Moments

We set out to see the giraffe. My father had told me he'd spotted it across the field from the house on our farm in Tennessee. By then, he was several years into a long course of Parkinson's Disease and was on several medications. But he was still physically healthy, able to continue the work of our farm. I knew that he was starting to hallucinate, but in our stubbornness, we thought we could convince him the visions were not real. My brother and I, along with our wives, our children, and my mother, climbed into his pickup truck with him and drove over to the field to see this exotic animal that was not there.

As we traveled the field road past last year's soybean stalks, I had the thought that perhaps we had gone crazy as well. But then my father pointed and said, simply, "There it is." We all whiplashed around, and sure enough, a string of colorful birthday balloons had descended and become stuck in a fence row and were bobbing up like the head of a giraffe. Driving home in silence, I learned the first of many caregiving lessons from my father—to listen and not discredit the patient, no matter what.

Not long after, we gathered again to take away his guns. A life-long hunter, my father had accumulated a small collection: a couple of shotguns, a deer rifle, a handgun or two. We knew he would never try to hurt our mother, but if he saw something and went for a gun, we just couldn't take the chance. In our wood-paneled den, the center of our family life for decades, as my father sat behind his big, heavy wooden desk, where he always sat when there was business to attend to, I thought of the changes occurring in our lives. In that big desk, my father kept, among other treasures, a pair of nail clippers in the trough of the sliding drawer. When I was too young to cut my own fingernails, he would call me over and I would sit on his lap. After the cutting, he would laugh as I pressed my fingertips into his pants leg to feel the newly exposed quick. He looked smaller now, behind that desk, as my brother and I told him that we would keep his guns safe for him. He complied, but the loss of his independence was palpable.

When my father first broke his hip (he would break both ultimately), I stayed with him in the hospital. A few mornings in, he was looking grizzly. "I'll just shave him," I thought. "Can't be that hard." I told him I was going to give him a shave. He looked wary of the proposition as I left the room to buy a disposable razor in the hospital gift shop. I remember thinking that the cheap shaving cream was too thin and runny, but I proceeded anyway. I'm a surgeon, after all. For years I'd made a living by cutting people open and putting them back together. This safety razor would be a cinch.

Scrape, scrape, scrape. My father winced. Soon, a spot of blood appeared, then another. "Sorry," I said. I changed the direction of the razor. Down, then up, east to west. I could see the hint of fear in his eyes as he watched me struggle. In the medical profession, we don't like to fail—especially a surgeon in a procedure.

"Certainly, I can do this," I thought. So I persisted. Scrape. Wipe the blood. Scrape.

Finally, my father had had enough, and he told me to stop. Years later, we could finally laugh about my botched job of a shave.

As his mind and body deteriorated, I was slow to realize that my mother, alone with him in their house, was overwhelmed with the daily care of my father. Then it all changed late one spring afternoon with a trip to the emergency department. The subsequent week of hospitalization became the opportunity for relief. He transitioned from the hospital to the nursing home in our...