The Figure in the Shadows

Alina Gharabegian

For Ani. For Steven.

We buried my mother two years ago at winter’s end, six months after my father’s passing—deep in the ground, the brass urn containing his ashes resting upon her coffin, together but separate, in death as in life. Atop the coffin, a sprinkling of dirt intermingled with a dozen white roses, strewn about. Kneeling on the dirt mound at the margin of the grave, I leaned in and felt the cold divide—the finality. The force of human history caught in one still image: the living hovering above the dead, the two forever apart. In the preceding months, before their story ended, I brought my life near theirs in a startling intimacy that I imagine was augured at the beginning of time. It was fitting that I should bind my life to theirs in caregiving before the end. I had abandoned them, after all (their story ran), by living clear on the other side of the country for twenty years. But in late January of 2020, intent upon doing my small share for aging parents, I took a semester’s leave from my teaching, and my husband and I moved from New York back to California to contribute.

My journal entry from New Year’s Day of that year, in anticipation of my imminent move, references a “dreadful holler hurled at an abyss.” That’s how I described our lives at that juncture, knowing nothing then of what I would discover and endure in the months that followed, when we ministered to my dad, in the thick of the pandemic. A dreadful holler hurled at an abyss because I could not believe that this was the culmination of the lives of two young people who had loved intensely and had formed and raised a family. That my parents’ difficult labor and glorious dreaming—dreaming that fructified, for decades, in the lives of others who dreamt and built, in turn—could resolve, could dissolve in this way, into a state whose too-close contemplation threatened the loss of my sanity. The holler to undo it all, to deny, to negate—to desire to begin again, this time with more auspicious possibilities and a happier end, a holler hurled to relate the profundity of that desire, the abyss of reality that returns no one’s echo, and the dread—Kierkegaard’s dread—of the possibility that remained. Where to begin?

Though they remained married until my father’s passing, the last of the beautiful things between my parents dissolved roughly fifteen years ago, leaving in their wake insoluble guilt on one side, adamantine anger on the other: two sets of feelings that dragged them to tragic, avoidable ends, and then death. They’d had an intense, passionate relationship, mad with love and difficult circumstances on both sides, from their teens, onward. They married after a five-year courtship, had their three children within the first decade of marriage, and committed themselves to the countless heartbreaking particulars of raising a family and keeping it together across two drastically different countries, immigration, the challenges of starting over with nothing on foreign soil with three small children in tow, succeeding marvelously, failing in parts—surviving, in a word, along lines drawn by fortune and misfortune alike. In America, unenthusiastic immigrants who felt acutely that they’d left behind a far more substantive and spiritually rewarding country, they nonetheless devoted themselves to the diasporic community they helped forge. They were immensely active, vibrant members of their community, beloved and respected by large numbers of close friends with whom they regularly celebrated and travelled and shared the social aspects of their lives, much of it very joyful. And they separately ran small businesses as professionals for decades, between the two of them. That they loved each other deeply is indisputable, but without the benefit of individuated development, they were also not terrifically good to each other. They grew into one another too early to have formed a healthy space for the self that might then extend to the other in mature generosity. And as is the case in many marriages, banal resentments settled and proliferated. Forty-five years into their relationship, these had already calcified before life’s darkest, most irresolvable disappointments (concerning lost time and the shutting down of dreams) consumed them through disease and self-destruction.

It must have been intuition that early devised the move away from my parents in adulthood. I adored them. When I rent my life from theirs to attend graduate school on the East coast, I must have been compelled by the need to decathect—to acclimate myself to daily life without them—in order to bear their eventual absence when they passed. What ensued, instead, was a prolonged and progressive emotional deprivation that I didn’t understand as such until after they had died. Annoyance was my predominant response when my mother would say, over the years, that she hadn’t raised me only to have me live at such a great distance from them. I didn’t hear “distance” as other than a marker of negligible space—mere miles, hours on the plane, a different part of the country, a different city. But oh, the gradual, ruinous privation that comes of that “distance”—of one’s absence from the vicissitudes of beloveds’ lives. Bereft of the joint narrative woven through proximal lives, love subsists on mediation, belatedness, and the past. And though I had gone to visit three or four times a year, and sometimes for long stretches at a time, and though we spoke weekly, I realized, too late, that by 2020, except in the retelling in parts, I had missed two decades of my parents’ existence and they had missed mine, because I had absented myself from the daily “nothings” that accrue to become our lives. It occurred to me soon after they died that I had not just become orphaned, but rather, that I had been destitute for a long time.

