Love One Another, or Die

The smell is what I remember the most, as the man in the white coat wheeled him from the room. When my father, Charlie Lacombe, first occupied this place he smelled of talcum powder and rosemary; he was somewhat of an amateur cook later in his life. Through the years many smells eroded the outskirts of his spacious bedroom, fresh white paint after my mother laid her open wounds against the walls, flowery potpourri, and freshly clean linens smelling of downy and old spice all folding into each other to become the smells of my childhood. The last smell, both foreign and familiar was not what I had expected. By the time my father died all the familiarity of his bedroom had faded, the paint began to chip, the potpourri was gone and the linens smelled of cheap soap and hospital food. It was in the moment he’d gone that I was left with the smells of his passing, sanitized sheets, expired baby powder and death, which is a smell indescribable. It’s a mixture of sadness and longing, beginning and ending. It changes you.



No matter how hard I try, I could never write what I feel at this moment, looking in his room. Trying eulogize the last moments of your fathers earthly life feel forced and artificial. I suppose I owe him so much more. For he had lived a life of innumerable pain and pain never leaves your soul, no matter how hard you try to forget it. But this isn’t a story about pain, his or mine, but a confession. I, Marlene Lacombe, could never have imagined that I could feel so cut off from human emotion, or that I would get to a place so desperate and lonely that I couldn’t escape from it. But I did, and none of it was easy.


No one understood it, because everyone had left me. My father, the prodigious son of a great circuit court judge, had been diagnosed with Ruliplexia one week after his sixty-fifth birthday. Ruliplexia was anything but simple, like Alzheimer’s the disease left its victims with decreased motor capacity, and caused the brain to shut down, forcing a person lose memories, even a basic understanding of their own hygiene. All this had happened to my father, but at warp speed. What would typically take eight to ten years to manifest took two years for my father. He was shutting mentally, physically and emotionally and there wasn’t anything that doctors could do about it. The options were simple but not easy: a home for the disabled or a permanent live-in caretaker. Charlie wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect of a caretaker. He was a stubborn man, workaholic and alcoholic that never spent twenty four hours in his own home, preferring to stay busy at the law firm for which he worked alongside my brother, Dan.


All the men in my father’s family had taken up work in the law and Dan was no exception, in fact, my father had planned his career even before he was born. Dad was always taking Dan to work with him, getting him involved in any school group that had some type of political interest and even before he left middle school had picked out his college for him. Not that Dan minded he was my father’s dream of a perfect child: commanding, clear, and dedicated to being a lawyer. Morals and ideals were important to both of them, but family was never high on either of their priority lists.


I, on the other hand, was more like my mother. Wanda Lacombe was a free spirit, and photographer who met my father in college at a peace rally and immediately fell in love. Charlie always said it was her spirit he fell in love with, and her tendency towards instability that scared him. By the time I was eleven, and Dan was in his first year of law school, she had been hospitalized three times. Dad made it quite clear that he felt I was going to end up in a similar position, describing my sensitive nature as ‘a character flaw that will result in depression’. He believed that women should be contained, and encouraged me to go to a community college and study history, marry and have children. That had never been my life plan and in fact I spent most of my time trying to be the opposite of what he wanted, convinced that I could prove him wrong. I wanted to be a better daughter, someone whom he didn’t need to worry about but I grew tired of trying to please him and by the end of high school stopped going to group therapy. Our relationship became increasingly strained when I decided not to go to college and become a writer full-time, I had taken a community composition class my senior year of high school and took a real liking to it. My mother nurtured this in me but upon her eighth commitment to a mental health facility, it was suggested that she should remain institutionalized permanently. My father, angry at my rebellion and distressed over the financial strain of paying for my brother’s law school tuition started becoming increasingly ill, but refused to see a doctor.


