The Pacemaker

Ten years ago, Dad couldn’t get himself out of bed. Mom called the ambulance. One week and a quarter of a million dollars later, Dad had two bovine heart valves and a pacemaker courtesy of world-famous heart surgeon Albert Starr. Dad was not grateful. He continued to abuse my mother, push her around, lean on her, and make horrible jokes like “I’m a walking cadaver.” Five years later, Mom was thrown to the floor on a train and broke her hip and was taken to the hospital in Centralia, a hundred and some miles north. Dad never visited Mom in the hospital up in Centralia once. Any of us kids would have taken him from door to door. When she was transferred back to town to a convalescent center, where she stayed for two months, Dad visited one time. When she finally got home, Dad went right back to making her wait on him, even as she was trying to rehab from her hip replacement.

(I asked Mom today when Dad’s surgery was. I’m terrible with time lines. She refreshed my memory, then remarked, “Your dad didn’t want to be here, but he clung to life anyway.”)

Ultimately, it got to be too much for Mom. Her deepest self wanted out of the caretaker role, and it was going to do whatever it took. Mom would intellectually acknowledge that she needed out, but being subjugated to Dad was all she knew, caring for Dad was her role, and she couldn’t imagine being deprived of that. So her subconscious took over. Alice Miller cites dozens of case histories like this in books such as Free From Lies: Discovering Your True Needs [W.W. Norton, 2009].

It began with panicked trips to the Emergency Room complaining of numbness. The first time, it was chalked up to a mini-stroke, a TIA (transient ischemic attack). But there were more and more trips, at least four in all, and the doctors decided it was more likely due to anxiety. Then Mom fell in the bedroom, just picking something off the bed. She didn’t remember falling, losing her balance, anything. She was just suddenly on the floor, screaming. She had broken her other hip (actually femur). Another femoral ball replacement. More weeks in the rehab facility. This time, Dad was there all the time, manipulating her with diamonds in her wedding ring, clumsy displays of affection, and sometimes acting like some sort of Svengali (he insisted on sitting directly across from her at a team meeting), all to make sure she came back home and picked up where she left off, caring for him.

I was beside myself. I told the rest of the family, “If we don’t get Mom out of the caregiving role, she’s going to subconsciously kill herself.” As it happened, soon after Mom got home, Dad started going to the ER with bouts of pneumonia, and in a matter of a few months, we had arranged for him to go to a nursing home and moved Mom into a one-bedroom apartment.

There are a lot of stories here, but the one I’m getting to is an image I have of Dad at the nursing home in his last months. He was sitting up in bed and his chest was half exposed by his tank top T-shirt. There was that pacemaker. I had never seen it before. It stuck out of his emaciated chest wall like a tissue box on a table covered with skin. That was the pacemaker that had been keeping Dad alive against his will this last ten years, depriving my mother from any chance at some quality of life in her declining years. That hideously geometrical contraption protruding from Dad’s chest is an image I will never forget.

I remember Dad’s pacemaker being twice as long, protruding twice as much, and being much more rectangular than the one in this picture.

That awful little quarter-of-a-million-dollar box is a metaphor for so many paradoxes and so much ambivalence. Dad not wanting to stay and not wanting to go. Mom subconsciously trying to get out from under and yet tenaciously clinging to her caregiver role. The controversy of technological extension of life at hard-to-fathom cost, and for what? So Dad could have ten more years of all-consuming anger, self-pity, and misogyny? How dare I say that, right? But, you see, I’m furious with him on behalf of my mother, whom he almost killed with his domination.

This memory, this image, is going to be the basis for a poem. How you write about something like that without filling in the backstory, I will have to figure out.

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. Feel free to reblog, share, or link to.