Easter gatherings, summer parties by the pond. Thinking of this now, my heart seizes. How full their lives were, how connected. 

“How was it?” I asked when Dad answered the phone. “I’ll bet the great-nephews have really grown.”

“Juanita?” he called. “Pick up the phone. Hold on,” he said to me. “She’s in the kitchen.”

Mother’s voice came onto the line. “Hello, and which kid is this? Can you freeze potato salad?”

“You have leftovers?” I said. “I can’t believe those teenagers didn’t finish everything.”

“It snowed, you know,” my father said.

“Not hard,” Mother said.

“Hard enough.” I heard the agitation growing in Dad’s voice. “We hadn’t been out that way for a long time.” Only a few months, I was thinking. And he knows those roads like the back of his hand. 

“But you left by noon, right?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” Mother said. “Bright as anything—with the snow and all. I had to put on my dark glasses. It was so strange. Everything looked different.”

“With the dark glasses?”

“Everything. It was like we’d never been there before.”

“I guess all the renovations at the farmhouse really changed the look of things,” I said.

“We never found it,” she answered. “We just kept driving and driving.”

“I’m hanging up now,” Dad said. There was an audible sigh, then a click, and he was gone. No stereo parents today.

“It was so strange,” Mother continued. “I said, ‘Paul, let’s pull over and ask someone.’ There was a fire station.”

There is no fire station anywhere near my cousin’s house. “You should have taken the phone,” I said. My sister had given Dad a cell phone months before, but he never used it. A waste of money, he claimed.

“We went as far as we could on that road. Then we turned around and started again. We kept looking for that sign—you know, the one off 38. Everything was just white. Nothing looked the same. But your dad wouldn’t stop. He kept saying ‘It’s got to be here somewhere.’ I was afraid we’d run out of gas.” 

“Did you eat something at least?” Mother can’t go long without food; her blood sugar plummets. 

“It was like we were in circles. We kept passing the same barns over and over. And railroad tracks. I was starting to get scared.” 

So was I, listening to her. You read about it all the time—old couples stranded on back roads, freezing to death in their car. It doesn’t take long, the experts say. 

“Then, when it started to get dark . . .” she continued.

“Good God, how long were you out there?”

“Paul finally said, ‘That’s it, it’s over.’ The party, he meant. ‘Let’s go home,’ he said. Just then, we saw the road sign leading to 38. We’d been so close all along!”

“Well, I’m glad you made it back,” I said. Then after wishing them both a good night, I hung up the phone and looked at my watch: 6:30. It must have been dark when they finally arrived home from their journey.

If you can call it a journey— the endless circling, the once-familiar landscape growing stranger by the minute. Lost-in-the-woods children. Except they weren’t children, they were my parents, and if they were lost, I must have been, too. This is what I am feeling now, years past my father’s death and deep inside the tangle of my mother’s mind. I keep replaying the phone call, imagining the snowy scene: my father in the driver’s seat, Mother beside him staring out at the fields frosted with white.  

But this time, when the Buick slows to turn around one last time, I open the door of my mind and climb into the back seat. Beside me the potato salad rests safely beneath its Tupperware seal and the green bean casserole is still warm, covered in foil. Foods from my childhood, ordinary and reliable as the stars my father once steered by: celestial navigation, he called it.  Snow is swirling around us, but Dad’s focus does not waver, his hands confident on the steering wheel. Mother moves closer to rub his shoulder. No need to worry; they know the way. Heat from the floor vent warms my feet and I slide back into the soft leather, feeling myself move heavily toward sleep as only a child can. The sun has not yet begun to set; there is still plenty of time to arrive.