January 2020 marked a very late period in the disastrous scene that had become my parents’ lives. I had missed a lot of the most devastating moments in the trajectory of my father’s vascular dementia, diagnosed, by degrees, throughout 2017 and 2018. I learned only secondhand about some of the horrific incidents endured and managed by other family members, given that I lived three thousand miles away. Since my mother could not singlehandedly undertake my father’s caregiving, in the previous month, on Christmas Eve, we had by dint of a miracle found a spot in a nursing home in which to settle him as he was discharged from the hospital’s psych ward. In leaving him there, I relinquished my soul at his bedside—his back turned to me, refusing to respond or acknowledge my presence. I felt I had lost him forever, submerged in an unspeakable dread I could not know, could not access. By January 24, when I returned to him, he had suffered immeasurably and lost a remarkable eighteen pounds; the shadow of a father I found in January weighed less than ninety pounds, gazed vaguely at me without recognition through gaunt eyes. During the following seven weeks, occasionally with my sister, I ministered to him twice daily at the nursing home with food from home, hoping I was recovering recognition, but mostly, I was stirring up ashes. As we fed him, his hollow face and skeletal mouth took gulps with increasing reluctance. All things lack salt before they come to a halt in an unwilling throat. During these feedings beside the Frankenstein contraption—his geri chair—I could only wish that he might continue to swallow till the end, that no disaster would befall him, that grief would fail to sweep him up during the day and infernal demons take little at darkness. Each day, when I left him after dinner, he turned away in resignation.

On the morning of March 17, a call from the director of the nursing home indicated that I had but twenty-four hours to remove my father from nursing care before their doors were closed indefinitely to visitors—precautions against the deadly coronavirus. Because I had met and spoken at length with the director, and he knew the level of care I expected for my father, he had extended the courtesy call. By the morning, dazed and frightened, unsure how to place one foot before the other in the fog of decisions that would irreversibly alter all our lives, unclear whether he already had the virus, not knowing how I would succeed in taking care of him at home, I nonetheless called the director to let him know my husband and I would be picking up my father, as the possibility that the family might not see him—not just daily, but ever—was inconceivable. In removing him, I had also to consider whether we could return him after the danger of the virus had passed. What Pandora’s box was I opening for him, for my mother, for my two siblings, if, after my return to New York in August, they’d be left without the possibility of placing him back in nursing care? But the decision was clear and swiftly rendered. The sum total of our farewell from the nursing home consisted of a brief instruction sheet, a request for the prompt return of their wheelchair, and a warning to never feed him solid food. And we were on our way.

But how, exactly, would we—my husband and I—get my father to stand up, move over from the wheelchair into the car? Even this simple maneuver seemed insurmountable, as the care of a fragile, elderly person, we understand, is entrusted to the professionally trained. Except for rare moments of verbal expression (much of it incomprehensible), he was largely uncommunicative, so it was never clear how much or how little he understood. We wondered how we would sit him down without hurting him and how he would withstand the car ride. Could he even sit up, other than in a bed or a wheelchair? Would he be safe and cooperative? Would he be traumatized by the change in his environment? Would we break brittle bones before the end of the six miles home, without realizing we had done so? And how would we get him out of the car on the other end, when he couldn’t follow directions? Ignorant and scared, we proceeded from one startled instant to the next, holding our breaths in between, praying the while that no calamity would occur.

The spectacle at home, once we settled him on the couch, was reminiscent of the scene in the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial when the stunned children who have squirreled away the precious alien haven’t any clue what next to do with him, and he is utterly helpless in making himself or his needs known to them. Unilateral leaning prevented him from sitting without being propped up with a bulwark of cushions. In the middle of the night, I awoke to check on him, and he was wide awake in his bed beside my mother, with his head on the hard nightstand, wiggling and leaning over on the edge of the bed, about to fall, suffering in total silence. The next night, despite the cushions lodged between the bed and nightstand, I found him in a similar state. How did I not know that he would require his own bed, with protective rails? In retrospect, I don’t quite know how we made it through the first three or four critical days without a trip to the emergency room at the volatile start of the pandemic. My father’s safety foremost on our minds, we didn’t believe we could persevere through even two or three weeks of the ordeal, and until the process became slightly routinized, we held our breaths throughout the day, exhaling with gratitude at the very end of each, thankful that we had survived the day, mostly incident free.