Even now I wish that I had reconciled with him. Maybe then the pain of my mother’s death would not have been so great. Almost two weeks had passed before my father contacted me with the news. I felt responsible, knowing now that perhaps some companionship other than my father would have done her good or at least kept her lucid. I keep running through these situations in my mind of how she looked, her pale skin glowing under her red velvety curls. She frequently smiled and her hands were worn from constant camera use, but at the same time they were gentle and beautiful. I have a hard time remembering her face, but her hands are etched in my memory like bullet holes. By the end, you could barely tell when she was lucid and when she was clear but the facts were that she died in September, about four weeks after my twenty-third birthday. There was no funeral, no memorial service, nothing. Charlie wanted to pretend like she was still around, it was just too painful to function without her, and we stopped talking almost entirely.


In January I got a phone message from Dan asking to speak to me. After the falling out with my father I had moved to Boon, a town about thirty miles away from where I grew up and rented a tiny apartment over the grocery store where I worked days. I had no desire to be rich, I just wanted to spend my nights writing and trying to get something published without starving. I hadn’t received a letter or phone call from anyone in the last six months so I knew when the phone call came, something big must have happened. It was a Friday and Dan came in the store while I was working the day shift. I had just been promoted to assistant manager and was still sort of reeling from the new responsibility. He showed up almost like a whisper sudden and faint. Standing in the doorway with a crooked smirk he looked at me sadly. He was wearing his favorite gray pinstripe suit, nicely pressed with his short blond hair neatly combed back. Everything about him was order as usual, but something in his eyes startled me.


“There’s a guy here to see you.” Carly, the nosy cashier I was training said, “Need me to cover?”
“Yeah, that’d be great” I muttered tentatively, “this’ll just take a few minutes.”
Walking towards him was like walking towards my father, he was the spitting image, his relaxed demeanor, concerned face, and dark eyes. I lead him into a small office in the back. “We can talk here.”
“So you work here permanently then?” he said feigning interest.
“Yeah. It’s not bad,” I feigned back, “my boss Julia’s really flexible with the schedule.”
“That’s good. Are you still writing, or whatever it is you do with your spare time?”
I nodded. I was beginning to become increasingly uncomfortable with his attempts at small talk and just tried to get to the point. “So Dan, what’s this all about? You said you really needed to talk. I doubt you came all the way down here to talk about my job.”
He paused and with jaws clenched confessed it all, “It’s Dad, Marlene. He’s not doing well. He’s sick.”
“So he finally saw a doctor, did he? What’d they say?”
“They don’t know. They don’t know what he has. That’s why I’m here.”
I laughed, “I don’t have a medical degree, Dan. What do you want me to do?’
“Come home. Come back and take care of him.”


I was flabbergasted. As Dan went on he described the illness in full, remarking on how it was my duty as his daughter to care for him while Dan got married and started his own practice in Milwaukee. It was clear that he was freaking out. He wanted me to take care of it.

“Look, I can’t do this now, Dan.” I stammered, “He doesn’t even talk to me anymore. He wants you around, your better for him right now.


“No I’m not.” He spat loudly, “He doesn’t even know what the hell is going on, and he’s delusional. Just come and see him, I just need your help Marlene. I did not sign up to babysit him.” He was clearly frustrated, and I don’t know what it was about the situation, but I pitied him. Foolishly, I let myself believe that I had been the bad daughter and that he had been the good son. That somehow this my chance to prove to my father just how much I loved him, even if he didn’t love me back. But that was just one of the many lies I told myself to keep on living.


I went and sat with Charlie, or at least a man resembling the shell of my father, and it was just as Dan described it. He could speak just fine, but thought he was on a boat, and kept calling me ‘Wanda-dear”. He was beyond delusional, sitting in his boat holding my hand, a boyish smile across his face. It was the happiest I had seem him my entire life. He was oblivious to his own pain, and was living comfortably in his delusions.


I started visiting him three days a week, so Dan could get some work done. I would stay the day with him, watching television, while he ranted about how he and my mother had infiltrated a pirate ship and stolen all their gold. It was bitterly hysterical, that my father, the rock of mental stability was fading faster than ever.
One morning I gathered enough guts to ask him the question. The one that had been looming over me for years, but I had been too afraid to ask. In a way we were both at our most vulnerable and while he was still marginally lucid, I needed an answer.


