My father was conscious of fire risk at the cottage so we would not burn paper in the barrel on windy days or when the weather was too hot and dry. Often, we set to work in overcast weather or after an autumn rain. The heat waves distorted my perception, making him shimmer like a character on Star Trek caught in a transporter beam malfunction.

He was often anxious, on guard against loss of privileges and status. As a teenager, I could bear witness to his conservative politics without feeling trapped. But when his obsessions hit closer to home — like fear of fire or break-ins — his anxiety swept through me, and I burned with shame, believing I had somehow caused the panic.

In my forties, I did not cause my mother to develop Alzheimer’s, nor to fall out of bed and break her hip. I did not tell my father to leave her on the carpet for an hour and go back to sleep. But he quickly blamed me, and rightly so, for placing my mother in a nursing home and for orchestrating his mental assessment.

His involuntary confinement in the mental hospital only lasted two weeks, but he was deemed mentally incapable and couldn’t return to his house alone. Let him out, I thought. He was only trying to take his wife to lunch, and the nurses got in his way. He wasn’t serious about protesting with a gun at the Cenotaph in his World War II uniform. It was just talk.

This was what I always did: agonize about making a difficult decision involving my parents, agonize over having made it, and then backtrack in my head when it all got too hot to handle.

 

While we waited for a room in long-term care, they gave him a week’s leave of absence to try a new environment at a high-end retirement center. His face brightened at the sight of the well-appointed foyer with old folks strolling around with walkers and canes. Maybe it would all work out, I thought, and we wouldn’t need a nursing home after all. While I did the paperwork with the manager, my father started reciting stories about his childhood friend Bob. He did not dwell on the fiery crash that killed Bob in a pilot training accident, or how he carried Bob’s casket down several flights of stairs. He focused instead on how Bob’s spirit saved him from his own plane crash in Montrose, Scotland, just two weeks before V-E Day. After receiving our down payment, she cut off the story while he was still in the cockpit, spinning out of control.

Unlike the shared arrangement on the locked ward of the mental hospital, he had a large suite to himself.

“Do you flash the light in here at night?” he asked.

He sat in a cozy chair while I unpacked his clothes and set up wartime photos on the dresser. I did not bring a likeness of my mother because I thought it would only incite sadness or rage that the medication could not suppress. I brought him downstairs in time for the afternoon’s entertainment, parked his walker in the hall with the others, and left him with sheet music for “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” His eyes were watery with gratitude, even if the song wasn’t from his war.

On the first morning, he wore pajamas to breakfast in the dining room, arguing with staff about the dress code. I paid extra for a support worker to help him get dressed.

On the second morning, I phoned him after getting a call from the manager.

“They told you to take the scarf off the light bulb last night, and they came back and found you’d put a washcloth on it,” I said.

“That’s a lot of horseshit,” he said. “They never told me to take it off.”

“They say you have to leave.”

He fell silent on the telephone.

It was no great loss since he had been lying in bed except for meals just like he had done at the mental hospital. The retirement home was too large, too beautiful, too different. I had wanted him so much to find the all-you-can-drink juice dispenser in the dining room or take in an impromptu recital on the grand piano in the salon.

The manager sat with him while I packed up. My father apologized. It wouldn’t happen again. Couldn’t he have a second chance? They both had tears in their eyes, but there was no last-minute intervention from Bob’s spirit or anything else. The fire risk trumped our cash payments.

 

We were mostly quiet on the way back to the hospital.

“I don’t suppose there’s anywhere else,” he said.

I could have looked for another retirement home. I could have moved him back to their empty house. I could have retrieved my mother as well. The three of us could have lived together.

“Not really,” I said.

 

On those fall days in the back lot of the cottage, I would stand at the rusty barrel, stirring up the fire with a metal rod or stick before the flames got too high. Years of burning had melted the metal, leaving holes in the bottom of the barrel. If any embers spilled out, we had to stamp them into the earth.

 

Mark Foss

—

Mark Foss is the author of three novels, including Borrowed Memories (8th House Publishing, 2024). His creative nonfiction has appeared in Canadian, American, and British journals and anthologies, such as PRISM international, great weather for MEDIA, and Hinterland. Apart from his own writing, he is the co-editor of The Book of Judith (New Village Press, 2022), an homage to the poet, writer, and teaching artist Judith Tannenbaum, and her impact on incarcerated and marginalized students in the United States. He lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.