CREEK ROAD GANG
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Chocolates for My Father
Patricia Zita Krisch
Copyright 1997
My sister, Anna Rita, met me at the airport and during the drive to her home in Sacramento she said, "Dad was so bad on Sunday I prayed please let him last until Wednesday when you would get here. He choked on the communion host."
Our eighty-seven-year-old father was in the last stages of Parkinson's disease and this would be my last visit. He had fought the move to a nursing home four years before but once there he had accepted it, attended daily exercise classes and social events, went on field trips, and was very proud of being the first president of the resident's council. "They need my leadership skills, " he'd said. His mind remained sharp and his personality determined.
Now his swallow reflex was disappearing and he was slipping into episodes of dementia. We knew the end was near.
Later that afternoon, I walked the long corridor to my parents’ room with dread in my heart. How would he look, how would he act? When I came into the room, he was sitting in his wheel chair bent over his bed shuffling around papers he could no longer see. How many times had I arrived at his law office to see him with a desk covered with papers, just as his bed was now?
"Hi, Dad. It's Patty," I said putting my arm around him and giving him a kiss.
"I want to go to bed, " he said. No hello, no acknowledgement that it had been a year since he had seen me. It was if I had been there yesterday.
When he was lying in bed and obviously feeling more comfortable, we chatted and then he said, "Do you have some candy?"
"No, Dad, I'm afraid you can't have candy anymore."
"Oh, yes, I can have candy."
"I don't think so. You are having so much trouble swallowing."
"Oh, I can have candy."
This went back and forth for a while, until I finally laughed and said, "Well, if you could have candy, what kind would you want?"
"Chocolate, of course! You always bring me chocolate."
The Chocolate daughter! About fifteen years before Dad had developed a new fondness for sweets and especially for chocolate. I took to including chocolates along with whatever else I was sending him for Birthdays, Christmas and Father's days. I brought chocolates when I visited every summer. Tobler, Perugina, Godiva, I brought them all. My pleasure that he so strongly associated me with gifts of his beloved chocolate was tempered by knowing I dare not give it to him now.
I left when he was starting to fall asleep, but he caught my hand and said, "If I'm asleep when you come, wake me. I don't want to miss a moment of your visit."
Later Anna Rita confirmed my fears. No candy, no chocolate. He might choke on it.
I visited the nursing home twice a day. Sometimes he was alert, sometimes he was clearly uncomfortable, his legs restless and in pain. One day he lay in bed reminiscing about his dilemma over which of two girls to invite to his Senior Prom at Berkeley. "I picked the Ryan girl, and she wasn't much fun," he complained. Was he back in that time sixty-five years ago? Another day he babbled non-stop, his voice so garbled I could understand little of what he said.
Each visit he asked for chocolate, begging and badgering. All the single-minded focus that had made him a successful lawyer and business executive was now centered on getting a piece of chocolate. Saying 'No' felt awful.
And day-by-day he seemed to be getting weaker, slipping away before my eyes. Anna Rita and I, with a feeling of desperation, decided to try butter creams and hope for the best. After our visit on Sunday morning brought more requests for chocolate, we stopped at a Mrs. See’s candy store where a clerk kindly helped us select six of their softest chocolate butter creams.
"I am going to feel really guilty if this finishes him off," I said as I got into the car.
"If it does," my brother-in-law retorted, "we'll know he died with a smile on his face."
Anna Rita, her husband, Bill, and I spent that afternoon under a soft October sun driving along the Sacramento River and down the Delta, stopping at little river towns, distracting ourselves from the sadness at the center of our lives.
On Monday morning I cut one of the butter creams into six tiny pieces and fed it to Dad piece by piece.
"How was it?" I asked when he finished.
He leaned back, his face looking beatific. "That was wonderful!"
I fed him another butter cream when I came that afternoon. By Tuesday afternoon, he had lost interest in the chocolate.
Dad died three weeks after I returned to Philadelphia. When I look back on that sad and difficult week, I am grateful for that last gift he gave me. He could have wished for one more hike in his beloved Sierras, but that had been unattainable for years. He could have wished to have one more audience charmed and enthralled with his wit and the force of his delivery, but now we had to strain to understand his mushy speech. No, Dad was ever a practical person, wedded to the present and the possible. He had figured out an experience he'd love to have one last time, then cajoled and charmed me into giving it to him. I gave my father one last taste of chocolate.
Our eighty-seven-year-old father was in the last stages of Parkinson's disease and this would be my last visit. He had fought the move to a nursing home four years before but once there he had accepted it, attended daily exercise classes and social events, went on field trips, and was very proud of being the first president of the resident's council. "They need my leadership skills, " he'd said. His mind remained sharp and his personality determined.