“Dad?” I spoke, almost in a whisper.
“Hmm? Shh, Wanda I am trying to watch this.”
“Dad it’s me, Marlene. It’s not mom. Mom’s not here.”
He seemed to not hear this and continued to watch the blank screen of the television set. “Dad, do you love me?”
The pause was so long I had thought maybe he hadn’t heard my question but eventually, almost like out of a movie he said, “We must love one another or die, dear. Love one another or die.”
It wasn’t an answer, but it was something, something to keep me going through the empty days where we said nothing, or when I wrote nothing. I found out later that my mother had written those words on the back of a family photograph which was tucked away in the attic. It was never clear what Dad would recall, but before he ‘left me’ he remembered that.


The days melded into each other, three days a week became four and then five until I was there almost all the time. I forgot about writing, and all I did was cook and clean for him while he ranted and drew pictures. One day, Dan called me from a payphone. He wasn’t coming home. Him and his wife, Dinah had bought tickets to Milwaukee and were leaving that night. It was my turn to deal with him.


I didn’t even fight it, because on some level I always knew that taking care of him was where I would end up. As ambitious as I had tried to be, all the things Charlie Lacombe had ever said about me I believed. I was fragile, and my mind was failing. So here I was locked up in a large empty house with my father speaking gibberish to the walls and all reason to vocally communicate just stopped. Like my mother, I had shut off all emotional capacity, to where I was like a zombie in my own body, programmed to be the loving daughter to my father I felt he probably deserved.


It was almost a year later that Dan eventually found us. It was a cold day in the middle of the week, but I had lost all track of time. I remember I was cooking oatmeal for lunch, since it was the only thing that my father, now confined to a bed, could swallow without assistance. I hadn’t washed my greasy red hair in a week, had put on a significant amount of weight and I felt so much older. So I wore sweatpants and t-shirts, no makeup and had a constant look of sleep deprivation on my face. Dan looked startled as he walked in the front door, looking just like my father used to look. I know he must have been disappointed with me. What had been a beautiful, clean white three-story house when he left was virtually in shambles. There wasn’t a stitch of art or decoration on the walls, they had given dad headaches, the stuffing had been ripped out of some of the leather chairs, the television was gone, and the dishes hadn’t been done in about two weeks, since the last time I’d taken him to the doctor. I had lost all real sense of actual time and was living in some alternate universe where everything moved slowly as if one was drifting in space. But Dan was still living in city-warped speed.


“Marlene?” he asked uncomfortably, “Marlene, are you okay?”
I stared at him for a long time before answering back, not in anger, but in curiosity. This had been one of the only interactions for me in the last year of my life.
“You’re back. Is it your turn now?” I blankly replied.
“Where is he? Is he okay? The doctor said he hasn’t shown up for his appointments lately.”
“He’s at supper.”
“What? Where?”
A smile spread wide across my face, “Not where he eats, but where he is eaten.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” and with a pause I continued, “He’s upstairs.”
Dan looked at me, really looked at me for the first time since he left, and I swear he thought I was our mother. There was a wash of longing and irritation but it passed as quickly as it came.
“I going to check on him just sit here and wait for me.”
“No.” I formed the word slowly, as Dan took the stairs up to our father’s room, “Just let us die here, just like this.”

As I write this, I am in a room with barred windows. There is a soft glow of light coming in through the space of the bars that reflects a shadow of a cross onto my bed and for once, I am at peace. I sometimes wish I could have been angry about Dan leaving me alone in that house with the delusions and the memories but I’m not, I just don’t have the room for pain in my life anymore. As mother would say, love is the only reason we’re living. My father died three weeks ago and I was there when he left the house and when Dan arranged a service but ultimately my hospitalization was my own choice. If Dad’s death had taught me anything it’s that pain is inevitable, but it’s not insurmountable.