Tragedies struck, one by one, translated…
Last March, my mother had a stroke, became a vegetable, couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk, she’d relied on the feeding tubes to keep her food intakes up, and needed a catheter, she’d become, totally, unresponsive toward her external environment. Looking at my mother like this, I’d finally understood, what it meant, to cry out all one’s tears.
At age ninety-five, my father insisted on caring for my mother by himself at home. “Back when we married, I’d promised I’m going to take care of her in sickness and in health, ‘til death, now she’d fallen ill, she can’t move anymore, she’d still needed to be looked after! And maybe, she no longer knows, but, I still do! We can’t not have a conscience, I’d flew out to the wars during my younger years, living her at home alone, I can’t just, put her in a nursing home, my conscience wouldn’t let me rest easy………”, my father cried, as he’d told me.
And, just like so, my parents’ living room became a hospital ward, the electric wheelchair, the air-filled rising mattress, the breathing machines and the machines to extract the phlegm from her body filled up the original spaces for our couch and tea stand.
The second day after my father took my mother home, my father deteriorated very quickly alongside her too. All of a sudden, he’d not known, how to eat with a spoon, not known how to dress himself, take his own clothes off, can’t tell the differences between night and day, couldn’t express himself verbally, he’d become, incontinent too………
My father became, severely demented. But, I still saw in him, the sturdiness of his love toward my mother in a lifetime.
And, although, my father, who’d gotten us all half-crazed needed the meds to keep his feelings in check and sleep, but, whenever his memories came back, he’d used his walker, step, by step, walked, to before my mother’s bed, touched her face and hands, and pulled the covers up for her. “Don’t wake her, allow her to just sleep, she’s, too tired!”, then, my father would sit, in the chair in front of my mother’s bed, held on to her hands, and, dozed off too. Can you imagine what that looked like? I’d suppressed my emotions, as I pulled the blanks over my father’s body.
But, most of the time, my father’s mind, is in, a chaotic state. “Who’s that lying there on the bed?” “Is she my wife, or my mother?” “I want to go home, I can’t stay all day at the hospital”, and my father who’d slept most of the day would often, called my mother’s name aloud. “Dad, mom’s asleep in the living room.” “Call her in here, where’s my pilot uniform? I’m flying out in the afternoon.”
My father’s unconscious words, started, helped link together, his fragmented memories near, and far.
A boy who, at the young age of fourteen, in order to evade the attacks from the Japanese, grew up all alone on his own, in order to have his meals regular, he’d signed up for the air force department of the military, and, his life was, flipped around with the eras. He’d gone to the U.S. for training, fought with the Japanese in the war, parachuted as his plane was shot, nearly died, in the war………
And now, he can’t remember anything anymore, even his dearly beloved wife, he’d held, no collection of now………
So, this, is from the child’s angle, watching how his parents loved one another, and how they both fell ill, and, couldn’t interact with each other anymore, and the father, lived in the events he’d endured through in his younger years.