In February, my widowed father came to visit. He needed time to think about where he wanted to live. He didn’t have a lot of time to think or visit. Within a week he was sick with the flu. He didn’t like being alone while he recovered and we were at work and school. I called a woman I know who sits with home-bound patients. “Would you come and stay with my dad?”
she came, handed him medicine, fixed him food and took him for rides. Even after he felt better, he asked her to stay and drive for him. Their first Friday afternoon drive included a stop at my son’s college to provide him a ride home for a weekend visit. My dad walked inside the building missed the building, missed one step and fell down hard.
He brushed aside their concerns, “I’m all right. Let’s go home.” They carry-walked him to the car, drove back to El Dorado and straight to the emergency entrance. My son called from the hospital, “Grandpa fell and hurt his leg.”
I arrived at the hospital in time to see the X-ray of his broken hip and hear the doctor say Dad needed hip replacement surgery.
A worried weekend was followed with a busy week of work, school, community activities and visiting Grandpa. During one of my visits Dad asked, “Have that lady, what’s her name? come and stay with me during the day.”
She came. She sat. She handed him items that were out of his reach until Dad declared he could manage by himself. She left to find another job.
A couple weeks later, he doctor OKed his transfer to a rehabilitation hospital in Louisiana. When I stopped by to visit my father on the eve of his departure, the lady was visiting him.
At the rehab unit, Dad progressed from wheelchair to walker and was released to a nursing home in El Dorado for a month of physical therapy. He learned to use a cane, the safest way to handle stairs and tricks for pulling on socks and shoes.
One son graduated from college and returned home to work for the summer.
My father graduated from physical therapy and made plans to go to Arizona, where my brother and sister live and to his sister’s place in California. Between work assignments, the lady visited my Dad in the nursing home and took him driving to look at her ideas of places for him to live. He was not interested.
He flew out to visit my brother and sister in Arizona and looked at retirement homes. He came back to El Dorado and took a room in a residential facility until, a few weeks later, he was offered an efficiency apartment at a complex for retirees.
He liked having his own apartment, doing things his way. But he did not like, two months later, waking up with sky rocketing blood pressure in the middle of the night. He called me. I came, but his driving buddy and companion when he was sick was there first.
By the time his blood pressure settled down, they both knew where he would live: with her. Two weeks later, they married and began their life together. May they have many happy years.
Added in 2010: They didn’t. The marriage ended before they were married a year. Family members from both sides talked about hard it was to live with their grandma/grandpa.