An aide at the Veterans Administration Nursing Home where my father was cared for the last year of his life told me something that broke my heart.
My father was at the VA because he had Alzheimer’s. Earlier, when he had been fully himself, he had said many times to us he did not want to be taken to an “old folks home.” That statement had become something teased about in our family. But Alzheimer’s changed it into something much more serious. None of us could take care of him, so with heavy hearts and tears, my mother, sister and I put him in a home that wasn’t his to spend his last days.
Once when I visited him, the aide said she had found him wandering the halls after our previous visit. When she asked what he was doing, my father said, “They left me.”
That broke my heart and bothers me still. It upset me so much that I never told my sister or mother what the aide said.
I know my father’s comment came from a visceral need buried deep within him. After I became an adult, I asked my father to talk to me about his father, just to tell me the kind of person he was. My grandfather had died my senior year in high school, but I always felt I—his only grandchild for nine years—was special to him and I wanted to know more about him.
During that conversation with my father, he told me about the time his family left him behind when they moved to the next army post. My father was seven and nine years older than his siblings, and it wasn’t easy to find housing for a family with a teenage boy and younger children, so goes the family lore. He stayed with an aunt and his grandparents, who had pretty much raised him much of the time anyway.
Tears—the first I’d ever seen from him—came to his eyes when he told me about being left behind. As far as I know, there was no ill intention in leaving him behind.
But being left behind was still being left behind.
I’ve thought about this a great deal as our country finds itself in an immigration situation that is tearing families apart, putting small children not with an aunt or grandparents, but in cages watched by strangers. The damage has been done. Many of these children will not fully recover, yet many will likely still lead good, productive lives, as my father did.
In the 1970’s my father and I met a refugee from Vietnam who was starting a new business in Atlanta. He told us he had lost everything when the war forced him to flee the country. My father said, “But you have your family.” That wasn’t a platitude; that was the voice of experience. Only a few years earlier, my family had lost everything when New Orleans flooded our home. Our family had escaped unscathed and together.
My father once told my husband-to-be that he wished he could keep his girls at home forever. But his rational self knew, and pretty much accepted, that his wish wasn’t realistic. He knew that at least until Alzheimer’s stole all rationale from him. But being left behind had settled in many years before and anchored roots deep into his soul. And it stayed there.
This, I know. And this is what our misguided government is doing to the thousands of children they’ve separated from their parents.
Families belong together
For an additional perspective, you can link to my son’s comments on parent/child separation:
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