It’s fair to say that while the more sophisticated edges of empathy were developed in the deliberate processes of training in the humanities, I actually learned caregiving in the quiet interstices of intimacy with each parent. My father, who had a remarkably (and paradoxically) soft spot for the poor, the downtrodden, the injured, the helpless, was also endlessly curious. We trace the etymology of our word curious through Old French to Latin to find there the words care and cure. My father possessed infinite curiosity, care directed toward knowledge: the conquest of new ground—of learning something novel, of turning it around in his head, figuring out the internal workings—discovering, uncovering. This is the father who saved the lives of two children not his own in two unrelated incidents by swiftly turning each upside down and whacking them on their backs to rescue them from choking, when their own parents were ineffectual with panic. I discovered, at five, a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest, which I’d unwittingly watered nearly to death in a flower patch in the yard, and he nursed it back to life, and I watched it fly out of his life-giving hand. When he cleaned his guns, organized his fishing gear, shined his shoes, he let me sit near and share in the private world of his processes, all the while speaking to me of the details—the parts, the functions, the interconnections—with the inimitable voice and patience of the Original Teacher whom, all my life, I again sought and next sought to be, because he had communicated that the space of learning is a warm and loving space of discovery and adventure and the pliant opening up of the petals to my will, if I cared for the flower enough. As an engineer, he garnered and delivered the same quality of care in his work, in his painstaking calculations and design work and in the pristine execution of his drafting, the figures and letters on velum, done freehand, like graphic soldiers in perfect formation—emblematic of the care attendant upon the deliberate, methodical application of knowledge that accrues and produces.

But nowhere in his life did his passion come more abundantly and irrepressibly to the fore than in his attunement to his grandchildren. Here, then, is the paradox at work in my father’s love: the wildlife that he respected and admired, he equally hunted and killed; only late in life did he arrive at a clear view of that transgression. Thus did his love of the powerless resolve in paradoxically arresting power. Compassion toward the downtrodden and helpless did little to prevent him from unleashing upon my brother generational wrath inherited from his own authoritarian father who, in his turn, unduly punished my father and treated him to beatings. When my brother was a little boy, my father knew less how to love well, and so, in later years, he unconsciously sought atonement in loving my brother’s sons, I think, by lavishing upon them the love denied my brother long ago. He poured himself flood-like into their lives. For him, it was a second chance at caregiving, and his care redoubled when my sister’s daughter was born.

Never have I witnessed an adult enter the space of a child’s imaginative domain so seamlessly and with such thoroughgoing interest. With totalized empathetic identification and remarkable patience, he would play for endless hours with toy cars and blocks and dolls, alike, delighted at his grandchildren’s magical innocence. Love’s unconditional aspect came to life for me here: the lover bends and refashions himself so as to be at the service of his beloveds, so as to participate in the beloveds’ worlds, on the beloveds’ terms, even if from the periphery and in self-abnegation—unrecognized by his beloveds and fully integrated into their needs. To be in their presence was enough for him. He was in thrall to them. He was in awe. And he brought every facet of his caregiving to bear upon his encounters with them. He did not, however, extend this quality of love to my mother. With her, his love was possessive and sought to please itself and so remained impoverished, did not grow. The care he demonstrated toward her must have served in courtship to woo and win her heart, but had, by the time I was of age to witness with remembrance, dissipated; the caregiving between them came disproportionately from my mother’s side. From her alone I learned what it means to direct one’s whole being to the care of another without reciprocation and self-regard.

What belongs to my mother’s teachings about care is complex and unwieldy—far beyond the purview of this narrative. Suffice to say that the ultimate lesson there was that no element of being in the world—no feature of one’s interiority, demeanor, behavior, thought process, interpersonal encounters, and certainly no part of one’s work—should be spared perfectionistic scrutiny. The world she presented was at once a morass of mediocrity (to be vanquished) and a vessel for Romantic symbolism (to be unearthed). Banalities were saturated with meaning if you observed closely; banalities could be instilled with meaning if you crafted with care. If the work to which one set one’s hand did not excel, that was labor lost. If individual capacity failed to rise to the production of perfection or originality, that was capacity misguided. There was always a way to do a thing better, to go further, to mark a higher ground. No doubt, the life-affirming ethos of creativity and productivity—her sense of the élan vital—inspired much of the push toward the care of minutiae. But there also existed in that impetus the vigilant attempt to avoid or altogether annihilate the possibility of failure or disaster if only one cared enough, which belongs, I think, not only to familial but also to cultural proclivities. It’s natural, I suppose, for these two streams of intentionality to have merged in the love and care she offered my father for nearly sixty years, between the start of their courtship and the end of his life.

