You knew about that
Heather Sellers I was shown to the dining area of my father’s nursing home while someone went back to retrieve him. I had not seen this man in person in a decade. Across the room, a woman in tan slacks and a blue blouse, neatly groomed, leaned forward in her wheelchair, facing the wall. “Help me,” she moaned. “Help me, please. Someone. Help me.” Her cries came from the deepest well of human despair. I stepped into the hall, looking for assistance, when I saw an aide pushing a man in a wheelchair towards me. I recognized the radical slope of the man’s body, a person caught constantly mid-fall, as he slumped to the side. His right hand was frozen in a claw at his heart. These were the disabling remnants of a cerebral hemorrhage that ravaged my father many years earlier, rendering an arm and leg useless, muddying his speech. But the man rolling towards me was an altered version of my father. Clean-shaven, he was dressed in a striped polo shirt and clean sweatpants. Cut short, and straight now, his thick white hair no longer streamed past his shoulders. It was so strange to see him this way. The aide spoke at full volume. “It’s your daughter, Mr. Fred! Your daught-er!” “Goddamn,” my father said, shaking his head. I crouched down next to him in the dining hall. The aide disappeared. The woman continued to keen to the wall. My father clamped his good hand on my shoulder, with a strength that knocked me off balance.