[Fourth of four parts. Begins here. Click photos to expand.]

Three women featured prominently in my father's life, and all of them took very good care of him. The first was my great-grandmother, Annie. Actually, that wasn't really her name. When she was born in 1881 her given name was Eerlah. By 1900 she had married and left her humble village and upon arriving in the Anglo-Saxon world she took the name Annie. When my father was born in 1925, Annie was in her mid-forties and she had not had life easy. She was raising five children in near squalor, her youngest being ten-year-old Albert. My grandmother was overjoyed when her oldest daughter married and gave birth to my father, no matter that this all happened under the same roof, in the same small home. Neither does it seem that anyone was in the least bothered by the fact that this was a marriage technically between uncle and niece, as I mentioned earlier.

My father was named Irving, but to his grandparents he was "little Avrum" or "Avrumale," a more typical, diminutive Jewish moniker you could not invent. (In fact this whole family might have been straight from central casting.) As my father grew up in the household with adolescent cousins (who were technically also his uncles and aunts---if you're following closely you'll understand), Annie increasingly favored him as the baby of the family. My father was spoiled with her attention, but sadly for him, it was to be short-lived. In 1934, Annie was rushed to the hospital where she died, apparently of a heart attack. My father's mother would also meet an early end, this time cancer would be the killer. When she died my father was only twenty-five. These losses left their mark. Health and anxiety were inextricably linked in that household, and in my father's mind for the rest of his life.

By the time my father's mother died in the 1950s the once cozy family was gone. His grandfather had died in 1946, and all his mother's siblings had married and moved away. On the other side of the world the Nazi invasion of Latvia brought an end to the lives of every member of our extended family left behind in Europe in a mass execution in August 1941. My grandfather, who had come to live with the older sister he had never known, was now truly alone. The world he had left behind in 1920 had been utterly destroyed and he would never speak of it again. His sister, Annie, and brother-in-law were dead, as was his beloved wife. He suddenly became the head of household and the sole parent of his orphaned son. The boisterous, crowded household of immigrants, that together from 1907 to 1951 had overcome one struggle after another, fell completely silent. Only memories filled the void where a family once lived. (Photo, shows my grandfather smoking his pipe on the sidewalk outside his house, c. 1950.)

Left alone with his own widowed father, my father plowed his energy into becoming a pharmacist. Had things gone differently for him in life, I suspect my father would have become a physician, but he never complained about his occupation. My grandfather retired from the fur business, but helped my father occasionally at the store. For the next fifteen years my father toiled long hours with unwavering determination, refusing to let his disability stand in his way. A steep, long flight of stairs greeted him every evening when he came home from the store. He faced those stairs thousands of times, as he had as a child. Summoning his strength, he ascended those stairs each day. One of the last times I can recall seeing my father slowly go up those stairs was in 1990 with my then two-year old nephew, as seen in the photo below.

My grandfather (who continued to go up and down those stairs until he died at age 94 four years later) was still very much alive. (Photo, above, shows him with my father in 1985 in front of his house.) However, my father would soon find that visiting his own father meant staying in the car at the curb and talking to him through the window as my grandfather stood on the sidewalk, occasionally leaning on the car. Although my sister and her family has lived in the house since 1994, my father has never again been able to visit the inside.

When I was about ten years old my father began to cut back his work, and then soon retired altogether. Having two stay-at-home parents was quite unusual, as was having a disabled father, but I can hardly ever recall noticing these differences as a child. My father was almost always seated (I suppose FDR was too, come to think of it) as he is in the 1981 photo below with my brother at his Bar Miztvah. My father couldn't mingle with the guests, which probably suited him since he tended to be anti-social, but he did set himself up in a sturdy chair in a corner away from traffic because his extended leg would invariably be tripped over or stepped on. (I only found one photo, below, among the hundreds of my childhood that shows my father's leg extended as it normally was. This one was taken at a party in 1971; that's my brother dancing out of focus.)