Smart, industrious, and singularly talented, my mother had a rare ability for transformations—using meager means and narrow opportunities to produce stunningly beautiful objects in the world that bespoke an exceptional aesthetic sensibility. She was an arbiter of soigné elegance and exquisite taste on all registers and had hoped to make her way in the world as a businesswoman. But life brought her marriage and young motherhood, instead. And well beyond the sacrifices a young Armenian wife of the 1960s might have been expected to make—sacrifices of personal autonomy, of career, of freedom from domestic responsibility—, my mother relinquished whole parts of her personhood when she married, tossing aside all dreams that did not sustain my father at their center. She burnished individual desire into a confluence with his. She took care to be fully attuned to the nuances of his emotional temperature. In both subtle and unsubtle ways, through demonstrations of intemperate giving, she communicated to him that he was loved, well taken care of, doted upon. The accompanying rhetoric runs that one gives to excess from love, because she can, because she cannot help it, because she desires the good of the beloved, but Eros is Janus-faced, after all. Eros is based in need, hence requires reciprocation, or it either turns to poison or dies. The legitimate need to be reciprocally cared for in a marriage remained unsated in my mother, and the circular, tragic irony of her ongoing love for my father was that, for decades, the greater her need grew, the more she gave, perhaps to counter the scarcity from his side; and the more she gave, the greater grew her need. And so, before the end, her love ran dry, drowned in a sandstorm of need. In picking up the surviving bits of their lives near the end, I was left, thus, to glean from what each parent had ingrained in me about caregiving, in their very different approaches to love.

Trudging through the quagmire of red tape across numberless phone calls and conversations with the Social Security Administration and California’s own doubly confusing Department of Health Care Services, we educated ourselves; and forced to be content with being half-informed, we navigated the bewildering terrain of government aid. The territory of privatized healthcare for hospice patients presented unanticipated pitfalls of its own, culminating in several false starts and ill-informed decisions, until we were exhaustedly settled, furnished finally and piecemeal, with the right kinds of durable medical equipment, recurring disposable supplies, and healthcare workers (whose presence in the house was as welcomed as it was feared, as they were perceived to be at greatest risk of contracting and spreading the virus). With tremendous care, we kept the virus at bay, and though every one of the healthcare workers who came (often double-masked) to check vitals and register reports and help bathe my father thrice weekly contracted COVID in their turn, we all remained miraculously unscathed by it through those seventeen months of home care. We considered it extraordinary that even my sister, a social worker at several dialysis centers, one of which had been converted into an emergency COVID cohort unit, who came into direct daily contact with COVID patients and who would come each evening to help with my father’s care, remained virus-free as well. Caregiving during COVID meant austerity measures and strange wartime rations that complicated simple, quotidian tasks. We would routinely drive great distances from one supermarket to the other, one drugstore to the next, to find rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, paper towels, toilet paper, and even bottled water; what we considered bare necessities were either rationed or in severe shortage. I often bartered supplies with healthcare workers who had too much of one thing and not enough of another so that we could all subsist in our caregiving—from one house to the next.

As the steepness of my learning curve gave way with the experiences of each day, and as the calm of an established routine allowed a measure of peace to half-penetrate the best part of most days, my body’s limits—stretched beyond my imagining—were shattered by the end of the first month of caregiving. My hands, most of all, ached in unprecedented ways, and I was not sure how they would continue to be of use. But here, I learned the valuable lesson of the disparity between the imagined and the real, when reality is hoped for and willed. Through the spring and summer of 2020, when I was free of professional responsibilities, the dizzying rush of each day, even with help from my husband and sister, seemed insuperable. With the university’s move to online teaching in the fall of 2020, I was afforded the opportunity to continue in California with my father’s care for a year yet. But now to the mechanized flow of the caregiving routine was superadded the teaching of a fulltime load. Twice weekly, for nine months, between two semesters, I was caught in a veritable hurricane of waking, changing my father, preparing his breakfast, administering his medication, teaching on Zoom, giving students a break so as to get him out of bed and sitting, returning to students, finishing up instruction to prepare his lunch, feeding him, rushing back to the next class, finishing in a flurry, changing my father, teaching the next class, ending just in time to get dinner on the table, eating, feeding again, changing again, and putting him to bed, so as to breathe and close down the day. Managing the flow of healthcare workers in and out of the house, paying bills, and peripherally handling my mother’s care, as well, claimed whatever little time remained, and so, with these responsibilities, I gained an entirely new view of daily labor, each moment replete with requisite industriousness.

