SAXTONS RIVER — When my mother had become so shrouded in the mists of Alzheimer's disease that she could no longer leave her assisted-living residence, Dad began to visit us without her.
Their D.C. residence, near to my sisters' homes, had been chosen to serve Mom's advancing needs, but over the years it had become obvious that Dad, too, was declining.
In order to be part of his life while he was still capable of sharing it, I brought him to our home three or four times a year, for visits of several weeks duration. Mom no longer missed him - sadly, she wasn't even sure she had a husband - and we had a comfortable, warm room waiting for him.
Dad had been an urbanite since birth and, though he'd gradually come to feel more at home in the suburbs than the metropolis, rural living remained an enigma to him.
He passed every day of his stays here with his nose buried in the printed shield of The New York Times, as if to protect himself from the barbarities of our pioneering (as he saw it) lifestyle. When he finished with the Times, he would pick up the political magazines that were indispensable to his visits.
Dad always had been a reader, coming from a family of Russian Jews who had revered the written word. To sit and read, surrounded by the comforts of American consumerism, was his idea of privilege, the physical demands of rural living representing the sort of hardship his impoverished ancestors had escaped.
But he was escaping something else as well - the loss of my mother's companionship.
When, as he read, occasional tears would roll out from under his glasses and course down his cheeks, pale in tone from both his indoor existence and a tendency toward anemia, I knew he was thinking of Mom.
I would put an arm around his shoulder and say, simply, “I know you miss her.” Dad would smile wanly but not speak.
Whenever he saw Tom or me scurrying around, working on one domestic project or another, he'd cry, “Don't you two ever get to sit down?” His statement would come not as an invitation to discussion but out of a disdain for physical work.
Several years ago, he'd slipped on the bathroom floor of his residence and broken a hip, the consequence of which he'd become more sedentary than ever - a lifestyle I decried!
I made a point of introducing walking into the daily regimen of his visits. His doctor and physical therapists having issued similar prescriptions, he complied with my agenda, despite his chronic fatigue, stiffness in his hip, and the added weight of his depression.
With his resistance overcome, he would rise to meet the prescription for exercise. If the weather was inclement, I'd walk with him eight or 10 times around our living room, with Dad generally picking up speed as we went, despite the encumbrance of the walker meant to protect against future falls.
But if it were fine, off we'd go for a “trot,” as I called it, up the dirt road that passed right by our house, starting out uphill to ensure an easier return. It was gratifying to me to watch his stamina increase during the course of each visit.
* * *
With the passage of years, Dad's reading sessions grew more and more symbolic, as evidenced by his drawing a blank in conversations about current issues, and I soon gave up trying to engage him in any politically relevant discussions.
Ironically, as his usual mental tracks fell into disrepair, he became increasingly responsive to the visual environment.
The bird feeder that dangled just outside the kitchen window opposite his seat had never drawn his attention before. Now the burglarious antics of a gray squirrel delighted him. He would comment on the changing skyscape as if he'd just discovered there was a sky. Sunsets, in our television-free home, became exciting entertainment.
But what pleased him most of all were the fallen maple leaves in autumn.
His eyes, of necessity focused on the way his feet must go, discovered in these leaves a previously unknown beauty, a beauty so immediate he needed to possess it.
With trepidation, I would watch him bend slowly to retrieve those many leaves he pronounced “the most beautiful of all,” totteringly placing them in the pocket of his walker, which I would grip for dear life, lest it tumble, bringing him down with it.
Restored to the upright, his face would be radiant from the unwonted activity. His rapture increased my awareness of that transient beauty. Busy as we always were, I had rarely “sat down” to count our riches.
Back home, the leaves would be largely forgotten, though occasionally their starry shapes would appear on his dresser or night table, as if he'd fumbled in his pocket and come up with some spare change. Discreetly, I'd remove the old faded ones to make room for the new ones that seemed endless.
They weren't endless, of course - it was mostly fortuitous that his visits sometimes coincided with the peak displays of Vermont autumns. Soon, the leaves would be brown and sere, then covered with snow.
* * *
On a cold, early morning in January, my sister called and told me that Dad had died suddenly during the night. We knew that he'd been hospitalized for an intestinal blockage, but the sudden heart and kidney failure came as a shock to us all.
When I'd had time to recover, I reflected that, happily, he'd gotten the chance to rifle through autumn's treasure store before he'd died. I was amazed that, weak as his heart had apparently been, he'd executed so many uphill trudges along a bumpy road, in an unintended tribute to the life my husband and I had embraced.
Months later, when I was cleaning out the dresser in his room, I came upon three dried red maple leaves, pressed flat under the weight of the bedding.
Before discarding them, I showed them to my husband, jesting that “Dad was a three-star general with leaves for medals.”
He'd earned them, every one.