I learned, in a corridor in the November, that when you tell a consultant you are a former medical student he will explain things to you properly, and that this is a monstrous thing to discover, because it means everybody else is not being told properly.
That corridor is the reason for everything that came after.
I should say what the five years actually consisted of, because “and then I became a nurse practitioner” is a sentence that covers about six thousand hours.
In the second year I did a bridging programme two evenings a week and one Saturday a month. Kes could be alone by then for about six hours if the day had gone well, and there were four occasions when it had not gone well and I left a lecture at the interval and drove home.
Then the accelerated nursing route, then licensure, then two years in a hospice as a staff nurse on nights, which is where I learned the thing I actually do for a living.
Then the nurse practitioner programme, which is the one that nearly finished me, and the board certification in hospice and palliative care, which I sat at twenty-nine in a testing centre in a retail park with a migraine.
Four years, part time, while running a household in which one adult was relearning how to hold things.
Nobody in my family knew any of it. Not one of them.
I did not hide it. I simply stopped announcing things to people who had made it clear they were not receiving.
I want to be honest about the money too, because these accounts always skip it. We were poor for four of those five years. Not romantic-poor. There were eleven months where our entire food budget was eighty dollars a week and I know that because I still have the spreadsheet.
The eleven hundred dollars my grandfather sent for the car was, in the March of the second year, the difference between having a car and not having a car, and not having a car would have ended the rehab appointments, and I have never told anybody that, including him.
And there was a night — I will put this in because leaving it out would make me a liar — in the January of the third year, when I sat on the bathroom floor at two in the morning after a bad day and worked out, in some detail, how I would go back to Wexley and reapply and how long it would take and what it would cost.
Then I went and looked at Kes asleep with his hands curled the way they were then, and I went back to bed.
I have never regretted it, and I have thought about it perhaps a hundred times, and both of those are true at once.
Kes walked with a stick by the eighteenth month. He walked without one at two years. He has permanent numbness in both feet and gets tired in a way he did not before, and he went back to work at three-quarter time in the third year and full time in the fourth.
He is thirty-eight now. He is fine. He is more than fine.
And he has said one sentence to me, twice, in eight years, both times at about two in the morning: that he does not know what would have happened to him and that he is not able to think about it.
PART 3 — AUREL
My grandfather wrote to me for four years.
I found out he was going to when a letter arrived at the Pellingham flat in the September of the first year, on paper, in fountain pen, in handwriting like a fence.
It was three lines long.
He wrote that he had heard, that he assumed the details were not what he had been given, and that if I wanted to tell him the real ones he would read them.
I wrote back six pages.
He was eighty-four then and had not practised in nineteen years. We wrote roughly every three weeks for four years and I have every one of his in a box.
He asked about Kes’s grip strength. He asked what the rehab protocol was and then told me it was better than what they had in 1978. He asked, once, whether I was eating, in a postscript, which is the only time either of us went near it.
He sent money twice. Not a great deal — eleven hundred dollars the first time and two thousand the second, both times with a note saying it was for the car and that I was not to argue.
And in the fourth year he sent his bag.
It came by courier, in a box, with no warning. A Gladstone-style leather doctor’s bag from 1961, worn down to the pale at both corners, with his initials on the plate by the handle.
The letter with it is the one that is on my wall.
It is four sentences long and I am not going to reproduce all of it, but the last sentence says: You are the only one of us who is still doing the work I actually did.
He was too ill to travel by then. He wanted me to come and I did not go, because he was in a facility six hours away and I had a man in a flat who could not yet manage a full day alone, and because I thought there would be time.
Aurel Duquette died in the March, two years ago.
I was not told.
My father gave the eulogy. Two hundred people, at the cathedral in Dunmoor, and there is an obituary that lists the family and my name is not in it.
I found out four days after the funeral, from a woman I had done a rotation with, who messaged me to say she was sorry for my loss and then, when I did not reply for an hour, messaged again to ask whether I had known.
I sat on the floor of the hallway in Pellingham for a long time.
Here is what I did not know until last Tuesday.
For four years my father told me nothing, and I assumed my grandfather had taken his side with everybody else.
For those same four years, my father told my grandfather that I refused contact. That I had cut the family off. That letters had been sent and returned.
Aurel wrote to me because he did not believe him.
But he believed enough of it to stop pushing. That is what Roman engineered — not a wall, just enough doubt in an old man to keep him from picking up a telephone.
And when Aurel died, my father made a decision about a funeral notice, and he has had two years to think about it.
PART 4 — THE FRONT ROOM
What my father walked into is not really a living room.
We have a front room and a back room, and the back one is where we live. The front one, for the last three years, has been the office of a small nonprofit that Kes and I started, and it looks like it.
There is a whiteboard. There are two desks. Along the far wall there are shelves of equipment — transfer boards, shower chairs, four-wheeled walkers, a hoist sling in a bag — because a third of what we do is a lending library, since the gap between when you need a piece of equipment and when the system gives you one is about eleven weeks.
There is a wall of photographs. Forty-one of them at the moment. Families. People at kitchen tables.
There is my certification, in a plain frame, because Kes insisted: I qualified as a nurse practitioner three years ago and I am board certified in hospice and palliative care, which took me four years of part-time study while running the caregiving side of a house.
And on the shelf at eye height, on a folded cloth, is my grandfather’s bag, with his initials on the plate, and beside it, framed, four sentences in fountain pen.
That is what my father stopped in front of.
Not the certificate. He had not got to the certificate.
