Still giving life to his father

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Robert sits on a chair next to his father's bed. He holds his father's hand and talks to him just to talk. He tells him about the day's news, about a weekend they spent in Maine, about all the people who have come to the hospital to visit. When an aide arrives to take his father's temperature with a thermometer she has to put in his ear, Robert explains the procedures. His father motions and Robert understands. "You want some water?" he asks. The older man nods and Robert adjusts the bed and holds his father and puts a cup to his lips and says, "It's coming," as he tilts the cup so that just a tiny bit of liquid drips into his father's mouth. More than a little will make him choke and cough and struggle for breath. And he is struggling hard enough as it is.

Robert takes the cup away, wipes his father's mouth, lowers the bed and returns to holding his hand. His father closes his eyes and rests for a moment. Then he motions again and Robert repeats the procedure. He does this over and over without a bit of annoyance or weariness. He does this with such love and tenderness that it seems more sacrament than sacrifice.

Robert adjusts his father's glasses. He puts his father's hearing aids in his ears. He leans close every time his father whispers. Ray Redican wrote to me a long time ago about his son, Robert. I thought it was a father bragging, exaggerating a little, gilding the rose, so to speak. I should have trusted his words. Ray never wrote anything but the truth. He wrote about all his children and his grandchildren and about his son-in-law, Tom, whom he called his other son and whom he loved as a son. He wrote about how good they all were to him. But it was Robert he mentioned most. "Robert makes me laugh. Robert brings me the paper every morning. Robert's a nut. Robert came by to check on me. I don't know what I'd do without Robert."

I have pages of this, not entire letters about Robert, but sentences and paragraphs about him, stuck in the middle of letters about so many other things, "I don't know what I'd do without him," written over and over and over again.

I met Robert a few years ago when Ray didn't need as much caring for. Or maybe the caring for was just different then. A few years ago, Ray had more good days than bad. He was still driving and taking his lady friend "my Virginia" out to lunch and dropping off his columns at the Merrimack Journal. He was still, with a little help from his friends, independent.

But he was lonely and sometimes at night, listening to himself breathe, he was sacred. "Nights are torture," he wrote. "I am so damned sick of being sick." But then Robert would call and make him laugh or stop by even though he'd already been by. And Ray would tell me about this, in a letter, about how Robert's coming made him feel better and safer and less scared.

Robert sits now beside his father, aching to do more than sit and give him water and hold his hand. He aches to give him life. Little does he know that he already has. For all the years he came by every morning before work with the paper and coffee and a muffin, for all the times he joked when he wanted to cry, for all the times he made some silly remark instead of some serious one, he breathed life into his father. "This kid gives me a kiss on the cheek before he leaves," Ray wrote. "At times he gets as far as the door and he does it again."

Robert can't breathe life into Ray anymore. Ray is worn out. "What I worry about is how the family will cope," he wrote nine months ago. "Especially Robert. We are together so much." I watch Robert tend to his father and I think there is something holy in this, and I wonder, where did he learn such love?

Then I look at the man in the bed and I know.