And thus, we coped. I learned, by degrees and through mistakes, to keep my father safe, to provide him with comfort, to return him to us in small measure by titrating his medication and watching him flourish, even if only a little. He gained weight, readily ate solid food, seemed content and sometimes even happy; he was often pleased and responded clearly and consistently to care; he walked, and stood, and strolled onto the balcony with help, amazed at the traffic below and the birds above; and he demonstrated a remarkable amount of gratitude and love despite his condition. Each morning, after changing and dressing him, I would go around to the top of his bed and tuck my arms under his back and pull him all the way up from where he had slipped down during the change. This maneuver took long to master, especially as it was difficult on my body and he was often uncooperative, made uncomfortable by being yanked up and unsure of what was happening, unable to express himself. His habit was to reach his hands above his head and grab me by the hair to prevent the move, and so a battle would ensue each time in which I’d have to persuade him—both physically and verbally—to let go his ferocious grip and let me complete my task. On one such occasion, my spirit utterly broken, he found me in that position in tears, grabbed the back of my head and drew me close to kiss my forehead with all his might, imploring me to stop crying—the only intelligible words he’d spoken in weeks.

For my parents, my father’s dementia meant inaccessibility—the imposition of silence and incapacity upon the period in which their sixty-year-long dynamic came to a head, when they otherwise might have carved out a shared space of forgiveness and peace before the end. I think the impossibility of such an end devastated my mother. She coped privately with the loss of a recognizable, cognizant partner. His helplessness and the aid I provided him signaled to her, once more, the satisfaction of his needs and the correlative neglect of hers in the narrative of their relationship. Already long resentful of my father’s bond with me, in witnessing my caregiving, she was caught between gratitude and bitterness. “I am just as sick as he is,” she would often complain. Grief had somatized into a dozen physical ailments, some nascent and acute, others longstanding and diffuse—difficult to diagnose. And her psycho-emotional responses to the exigencies of that period expressed themselves in behaviors I perceived as deliberately uncooperative, obstinate, and often destructive. So I grew increasingly withdrawn from her and intransigent on my side, as unwilling to receive her help as she was to offer it. I have only forgiveness to beg of my mother—a plea cast beyond the grave, into eternity. Predictably, neglecting to recognize the legitimate needs of a parent with whom I’d had a profoundly complicated relationship, I rushed instead to tend to the other who had well met all my needs in the filial bond. Drowning in my own unmet needs, I failed to bring the lessons of my training—of humanism and humility—to the service of the impossible encounters with my mother. After all, need and unconditional love are inimical forces.

Marrow of my bone, my warrior father, my love—he fought me fiercely and with exceptional strength that nearly sapped my own as I learned, worried and tenuous at first, how to clean him without the mortification of the soul or violation of the body of a supremely private man. I learned the flexible contours of the line between his dignity and his needs. I learned to read his eyes, his movements, his moods; believing I was learning to know a different father, he taught me he was just the same, and that I was only looking more closely. Across hundreds of hours, in a hundred interactions, he taught me how to see him, how to listen carefully in the absence of words, how to speak and not to speak to him, what to look for, where to stop, where to begin again. I learned that intimacy is multiply generous and vulnerability the most humanizing force, and that together they teach us how to reconstitute love. But all along, ours had been the safe space that cradled an unspoken trust. There is neither grand achievement nor difficulty in expressing unconditional love for someone who has loved us unconditionally all our lives, as my father had done with me. And when we are not in need of anything from the beloved, giving unconditional care is natural and easy. It’s the unreciprocated caregiver—the one who loves with unmet needs—who is as heroic as she is tragic. Whether unable or unwilling (these had become one and the same in her) to tend to my father, my mother withdrew her active care from him as she withdrew her spirit from the world. All vitality long since extinguished at the altar of giving excessively to others, the last of her slipped away from us well in advance of her passing. But my mother had taught me abundantly well what it means to cull all aspects of myself in the interest of an endeavor with attention to every detail; she had further exemplified, all my life, what caring for this particular individual—my father—might entail. In the period during which I took care of my father, the tendencies, capacities, and understandings I mobilized in the service of caregiving were actually the ones I had learned from the figure in the shadows who each day receded further into the darkness, as I brought her work to fruition.

Alina Gharabegian is an American Armenian, raised in a diasporic community in Los Angeles. Trained as a Victorianist, she lives in New York City and works in New Jersey as an English professor. She is an emerging creative writer whose work has appeared online in publications such as Still Point Arts Quarterly, Vita Poetica, Unleash Creatives, and Subprimal Poetry. Her passions include poetry and the tango.