My Father’s Mysterious Nighttime Visitors
I’m in Baltimore visiting my dad, who’s in the hospital after a fall. He has a mild case of COVID and is weak but he’s overall in good shape considering what he’s been through and is in good spirits and undergoing various tests.
My father, for his whole life, had genius-level intelligence. In high school he could look at a math problem spanning the entire blackboard and in moments catch the mathematical error a classmate had made somewhere in the middle.
Nowadays, at the age of 83, my father couldn’t do that anymore. He is, though, still unusually intelligent. Generally completely lucid.
Today, recovering in the hospital, my dad is 90% back to himself. But he’s still 10% confused.
Today, for example, he told me that when he fell from his bed this past Thursday night, he was too weak to get up and knew he was in trouble when some people in uniform came into his room and helped him back into bed. He didn’t recognize which uniform they were wearing, he told me, but maybe they were EMTs? Or policemen? He remembers them clearly, and feels so grateful to them. On that night, at 3 AM, my father left my brother a phone message that he shouldn’t worry, he’d fallen out of bed but the emergency people came and helped him get back up.
The chronology of that night is still unclear, because at 8 AM, after we called the medical alert company, they found my father lying on the ground. Did he manage to get back into bed at 3 AM and fall again? It seems he did, since even if my father was very confused, I don’t think he would have said he was back in the bed if he wasn’t.
What is certain, though, is that NOBODY came to help my father get up. The alert company had no record of a call from my father or sending anybody to investigate. Nobody has keys to the house except us, and we were all far away.
I mentioned this story to a friend, as evidence of my father’s remaning 10% confusion.
And her response threw me for a loop: “Your father has helped many, many people and saved many lives during his lifetime. Maybe one of the people he helped came down to help HIM when HIS life was in danger?”
What do I know for sure? Not much. Except that what I know and understand will always be less than what I don’t.
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