The Recliner, Part 2

“May 10^th, 1940: We were awakened in the middle of the night to Nazi planes flying over head. They knocked out most of the Belgian air force before they got any planes off the ground.”

All eyes turned to Dad. I was proud and impressed by his authoritative tone, as if he had spent May 1940 in Belgium as a war correspondent instead of an eleven-year-old boy. Now his sisters would cede the floor to their little brother who had finally stopped looking down to his fidgety hands. Dad looked around the room face to face, eye to eye, and continued.

“Everyone, all the neighbors, wanted to escape to France. No one wanted to live under the Nazis. The Belgians still hated the Germans since the First World War. We thought the French could hold out and we’d be safe there. Aunt Mathilde instructed us to pack a home-made rucksack.” Uncle Hugo had been arrested by the Belgian police a day or two before. There was no telling when he’d be released. The group of six — Dad, his two sisters, two cousins, and aunt — hastily left by foot and shared turns pushing provisions on their one bicycle.[1]

Public domain photo downloaded from Wikipedia, Belgian civilians fleeing westwards away from the advancing German army, 12 May 1940

They walked, and they walked. Dad described machine gun fire, British and Nazi planes shooting at each other overhead, planes dropping, and sometimes airmen parachuting down to the ground. Dad watched nuns hold up their rosaries and pray out loud for God’s protection from the bullets being shot at them. And there were those untrained terrified French soldiers who sprinted for an air raid shelter displacing Belgian civilians. The cowards never even fired!

At the Ypres River, just before they were to cross into safety, Dad picked up a leaflet the Nazis had dropped from a plane. It showed the defeated armed forces: Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and England. The Germans were in control. Return to your homes, said the leaflet, as did the Nazi soldiers who were escorting the captured French and Belgian troops to POW camps. Dad hoped it was all propaganda. They were so close. But no, King Leopold had surrendered. Aunt Mathilde made them turn around and begin the march back to Mechelen.

Dad remembered all this so clearly! Sometimes Aunt Hilda would ask Dad the name of the town where they slept in the hayloft that could have burned down, or the barn where the Nazi soldiers poked pitchforks through the hay looking for escapees. Sometimes Aunt Lucie would ask Dad to comment on an assertion: “The Nazis weren’t vicious in the beginning. Remember, they tried to serve us a cup of coffee. But I, I would take nothing from the Nazis.” Dad wouldn’t either. Aunt Lucie said Dad should have been a historian.

Back in Berkeley, Dad’s bank had logged me out of his account due to inactivity. How much change Dad had seen. His once prodigious memory reduced to “I don’t know.” What would Dad have said back in the day if he’d received $1307 for his Kindertransport experiences? While I was sure he would have cashed the check, it was hard to imagine that he would have felt the sum generous compensation.

A week later, I was back in Rochester. After a hospital stay for COVID pneumonia, Dad was in rehab. A social worker walked in and introduced herself. I wasn’t sure if Dad could hear her. I’d been repeating things all day long. Though Beth, as she introduced herself, had a lovely smile of perfect teeth, she was using a library voice, when Dad needed a football announcer with a megaphone.

Beth said that they were ready to discharge Dad from rehab. They wanted to keep his lungs healthy, and it seemed like Dad hadn’t been doing a good job with the nebulizer and various inhalers prior to his hospitalization. He needed help. I knew this to be true. I also knew my sister was very upset about this and had tried to talk Dad into moving to assisted living several weeks earlier. Now Beth mentioned assisted living again. There, Dad would have a nurse helping with his meds. Perhaps that would reduce the number of times he needed to come to the hospital. This past hospitalization had been Dad’s third in less than three months.

I repeated to Dad (very loudly and looking straight into his face) what Beth said about assisted living, medication management, and keeping his lungs healthy. I asked him if he understood. He nodded yes. Beth handed me a stack of papers to complete. Dad signed the forms.

Once Dad had signed, Beth moved on to the next topic. The moving date: I needed to start work on this NOW because Dad would be released in a day or two! We would need go through Dad’s things and winnow them down because the new unit would be SMALL! No, assisted living didn’t help with moves, even if it was from an adjacent building. Many families did it themselves. Maybe someone would know a good mover: I should ask around.

I suddenly felt overwhelmed. Dad was in no position to orchestrate this move. I didn’t see me and my sister, with additional assistance from my daughter and cousin who had also come to town, moving Dad’s bed, recliner, TV, and other large items by ourselves. Plus, there was the artwork on the walls, things my mother had collected over decades. That would need to come down, be moved, and put back up. My feelings about the downward slide of Dad’s health, and what else I might have to face in the coming months, would have to wait until after this move.

After several phone calls, I agreed to meet a woman named Francine the following morning to size up Dad’s stuff for the move. Francine had a cottage industry helping seniors downsize and move. Francine studied Dad’s hulking recliner chair from afar. She squinted at it, then sat down in it and checked the action. “Lethal,” she pronounced, pointing out how Dad had jerry-rigged one of the legs to kinda-sorta stay in place. “I’m not moving this.”

I explained how this was the only chair Dad sat in, and that he would be upset if he didn’t have it. “Buy a new one,” was her response.

“Dad would not be happy about that either,” I told her. “He hates for me to buy him new things.”

“So what? You don’t want him falling out of the chair.” Francine smiled at me as if I were an idiot. Then, she gave me the name of a salesman in a nearby furniture store. “Go buy a new chair,” she said with finality.

A friend in Berkeley had recently purchased an “ejector chair” for her dad. The idea was that it gave your derriere a boost up and out. That didn’t seem like a bad idea, as I’d watched Dad struggle out of his behemoth for years. I made a note on my drive to the store to ask about ejector chairs. But I was mainly concerned with how I’d spin this purchase to Dad. Would he believe me if I told him that his chair was “unmovable?” Or would he think I couldn’t help but be a spendthrift with his money?

I also thought about this move as a new chapter in Dad’s life. Dad had lived in an independent living apartment at the Summit close to five years. Before that he’d been in Spencerport for over 60 years. Now another change. I hoped this period of “assistance” wouldn’t ignite bad memories of Dad’s chaotic childhood. I didn’t plan on offering him any platitudes about a new adventure.

“How much?” Dad asked grumpily as I showed him how to work the remote-control on the new chair. (The new chair looked so much like the old that if it hadn’t had a remote, I wouldn’t have told Dad that it was new.)

When I didn’t answer, Dad repeated himself.  

“Dad,” I said as I was being ejected from the chair. “The chair cost less than the wire transfer last month from your friends in Germany. Consider it a present for your experiences with the Nazis.”

First Dad did a downward swipe of his hand which I knew was his shorthand for, “Don’t bullshit me.” Then I saw a hint of a smile cross his face. 

Walmart offering MM-7001 Mega Motion Big Man Lunar Power Lift Recliner

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[1] A link, with a few photos, to a Brussels Times article from 2022. Thousands of Belgian civilians joined the march to France.