Here’s what they don’t tell you…
My father-in-law is a quiet man, and for the time I’ve known him, he has never taken up the center of attention; even when it’s his birthday, which falls on Christmas, and we push the holiday back so we can celebrate him, he still manages to stay on the periphery.
He loves pie, specifically pie with ice cream, though he’s been known to add milk to a bowl with pie and call it breakfast. When he has coffee, it’s always just half a cup, but he will upend the sugar jar 180º for a solid three seconds which causes me enough discomfort to jokingly say, “Want any coffee with that sugar?”
He is the youngest of twelve siblings, and now he is the only remaining sibling. We know snippets of his story, growing up in the Depression era in a town that is only fifteen minutes from where he raised his own family. By the time we thought to record his story using one of those companies with question prompts, we may have already started losing him.
He has the most perfect penmanship I’ve ever seen, and only ever writes in lead pencil and with his left hand. When I sent him the first round of questions which involved prompts like, “How did you celebrate your 21st birthday?” or “What is one of the most expensive things that you’ve ever bought?” he sent the question page back with his answers penciled in underneath certain questions. They were succinct and said things like, “I don’t know,” and “A watch.” When I tried to clarify that he only needed to answer a few questions with a bit more detail, he sent the same page back, photocopied with his previous answers in pencil. When he sent me the same page again unprompted, we knew that this was no longer a funny coincidence.
Because my father-in-law was so reticent and habitual, it took us all for a loop when we really started noticing dramatic changes. One summer, we went back to help take care of the house because my mother-in-law had been hospitalized. He spent most of the time napping in his chair and waking for meal times when we called him. He always led our prayers, which always started with “Our dear Heavenly Father,” but had enough variation to keep us from thinking that anything was out of the extraordinary, but when we left, we got the call that he’d fallen three times that week and had apparently forgotten how to get up.
The first time we visited him in the nursing home, we were so nervous, but once we started talking to him, it was hard not to feel the familiarity of his one-word responses and interest in seeing our pictures. Occasionally, he would remark on something that would seem a bit off-base, but we managed to maintain a sense of normalcy despite the newness of this space.
Decline is like this. It’s gradual. It slips us deeper and deeper into a new landscape until we stop and look around and realize we’re in completely foreign land. When we got the call this week that he had started to lose his sense of self, we wondered what that would mean next time we saw him. Physically we know that his brain is shrinking, and we can see scans that change over time, but as the shores of his brain recede, entire eras slip away wordlessly into an unknowable sea. We have no choice but to brace for an end that is inevitable for all, but yet the descent is never pleasant or unsurprising.
During my first year of college, I fell into a pretty deep depression. I remember being so stressed that I woke up one morning with my jaw locked. I called my mom and tried to tell her through clenched teeth that ultimately I was sad and not handling the transition well. I remember her response surprising me. Listen to sad music. Watch sad films. Just let the sadness overwhelm you because even sadness will pass.
Leaning into the sadness is not an American ideal. I’m also surprised by how little time we spend grieving — how hidden this very common past time is. The first time my husband watched a Kdrama with me, we chuckled at how overt the sadness was. Faces crumpled with despair, the music cued dramatics, and the storyline dipped into hysterics. As funny as this was, this so called Korean han is a baseline for my emotional state, and I’ve always been comfortable with sadness, even if I don’t regularly welcome it.
When I lived in the Middle East, I remember the first time I heard uulation. Women wailed as they donned black garb from head to foot. Women threw themselves on the coffin. They beat their chests. I remember thinking that this was grief as it was meant to be manifested, and yet I could never imagine myself co-opting this degree of mourning.
As we prepare for the inevitability of my father-in-law’s passing, I don’t feel compelled to wail because I can’t imagine him being comfortable with such displays. In fact, I’m choosing to believe that he possesses agency over these days — that quietly retreating in small and subtle ways is exactly how he would want it. My only hope is that he gets to have the silent satisfaction of knowing that his life was well-lived, that we have always loved him even when he wasn’t the loudest presence in the room. I picture how quietly he would pour milk into his bowl of pie, and how it was only when his spoon clanked the nearly empty bowl that we’d exclaim, “You had pie for breakfast?!” and with satisfaction he’d reply, “Yes. I did.”
