I detest that woman, my father grumbled. My father actually used that word—detest. She wasn’t a real woman, really. She was the voice of the GPS and she deprived him of his greatest pleasure in life—giving directions.

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My father took his directions very seriously—they were filled with details and out-dated facts from previous decades.

 

They went something like this:  Back out of the driveway; go to the end of the street, (which used to be a dirt road by the way, but the town finally paved it in l979), take a right where the gray house is with the white shutters.  In 100 feet, you’ll go over a
manhole; slow down. It was never installed correctly. It needs to be flush with the pavement. Drive straight. The road takes a slight dip down to a stop sign.  Take a right and on the left you’ll see a road with a maple tree.  When you get to there, don’t take that left. Go another 20 feet and take a sharp right where the yield sign is tilting at a 45 degree angle. 

​

As he got older, his directions changed—he became a storyteller.

 

Go out the driveway.  I repaved it last spring.  I got three quotes. I took the one for $1500.  You have to shovel the snow off the surface right away and not let it freeze or you get those cracks.  If you get cracks, don’t paint them over. It looks stupid. Take a right--the house on the corner used to be grey—it’s got blue aluminum siding now. It’s supposed to last for years and you never have to paint it. Your
mother and I don’t like it.  When you get to that left where the maple tree used to be, do not take it. Take the sharp right. There’s a CVS there now. What an operation. I can get everything I need there; but their receipts! Holy mother of God, it’s like a roll of toilet paper.

 

In the last few years, he became a truth teller.  

 

Do you have to pull out the driveway so fast?  Slow down for Christ’s sake. Take a right at that house that’s falling apart.  Geez, what would it take to put a fresh coat of paint on it?  Take a right at the stop sign.  Does anyone stop anymore?  I almost got run down last week.  Don’t take that left where the maple tree used to be.

 

My siblings and I loved to laugh at his directions and we each had a story that could top the other. His directions were one of the many stories we told as we gathered around his bedside in what turned out to be an all-through-the night final vigil.

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My youngest brother Jamie called on a Sunday afternoon. He’s failing. I think you should get here.

 

We were all present at the nursing home by late evening, the four surviving
siblings of six. Pulling up the frayed upholstered chairs, we formed a crescent about my father
bed.

 

His breathing was labored, but his face was smooth and still, as we settled in for a long night.

 

Our mother had gone back to their house, having sat with him at the nursing home, holding his hand, nodding and murmuring “Yes, Gene, I’m here Gene.”

 

She was exhausted
from the long day, and from the longer day before that and the day before that. How long had
this been going on? She couldn’t remember.

 

Dad had been mentally declining for years but we were all somewhat blind to it.  My ‘come to Jesus moment’ was when I lifted up his garage door to fetch a rake, hoping to make
a dent in autumn’s onslaught of leaves. I was stunned to see a mess—piles and piles of stuff. He
had always kept his garage immaculate. Nothing was ever out of place. Garden tools hanging on hooks, rakes lined up by height against the back wall, power tools pristinely wiped down and ready for use. It scared me. This is what the inside of his head must look like.

 

Jamie remembered when he took Dad to a Red Sox minor league game in Pawtucket RI . Dad kept asking “where’s the green wall, what happened to it?” Jamie kept telling him they
weren’t at Fenway Park, but he wouldn’t listen. He got angry, saying, ‘What the hell did they do
to the green wall?’

​

We laughed about it at the time. Confusion’s what happens when you get older, we said, but there had been something darker happening. Unexpected flashes of anger moved into his life.

 

I drove him to pick up new reading glasses and he lashed out at the woman assisting him. He accused her of trying to take advantage of him, charging him more and giving him the wrong
prescription. He called her a bitch. I was horrified and quickly got him out of the store and into the car. I went back in and apologized. She said, “Poor man, he has dementia.” Strangers were
seeing what we were having a hard time accepting.

 

The dementia crept in and took over. He was hostile and stubborn. My mother and Jamie took the brunt of his anger, as the three lived together in our childhood home.

 

When Michael, Joe or I visited, he would try to be on his best behavior, leaving us to wonder if things were all that bad. It took “the incident” to get us all on the same page.

 

It was the middle of the night. Jamie bolted up straight in bed, hearing shouting and pounding. Dad was awake, roaming the first floor with a hammer, yelling there was an intruder in the house. He mounted the stairs and rushed into Jamie’s room and thought Jamie was that man. My brother threw a blanket over his head and wrestled him to the ground.

 

The incident frightened my mother and plans were made to place dad in a nursing home. My father raged. My mother cried. My brother bore the brunt of it all.

 

Someone had to be the bad guy who  said ‘enough’, so Jamie raised his hand.

 

“I wanted him to still love Mom and know she was on his side”,  Jamie told us as we sat in the darkness, keeping watch, unconsciously rocking to the rhythm of his breaths.

 

I marveled at who Jamie had become, how he had shown up for my parents and held it together, for all of us.

​

I was fifteen when he was born and within three years, I was out of the house, off to school, work   building my own family. I wasn’t a part of his childhood. Most of my siblings were grown and gone by the time he was 10. He had a quiet centering presence with my parents, gently tolerating their faults. He was confident in my parent’s love in a way I struggled to be.

 

As our vigil approached midnight, my father’s breathing abruptly slowed a notch. We called the
nurse who said this was normal, a part of the dying process. She shifted his face slightly casting his profile in shadow.

 

Our parents were an attractive couple, he with bright blue eyes and my mother with her dark
wavy hair. They styled themselves after the idols of their day--he Frank Sinatra and she Loretta
Young.

