My father-in-law died at 93 in a nursing home. He was loved.
Courtesy of the author
- My husband is an only child, so the care of my father-in-law fell on us.
- We had to move him from his home of 61 years to an assisted living facility.
- He died at 93, right before Valentine's Day, and was so loved.
Rolling my father-in-law's squeaky wheelchair carefully into the stark white conference wouldn't let me escape the strong ammonia odor wafting throughout the nursing home.
Although this facility had marginally average state inspection numbers, this place had a bed available, and my spouses' and I guilt at putting Bob here was off the charts.
In the conference room, a blank-faced social worker sat next to the activities director, who'd just come in from an outdoor smoke break by the big green trash dumpster. Her smell of cigarette smoke seemed to compete with the dreaded urine odor for any fresh molecule of air that could remotely offer a fresh breath. We were settling in for Bob's care plan meeting, which is an assessment of how things are going for him, what's working, and what's not.
Deaf as a post, no one had charged his hearing aids the night before, so I came armed with his dry-erase board and red marker. By writing out in front of him what was being said, I wanted him to be aware of what we discussed, and in turn, he could answer and voice his own concerns and questions.
We hadn't envisioned this for him
Sitting in the conference room, my husband and exchanged nervous glances. This place wasn't how we envisioned the last years of my father-in-law's life.
Four weeks prior, which seemed like an eternity, Mark and I, with Bob's agreement, moved him from his home of 61 years in Dallas. A widower of two years, Bob was pretty much wheelchair-bound in his comfortable yet modest brick home. He was able to transfer from the chair to the bed and other noncomplicated activities of daily living, but his level of care proved too much for the assisted living center that we'd originally selected for him.
He lasted in that place for a whole 72 hours before ending up in the hospital dehydrated due to some nausea and vomiting. Bob was an only child, and my husband was an only child, so the obligation fell to me and my husband. As newlyweds, we left Dallas and moved two hours south, so we were really hoping for meaningful time with Bob. We wanted to load him up and bring him to the house for a few hours every week. We looked forward to taking him out to eat and perhaps to a local book review — activities he'd enjoyed all his life.
We wanted him to be close to us
After hospital discharge, Bob needed advanced care, so we reluctantly moved him to the only place close to us that had a bed open. Family pictures on his nightstand and a bright red full-bloom poinsettia on his other table made no difference in his somber mood. Tasteless and colorless institutional food was no match for his preference for simple, cooked, and heavily seasoned fresh vegetables. He never met a piece of cherry pie he didn't like. This nursing home didn't serve cherry pie.
He asked the staff what they'd do with someone as old as him
Staff agreed Bob should join us for this meeting. I noticed how small and vulnerable he looked in the wheelchair. His tiny round face sported a five-o'clock shadow, and his eyes seemed bluer than ever in the 33 years I'd known him. An architect in his professional life years prior, he dressed in slacks and a button-down for office wear. Today, he was wearing blue and black flannel plaid pants that hung on him and an oversized sweatshirt, complete with a trail of tiny white cereal crumbs down the front of him, compliments of breakfast that morning. Muscle atrophy and general weakness confined Bob to the wheelchair. Bob was wearing out, and he knew it.
Fifteen minutes into the meeting, he was squirming in the chair and said he was tired. I wrote on his dry-erase board if he'd like to ask the staff anything, and without hesitation, he asked, "What do you do with a 93-year-old man?" A fair and sensible question, given his unwanted circumstances. Now, the staff was squirming in their own chairs, and the smoky activities director spoke up, saying, "We love him. That's what we do." Bob just smirked and barely nodded his head.
Bob lived another six weeks, dying a week before Valentine's Day. After viewing his body one last time before the funeral home came, I walked into our house the morning Bob died, and I couldn't help but notice the small red heart-shaped box of candy I'd bought him for Valentine's Day. We'd never get to watch him enjoy each gooey small chocolate nugget. It was to be a simple token of love for him the next week, and it was then I realized Mark, and I accomplished what we'd set out to do from the beginning of this journey. We'd loved him.