Despite my instructions, the new hospice nurse revealed to Dad that his gift, and my reporting of the gift, got his old nurse fired.  I called Kourtney and expressed my utter dismay at being put at this new squeezing fulcrum point, this point of carbon-to-diamond pressure, and I demanded (or desperately requested) that she visit Mom and Dad and explain—before I arrived home—to them how the termination was not Dad’s fault, how the nurse accepting the gift violated all federal, state, and company rules and ethics, and especially how the termination was not “Roger’s fault” for having done right to report a wrong, and I needed to arrive home to a place of relative safety instead of a place of shaming accusation and recrimination.  After the hour-long visit, she assured me he understood and was sufficiently calm.  Indeed, I found him calm, yet eager and accusing.  She was fired, Roger, because you reported the gift.  (I.e., you snitched.)  I stiffened myself against shame, a little boy standing up to an angry giant of a man, and immediately interrupted the lie.  “That is not true,” I shot back.  Your nurse was fired because she played on your sympathies and committed a crime, not because I reported the crime.  That the company did not know about its employee accepting an illegal gift does not excuse her and does not condemn me.  But he would not relent, and I would not be shamed, and in my momentary rage I thought, You are not my father.  You are the man who even on his death bed needs to be right and will tell me how I am wrong and how I am at fault even though I do the good and right thing, the hard thing, because it is good and right.  You are the man who belittles his son rather than acknowledging his own shortcomings, instead of thanking his son for his courage and his ethics and his advocacy for truth and right.  And, I am afraid to say, I continued spinning my mental yarn of hurt and justification.  You are the man whom I have always wanted to please but could not, from whose lips I craved but never heard “I love you” and for whom my saying “I love you” feels like chewing glass.  My own fears and frustrations and guilts and inadequacies continued to pour through my thoughts.  You are the man around whom I strapped a gate belt and lifted with all my decrepit might to raise you from the floor and onto your chair and into your bed and who complained about how I had hurt you, instead of thanking me for saving your life, again.  You are the man to whom I wanted to be a beloved son but to whom I instead became a resented caregiver, or a toxic mix of both.  Leaving him to watch Dr. Poll alone, I resolved again never to live with my children in my future decrepitude.

(Pictured: Chicago Ivy #3.)