 

They met in 1948 right after his release from the Army. There was a dance competition at the local VFW. They randomly matched up and claimed first prize. Their courtship was brief; he was 22 and she was 19 when they married.

 

My parents had a secret code when they danced. Dad’s back  would straighten up, his head to
the side, and with his hand firmly on my mother’s waist he would guide her through twists and turns and lingering dips.  Never looking at each other, they stared into the middle distance, letting their synced bodies swing and sway in tune.

 

At weddings they would wait for the band to play a few numbers, tapping the table for the beat to take hold, and then with a shared nod, they would rise up crisply and make their way to the dance floor. With their hands entwined, the other dancers would step back as they eased into the
center of the floor, advancing in a continuous circular motion. As kids, watching them was intoxicating.

 

Dad’s breathing continued, in a steady rhythm, and I wondered out loud if he could hear us.
 

Michael got up and sat at the foot of the bed and took his hand. “Hey, dad, remember the time you bought that snow blower? You plowed all the neighbors’ driveways. You were a wild man with that thing. Everyone loved you Dad.”

 

Joe joined Michael on the bed. “He went with me to get my driver’s license. We got home and he put the  car in park, let me slide into the driver’s seat and said; ‘now take it nice and slow and always watch out for the other guy.’ In about two minutes out of the driveway, I smashed into a
car. I did stupid things like that. I don’t know why.” Joe leaned over and stroked our father’s cheek. “Sorry I was such an asshole, Dad.”

 

Michael told a story, which we had heard many times, but we needed to hear again. Jamie drove our parents to Maine to see Michael’s construction company. My father was confused about where he was, but understood he was staying in a house Michael built and he kept telling everyone he encountered. Michael loves this part of the story and tells it well. “Holy mackerel, Dad was a walking PR machine. We’re getting dinner and he tells the waitress that his son is a big-time architect and
contractor and that his son could have built this restaurant much better than the wreck of a building it was now. He said if the waitress needed a new house she should call him. I’m like, Dad, are you trying to pick her up?”

 

Michael lowered his head into his hands and then wiped his eyes. “I’m a lucky bastard. He lived long enough to finally be proud of me.”

 

As the night wore on, we drifted into our silent reveries. I struggled to put aside the last few years of increasing dementia and outbursts. I wanted to remember the generous and kind man he was, a man who openly expressed his feelings.

 

He sobbed when our siblings John and Jean died, then buckled up and devoted himself to attending to our mother’s sorrow.

 

His love language was
doing helpful tasks, sending cards, trying to make the grandchildren laugh.

​

At the height of his dementia he insisted I take him to the grocery store. He directed me on a
route that took us in the opposite direction and then circled back via a back road. I was about to
go home, convinced I was on a fool’s run, and then we arrived at the store. We went in and he bought a card and a dozen red roses. When we pulled up to the house, he proudly walked in and presented them to our mother, smiling like a smitten young man. I took a picture of them together then, proof that he was still there despite the cloud of dementia.

 

Jamie broke the silence. “It’s been insane the last few months.” He lowered his voice. He didn’t want my father to hear the coming story.

 

“I would get here every morning with a glazed donut for Dad, because he refused to eat their breakfast. One day he tells me the residents are stealing all his things--that people come into his room at night and go through his dresser. I say, ‘okay Dad’ and I agree to talk to the
administrator, but then I notice his arm looks swollen and I rolled up his sleeve and he has five watches on his wrist. I say, where did you get those, and Dad says Oh, I found them laying around.”

 

Joe asked what the last few days were like. He, Michael and I braced for things we didn’t want to
hear.

 

“Well, one minute he’s crying, saying to me ‘I’m worried about your Mother’, and the next
minute he’s insisting I stole his money. And then, he just became, I don’t know—he went quiet. He stopped talking. It’s like he ran out of fuel.”

 

Ran out of fuel; that was something Dad never did. He had three maxims in life that he imparted to us, ‘change the oil in your car after 3,000 miles, don’t let your fuel go below a quarter of a tank and never buy a house with water in the basement.’ I had done all three things.

​

My brothers and father were now snoring in a beautiful, uncoordinated rumble of snorts and sighs as the pink light of dawn broke. I was determined to keep awake, but I soon felt my head drooping.
 

The clattering of a meal cart woke me up. How long had I slept? He made it through the night. The boys woke up. We stood and silently hugged each other and drew close to the bed. This was our wake, I said, a true Irish wake.
 

By mid-morning our mother and the elder grandchildren joined us. Our vigil ended at noon,
when my father peacefully passed away.
 

There was a simple service. Aging neighbors and long-forgotten friends came and some nuns from the local church. There were stories of his kindness, his humor and his unbridled love of my mother. Not surprisingly, everyone had a story about watching them dance. At his gravesite, I said a final blessing.
 

Dad, on this final journey, you’ll be going alone and on foot.  I have some directions for you. As you head out of the driveway, you’ll go past an old rusted blue house. You were right about that siding. Keep on walking. In a mile or so, on the right, you’ll come around a bend.

 

Watch out for that dip in the road, Dad. They never did pave it properly. Keep on walking.

 

On the left, you’ll see a path with a big beautiful maple tree.  As you get closer, you’ll catch a glimpse of the sun, shining through the leaves.

 

Take that left, Dad. It’s bringing you home.

​

 

 

Don't Take That Left Turn, a chapter from Every Irish Girl Has a Nun Story was published in The Southern Quill, 2026

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