One of my favorite pictures of my father shows him attending a Pharmacy Students Convention (I think) sponsored by various companies (including apparently Polaroid and Syvania lighbulbs) in New York. To my knowledge this was one of only three trips he took to New York, the other two being his honeymoon and my law school graduation. The woman in the picture represented the lightbulb company.... that's not my mother!


The third important woman in my father's life has been with him the longest, and she is my mother. Born of a blind date and a brief courtship, their marriage has lasted forty years. During these decades there were times when I know my mother felt that she got the short end of the stick, adopting and raising three kids and looking after a husband who had significant physical limitations. Furthermore, it was not easy for her, a successful bio-chemist and business owner until the age of 39, to abruptly change course and make everyone else's needs subordinate to her own. My father was never great at showing gratitude. I always ascribed this to the fact that he had been treated with so much compassion as a child because of his illness and disability, and also because he had been an only child. Despite this they managed to build a life together based on their devotion to raising their children as best as they knew how. These days, they do occasionally comment that they are so very grateful to have us around and they wonder, rhetorically I suppose, how other elderly people cope who are not as fortunate.

Today, my father is confined to a hospital bed in his room. He can no longer stand or walk, though he makes a valiant effort once a day when his caretakers hoist him up and he leans on a walker with all his might. My mother can no longer take care of him, because her illness has robbed her of the energy to lift a tea cup to her lips, or walk more than a few steps. Both of them have only limited time left, and they do speak informally of moving to some kind of continuing care facility at some point in the future, though I know they would rather stay at home until the end.

My father sees my mother each morning when she gets up and walks out of her room across the hall from his own. My father sees her again at night when she returns to her bedroom to sleep. Besides that there is almost no communication between them. My mother can barely speak because the muscles in her throat are now so weak that she can only manage a few slurred whispers. My father is in many ways at last alone. His own father, my grandfather, who passed away in 1994, was by far the longest-living member of his family most of whom had long before succumbed to cancer or heart disease in middle age. Because of my father's isolation from my mother in the house he spends almost every minute of the day waiting for a personal care provider to come for one of several one hour shifts to take care of him. My brother, sister and I spend as much time as we can with both our parents, but it has taken a toll on us. This summer my brother-in-law and my nephews also took some "shifts" sleeping over on various nights to be with them, but we are all exhausted emotionally.

It is very difficult for me to sit with my father. All my life he and I have been at odds on some level. By the time I was twelve we were polarized by our view of society and politics. I remember once my father yelling at me "Your generation stinks!" and I yelled back "Thanks for letting me know, I'll tell them." We shouted a lot about politics. Even when I subscribed to the National Review and had a crush on Alex P. Keaton from the television show Family Ties, I could not accept what I veiwed as sexism, racism and homophobia. By now he may have mellowed just a bit, or I may have just become less reactive because of repeated exposure, but I can happily report that despite the divide in our views I have no less respect for him and no less desire to help him live out his life with dignity. Perhaps, ultimately, that is what I have learned most from four decades as my father's son.

He lies in his bed in diapers, watching television from the moment he wakes until the moment he sleeps. His mind is fully intact, in fact probably sharper than ever, though his heart disease robs him of energy he has occasional bursts of enthusiasm. (Below the last time a photo was taken of him seated in the kitchen before his legs and his heart finally confined him to a bed. That's my brother on the right.) The funny thing is that when he was able to walk to the kitchen and sit in his chair, he would never watch TV, especially not during the day. Always a voracious reader, he devoured the Wall Street Journal and various periodicals each morning, and he would stay current on big business and politics. Now he does not read, as he cannot really sit up in bed; his hearing is going, he is slowly removing himself from the events of the world, the blaring, non-stop television, notwithstanding. For the first time in my life, I see my father as disabled, because he is at last 100% reliant on others, but he is still the same person who always signed his letters to me "Dear Old Dad."

Return to BLOG here.