|
Road Kill by Julie Cline ’95 In 2004 my father had a heart attack and a stroke. After recovering from both, he slid into the creek that runs through my parents’ yard and broke his leg. My mother was exhausting herself overseeing his care, so I stepped in to help. The experiences we are sharing have awakened my internal voice, and it seems that it won’t shut up. I have written several pieces about those experiences. What follows is an excerpt from “Road Kill.” At that time my parents were 87 and 90. Early in 2007 my father will celebrate his 92nd birthday. Later on, if she is still oriented enough to understand, my mother will celebrate her 90th. Over the years, as my husband and I have struggled to meet both our own and my parents’ needs, we have come to appreciate the meaning of the word “long” in the phrase “long-term care.” — Julie Cline I began the automatic drive from my parents’ house to the hospital: two turns right, a turn left, left again and some distance before the turn onto the hospital’s road. At the elevator doors another visitor asked me which floor the cafeteria was on. I had to think—which hospital was I in? “It’s on the second floor—the I found my mother awake and anxious. I helped her scoot up in the bed. I readied her tray table for the evening meal. The nurses had given her Ativan before I arrived. Afternoons were the worst for her. Her depression deepened and her anxiety rose more than at any other time of day. I stayed with her until her meal came and the Ativan kicked in. She dismissed me to go feed my father.
It was growing dark and I was ready to reverse the automaticity of the drive to the hospital. I made the first turn without thinking and would have continued on in this robotic manner, had I not seen the body of a dead raccoon in the middle of the main road. It had just been hit. Its fur was ruffling in the breeze generated by passing cars. It was beautiful and wild—and quite dead. I cried for the raccoon all the way to my parents’ house. When I arrived there, I tried to call the city to have the body picked up, but the offices were closed.
On my return trip to the hospital, my headlights revealed that the raccoon’s body was still intact. It remained that way through my last drive that night. Inevitably, I thought, it would be hit again, and the next day, in the early morning, when I drove in to catch the doctors on their rounds, the creature’s intestines were exposed and escaping its body. Later, as I drove back to check on my father, the body of the raccoon had been spun around so that its intestines were no longer visible.
On Sunday morning, as I had approached the rise on which the raccoon had met its death, I was elated to see that the body was gone—and then devastated when I realized that, no, it was still there. It had been smashed flat. As a young adult I had seen the car in front of me hit a sleek, brown and black dog. The dog went down on the pavement, the car roared on. I stopped. The dog was dead. I dragged him to the sidewalk for his family to find him. Passing the flattened raccoon, I tried to articulate some philosophical statement about a culture that, on a daily basis, ignores the deaths of beautiful creatures, but mostly I just wanted the raccoon and that sleek young dog to be alive again.
“Road Kill” is included in Heating and Air, a collection of essays Julie Cline has written about caring for her parents. You can read the essays online at web.mac.com/marylamar. Links are on the lower left side of the page.
|
|
|
|
