Grandpa Herb’s Bedroom in 2004 and 2007, Spring Valley, Illinois.
Grandpa’s back home again. A broken hip in November meant that he had to spend Christmas at the old folks home while the rest of the family tried to carry on without him for the first time that anyone could remember. When we visited him the day before he asked me to lean in close and spoke softly, “You could pull around back near the door and we could go out there. Back home.” It took me a second to realize what he was asking me. Had it not been for his frail condition I would have thoroughly enjoyed breaking Grandpa Herb out of that place. We would of laughed the whole way back, bouncing over the hills and stopping off at his favorite bavarian restaurant for pickled herring, mounds of kraut and sausages. But it’s been years since he’s been able to move like that.
The bed he once shared with my Grandma Katherine was half-empty when I first photographed it in 2004. He was caring for her downstairs, where the long dining room table used to be. In its place a large, imposing hospital bed had been wheeled in, along with an array of instruments and hospice related items to keep her comfortable until the end. By the time I made the second picture of Grandpa’s bedroom, in 2007, the farmhouse had nearly burned to the ground. The room had to be remodeled but I was glad to notice that the bedspread was the same. Boxes of belongings now filled the closet to the left, carefully labeled and sorted by their children for the day when they’ll be taken down and passed on. My mother’s little white dog, Sophie, sniffed at a scattering of dead Japanese beetles on the floor next to the bed. No one came up here anymore. Herb was downstairs now, looked after by a rotating cast of caregivers who left notes around the house for one another like, “Turn off electric blanket if Herb is asleep.”
I didn’t go upstairs on my last visit home, earlier this month. Herb seemed tired and distant at the table as we waited for him to finish lunch. Then the caregiver strapped him into a wild-looking apparatus to help move him back to the bed. This machine, or hoist, basically picked him up and dangled his thin frame above the ground to make it easier to move him without injury. As he waited to be unhooked and placed into bed I thought about a time when we still kept cattle on the farm and how it felt to sink my feet deep into the pile of loose milled corn to fill another bucket for the morning feeding. I’d struggle with both hands to pass the bucket over the wooden divider to Herb. He stood tall in his gray coveralls, holding two full buckets in each arm. Such a strong man I thought.
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