My Father's Footprints Read Online Free Page A

store. “Do you have
Bang Bang Fuck You
?”
    “All our copies of
Bang Bang Fuck You
are out right now. Try again tomorrow.”

    The Good News: You are a better person than you probably think, particularly if you think you could never deal with, say,
     your parents’ senescence if said senescence led you into the world of Depends Undergarments and other unpleasant facts of
     late life. You can.
    Look, I’m a chicken. I speak as one who, going into every squeamish turn, said, “I can’t do this,” and then did it. I gave
     showers. I changed adult diapers. If I did it, anybody can. A tip: Buy some medicated VapoRub-type stuff and smear some under
     your nose when you run into really icky situations. It’s the Sandwich Generation’s magic mushroom, a Castanedan mind-altering
     substance.
    The Bad News: Even as the physically gross stuff turns out to be less paralyzing than you had feared, the emotional stuff
     is far trickier, and there is no VapoRub for the soul, unless you count alcohol.
    Today, for instance, a hospice nurse and I have to “break” my mother on the subject of nursing homes. First we convene everybody
     in the living room: Mom, Dad, me, and a few hospice people. We discuss the way the apartment is becoming more and more dangerous.
     My father wakes in the night and wants to leave the hospital bed we’ve had trucked in. The only person there is my mother,
     who cannot support his tottering weight.
    We go around the room, soliciting comments about other options, gently steering my parents toward the nursing home.Each time my father has the floor, he discusses his distaste for the confinement of the hospital bed with its high sides.
    “When I want to go to the john, I have to get Barbara to help me, and the whole thing is a nuisance,” he complains.
    “We don’t want you to get out of bed on your own,” says a nurse.
    Around the room we go, discussing future care options, the likely course of the disease, the advisability of lining up a nursing
     home placement right now. Back to Dad. Anything else to say?
    “Perhaps a ladder could be attached, so that I could climb in and out more easily,” he suggests.
    “No,” I say, “the purpose of the bed is to keep you from getting out and hurting yourself.”
    He shrugs.
    The next time we come back to him, five minutes later, he brings up the bed again, as if it were a fresh topic.
    “Bob?” asks the hospice nurse.
    “I’d like to say a few words against that bed in there. It’s medieval!”
    Later, the nurse and I talk quietly with my mother, while Dad sleeps.
    “It’s the only way. He’s not even safe here anymore.”
    “I can’t. I made a Commitment to keep him at home.”
    “What good will that do if he falls on top of you, and you both get hurt?”
    We have to apply just enough pressure so that she can resist, resist, and then cry and give in. She has to be able to blame
     us for the smashing of the Tablets of Commitment without really having been so mercilessly bullied that there is lasting damage.
    When the deed is done, the nurse leaves, and my mother and I are alone with our decision and our patient, who has become endearingly
     childlike in recent days. No, not childlike,infantile. The realization gives me a little jolt, and I can identify the sense of regret and nostalgia draped over me. It’s
     the ultimate Oedipal joke. My mother and I have a baby. For the last few days we’ve been feeding and diapering him and trying
     to discern from his sometimes incoherent pleas what it is he wants or needs. We’ve been up at all hours. And we’re going to
     miss him when I take him to Hughes Convalescent Home tomorrow.

    Hughes is within walking distance from my parents’ apartment, so I bundle up my dad, blanket, parka, hood, and wheel him over.
     The whole thing feels like an afterthought following the Breaking of the Covenant. The people at Hughes greet him as though
     his arrival were ordained at the hour of his birth. “Oh,