Mama hadn’t been gone too long when my Dad ended up in rehab. I was in rehab too at the time, where an equanimity of spirit and growing roundness to my form could only mean on thing: I was pregnant.
It happens sometimes, you know, when life’s unredeemed losses pull you down into paths of least resistance? Humans cope by the means available. So there I was, impregnated by a familiar friend I’d relied on in many a tough situation, but never to this degree.
I’d bring my attentive companion to Manorcare when I visited my dear old dad, recuperating from a cracked hip. At Dad’s age, this entails a lot of difficult maneuvering around damp sheets and bedside commodes, which, one learns rather quickly as daughter-devotee, is not the number one priority of understaffed rehab establishments.
I hope I didn’t give the impression earlier that I myself went to rehab for some kind of socially suspect addiction or another, autobiographically interesting as that might be. To be clear, I was merely the significant other to my sweet, bereaved father in an institution that failed him time and again.
Nights were the worst, when staffing was even lighter than by day and I had to leave. My stalwart helpmeet and I bade Dad adieu and the night traumas began. His room was at the end of a long hall, his only means of calling for help a string by his bed that activated a light over the doorway to the hallway.
Hearing his horror stories about lying for hours in soiled sheets, I lunged to the nurse’s station, which was empty. I tracked down an employee, who received my complaints with a practiced stare before turning to her mop. Several staffers later, as my righteous indignation fizzled into politely desperate pleas, somebody came up with an answer. The light for 32B was burned out! Ah, no wonder no one checked on an 87 year old man on diuretics who couldn’t get out of bed to save his life. Electricity! Technology! Humanity had nothing to do with it.
I’d like to report that everything improved once the bulb was switched. But it only got worse. He developed a chest infection which put the kibosh on physical therapy for a few days. Did you know that if you’re not ‘progressing’ in physical therapy for a few days, your insurance company stops paying for rehab?
The ongoing struggle to have underwriters and care providers speak a common language (i.e. common sense), along with hiring a private night nurse to sit by my father and pull his string to call for help to meet his needs (she had a bad back) and all the other injustices and indignities he and his various roommates had in common would have been unbearable to me, his anguished daughter, had it not been for my dark, sensual, delicious Mr. Hershey, ever at my elbow, always in the know about the trouble I’d seen.
Boredom is a huge obstacle to revival, so the three of us, Dad, Hershey and I, made do. We played cards, watched movies, wheeled around the premises, got out to bingo, dined in to reality shows on two jumbotrons' competing plot twists, both loud enough for senior roomies to enjoy. The whole while, Hershey reached out to me, reassuring, available. ‘I’m here for you, dear. Let me comfort you.’
Oh, did I give the impression earlier that I’d actually gotten pregnant with a living, breathing compulsion of a man, intriguing as that may sound? Hershey was indeed a hunk, and a sweetheart in his way (bittersweet, truth be told, as these trysts tend to be), but technically speaking, we were celibate, my pregnancy symbolic and therefore somehow pure, don’t you think? We consummated our mutual admiration in the midst of adversity and, unlike the mundane scenarios of childbirth, diapers, tetanus shots and roseola, our pregnancy could go on and on with only our fathomless desire to satiate again and again.
I’d like to tell you this theory holds but, alas, poetry and real life have no lasting concourse, only the highs and lows of outrageous fortune. Dad, now healed - hallelujah - abides in the sweetest (that word again) assisted living home your bright mind might imagine. Hershey and I are working things out with, shall we say, a little less rhyme, a bit more reason? I reach for him daily but not as before, when his alluring goodness robbed me of my sensible, honest self.
As for the rounded belly, well, that’s been subsiding too, month by month. And my mother, whom I might blame for the saga just unfolded, blankets a slope not far from my dad’s new home, her ashes feeding the trillium blossoms every spring. I’ve finally come to mourn her, my pregnancy notwithstanding, my
germinative ocean refined and encapsulated in the complicity of years. The ones left to me, unbounded.
Austrian Lithograph, The First Birth