Now his swallow reflex was disappearing and he was slipping into episodes of dementia. We knew the end was near.
Later that afternoon, I walked the long corridor to my parents’ room with dread in my heart. How would he look, how would he act? When I came into the room, he was sitting in his wheel chair bent over his bed shuffling around papers he could no longer see. How many times had I arrived at his law office to see him with a desk covered with papers, just as his bed was now?
"Hi, Dad. It's Patty," I said putting my arm around him and giving him a kiss.
"I want to go to bed, " he said. No hello, no acknowledgement that it had been a year since he had seen me. It was if I had been there yesterday.
When he was lying in bed and obviously feeling more comfortable, we chatted and then he said, "Do you have some candy?"
"No, Dad, I'm afraid you can't have candy anymore."
"Oh, yes, I can have candy."
"I don't think so. You are having so much trouble swallowing."
"Oh, I can have candy."
This went back and forth for a while, until I finally laughed and said, "Well, if you could have candy, what kind would you want?"
"Chocolate, of course! You always bring me chocolate."
The Chocolate daughter! About fifteen years before Dad had developed a new fondness for sweets and especially for chocolate. I took to including chocolates along with whatever else I was sending him for Birthdays, Christmas and Father's days. I brought chocolates when I visited every summer. Tobler, Perugina, Godiva, I brought them all. My pleasure that he so strongly associated me with gifts of his beloved chocolate was tempered by knowing I dare not give it to him now.
I left when he was starting to fall asleep, but he caught my hand and said, "If I'm asleep when you come, wake me. I don't want to miss a moment of your visit."
Later Anna Rita confirmed my fears. No candy, no chocolate. He might choke on it.
I visited the nursing home twice a day. Sometimes he was alert, sometimes he was clearly uncomfortable, his legs restless and in pain. One day he lay in bed reminiscing about his dilemma over which of two girls to invite to his Senior Prom at Berkeley. "I picked the Ryan girl, and she wasn't much fun," he complained. Was he back in that time sixty-five years ago? Another day he babbled non-stop, his voice so garbled I could understand little of what he said.
Each visit he asked for chocolate, begging and badgering. All the single-minded focus that had made him a successful lawyer and business executive was now centered on getting a piece of chocolate. Saying 'No' felt awful.
And day-by-day he seemed to be getting weaker, slipping away before my eyes. Anna Rita and I, with a feeling of desperation, decided to try butter creams and hope for the best. After our visit on Sunday morning brought more requests for chocolate, we stopped at a Mrs. See’s candy store where a clerk kindly helped us select six of their softest chocolate butter creams.
"I am going to feel really guilty if this finishes him off," I said as I got into the car.
"If it does," my brother-in-law retorted, "we'll know he died with a smile on his face."
Anna Rita, her husband, Bill, and I spent that afternoon under a soft October sun driving along the Sacramento River and down the Delta, stopping at little river towns, distracting ourselves from the sadness at the center of our lives.
On Monday morning I cut one of the butter creams into six tiny pieces and fed it to Dad piece by piece.
"How was it?" I asked when he finished.
He leaned back, his face looking beatific. "That was wonderful!"
I fed him another butter cream when I came that afternoon. By Tuesday afternoon, he had lost interest in the chocolate.
Dad died three weeks after I returned to Philadelphia. When I look back on that sad and difficult week, I am grateful for that last gift he gave me. He could have wished for one more hike in his beloved Sierras, but that had been unattainable for years. He could have wished to have one more audience charmed and enthralled with his wit and the force of his delivery, but now we had to strain to understand his mushy speech. No, Dad was ever a practical person, wedded to the present and the possible. He had figured out an experience he'd love to have one last time, then cajoled and charmed me into giving it to him. I gave my father one last taste of chocolate.
* * *
Biographical
Note:
Patricia (Patty) Zita Krisch grew up in Sacramento, California, and
lived for many years in Chicago and for more years in suburban
Philadelphia. She is currently completing a book, A House Alive with
Words,
about a cohort of boys living in a residential A Better Chance program
to prepare for college. In an earlier time in her life she worked as a
demographer studying metropolitan population patterns and taught
college sociology classes. She has been a member of Virginia Newlin’s
autobiographical writing workshop class for thirteen years and wrote a
memoir about her mother, The Solace of Clothes. She also
writes occasional autobiographical pieces of which this is one. For more or Patty's
stories which have appeared in our pages, see our Author Index
Prose A-K.
