Dad's back in the hospital again. Fredericka, his nurse, called me at work. "I think Mark has aspirated his oatmeal." Fredericka is my age. She's from up North--around Macon. She looks like a gypsy. She has dark hair and big eyes. She used to be over 400 pounds, but had a gastric bypass, and now is about 180. She used to work in the clinic,but started taking care of my dad in January. She's not perfect. She lost her job over some petty bit of dishonesty, but she loves my dad. As all women love my dad. She's the only one of the nurses seeing to him 24/7 who will face down my mom. , e He's failed numerous swallow studies, but has repeatedly refused a feeding tube. There has been a lot of drama around food. He desperately needs calories, but my mom feels that feeding him is too intimate and something she should do, but she doesn't. She's like an anorexic by proxy. Endless ritual accompanies the preparation of food, and meals take hours and are hours late. Battling about it, as I have done, gets him so upset he can't eat at all. So he has slowly starved. The question is--is that what he's intending to do? He's smart. Surely he knows he's killing himself. Now he's decided he wants a feeding tube. But he's too debilitated to survive the surgery to get one. So he's in the hospital. And he has aspiration pneumonia. My mom roots around his room like a mad little animal. She has a notebook and keeps a record of everyone who enters the room, and what they do and what they say. Lots of underlinings and exclamation points. She hides the book when you ask her about it. She frequently threatens to call a lawyer. Then she's appeasing and ingratiating. "I like you... you're a good nurse," she'll say. Classic splitting. I find myself filled with this constant dry heat of anger now. It feels like a dry woodstove fire. It's never gone. I can hardly say a word to her, without hearing the tone in my voice--full of contempt and weariness, and I hate myself for it. My husband, though, has proved himself a saint. He stays buoyant and kind, matter-of-fact, deals with this terrible situation. Deals with me. Has spent the night, wiping my father's ass. "We're people who love." He told me last night. He never talks like this, my Catholic school juvenile delinquent. That's my half hour.