I knew my parents were coming, and not to visit—which was often, though living on the opposite coast, not often enough—but coming to live. Forever.
To understand what a great adjustment this would mean, it helps to know that I haven’t lived within 1,000 miles of my parents since I left for college at age 18. And since being married 25 years ago, I haven’t lived with anyone besides my husband—not counting the occasional house guest, various dogs, horses, and a cat named Chaucer. Such a life has made me self-directed, increasingly set in my ways, and easily irritated by the slightest upset of my routine.
So although I love my parents immensely, and like them a great deal besides, I approached the impending convergence of our lives as I do most things: with a sense of duty and a smidgen of anxiety. I just didn’t think about it more than necessary. Of course, my lifestyle and occupation (an English professor and department chair) don’t permit much time for a lot of extra thinking. But when the long-expected call came, on day four of their five-day trek from Washington State to our home in Virginia—their new home—and my Dad said, “We’re 400 miles away, we’ll be there sometime tomorrow,” I began to think.
“Tomorrow” had been a couple of years in the making. Many families find the conversation required to plan for aging and death difficult to broach, but my father has never been one to let anything be left to chance. So a few years ago, when he retired for the final time (having worked three consecutive careers), Dad sat Mom down to plan their future—more precisely, Mom’s future in the statistically likely event that he would “go” first, as my mother puts it.
When Mom told me about their discussion, I suggested that, when that time came, she come live with us. As the only daughter, I felt more suited—my deficiencies in the nurturing department notwithstanding—than either of my brothers to have her. This is normal, I suppose. 61 percent of family caregivers are women. I never dreamed my father would consider moving them both, kit and caboodle, from the home they had built some years ago to be near their grandchildren, my brother’s kids.
But then my father had his own dream. And the next morning, during their daily walk, Dad told Mom that he wanted them to move in with my husband and me.
So they made a couple of visits, chose a scenic knoll on our land between our house and the horse barn, drew up plans for a small home that my husband would build, and construction began.
That’s how we got to the phone call. And with their coming nigh upon us, I began, finally, to think concretely. Realizing my husband and I would be at school when they arrived, it dawned on me that I should have gotten some flowers, some balloons, something to greet them. It was too late to make the 20-mile trip to Wal-Mart, especially on a school night. Perhaps a “Welcome Home” sign? But did I have any large sheets of paper? Markers? Of course not. I wandered into the garage, where my husband was making last-minute preparations for their arrival.
“Do you have any big sheets of paper?” I asked unhopefully, explaining what I wanted to do. “Do you want me to have the kids make something up tomorrow?” By “the kids,” he meant the students in his Building Trades class at the high school where he teaches.
“Could they?” I asked. He assured me they could, and I accepted gratefully a sense of relief. He called the next morning, asking me to stop by his school on the way to my school. I pulled into the parking lot to see a gargantuan six-foot tall sign painted red with white wooden letters affixed, proclaiming, HOME SWEET HOME, and a little wooden house glued under the words. My husband planned to take it home to “install” at lunchtime. It wasn’t exactly the tactful, decorous, little banner I’d had in mind, but at least it was something.
After my late afternoon class, I returned to my office to a phone message. “We’re here!” My mother’s voice said cheerily. “During the whole trip, I just wasn’t sure how I’d feel when we actually got there,” she confessed into the phone. I never imagined that my mother—the woman who never second-guesses, never looks back, but has for her entire life charged full speed ahead in every endeavor (a quality which, for better or worse, I inherited from her)—would have had any doubts. Her message continued, “But when we pulled up to the driveway,” my mother’s voice broke, ” … I saw the sign ….,” she paused, “and I knew we were home. ‘Home sweet home’.”
Even as someone whose life work centers on words, I am continually awed by the power of even the simplest words to transform a moment and, in so doing, all succeeding moments.
Karen Swallow Prior is English department chair and associate professor of English at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. She has written for sister publication Books & Culture.
