As of late, I have become accustomed to a new language while caregiving my parents into their ninth decade of existence. Not the Italian they share with the nurse, but something that resembles the sound of clear-cut communication. This new role as caregiver of my cancer-riddled father has me arguing with his hubris on the benefits of allowing me to help him change into pajamas at bedtime. He is adamant not to succumb to the “plottings” of anyone other than me who tries to help. This language is externalized in jocundity too; his daily response to my greeting, “Hi, Daddy, Hi, Mommy” is “Who is that?” Admissions of appreciation are frequent: “Thank you, but why do you need to do this?”
“Because you did it for me.”
The soul expresses in nonverbal transmissions of affection too—moments of glad grace found in my parents’ hand-holding on the sofa, in bed, in the slowness in between. My senses are piqued by the content of their articulations—the thwack of the newspaper on the table after a completed crossword, the quiet rumbling of an afternoon nap, the glimmering joy in their eyes when my children visit. The sweet smell of baby powder that is familiar, a pleasant panacea on my shaking hands when on the phone with the ER doctor after one of their falls. It lingers on as I lay in my own bed in supine stillness, the ticking of my watch growing louder in the silence of my brain’s electrical outage.
A now-frequent detour on the road back to their house is a long pause at the ocean in Southampton, a service station that has become my body’s biochemical booster. The thunderous surf’s impact splits water molecules apart, knocking electrons free to attach to the oxygen and newly created energizing ions that my whole body breathes in. Ah, the lure of it! I invite its bounty of minerals to absorb into my semi-permeable skin.
Grounding in the sea, my soul hums a steady generator hum. I am ready to take on my father’s lawyerly opposing arguments, eager to succeed in getting him to stay in bed all night to avoid another fall.
But this new soul-speak is lovely too. As I arrive with charged fortitude, my mother, in quiet shorthand, intimates, “There’s our girl of the water.”
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