Father Moves Back to the Family Home After Falling Seriously Ill

His father’s return to the family home followed a renewed illness that made his newly established life in Lübeck impossible to sustain. He came back not to the intact household of earlier years but to an empty house within the psychiatric hospital grounds, where he faced the worsening disease alone. The move brought the family’s separation, his illness, and the home’s changing purpose into the same confined space.

Causes and Circumstances

Years earlier, his father had received a grave diagnosis after passing blood in his urine. Within twenty-four hours, surgeons removed the affected kidney. He told his son that six years would have to pass before the risk of recurrence fell significantly, bringing his chance of reaching old age back to what it had been before the illness. The diagnosis, as the narrator later reflects, accelerated time and set events racing ahead.

The parents’ marriage was already under strain. With no child or dog left at home, the father’s worries and the mother’s fears had become difficult for them to bear together. The father met another woman, moved in with her and her two young children in Lübeck, while the mother eventually left for work at a hospital on Lake Maggiore. Their separation left their former home vacant; plans were even discussed to convert it into an assisted-living ward.

The Return to the Empty House

The father’s illness returned only a year after the first operation. Pain in his leg led to examinations that left no doubt that he needed another operation. Six weeks later, tiny shadows appeared on his lungs. He understood what they might mean and struggled to begin the arduous treatments: his leg was operated on, his lungs were irradiated, and he was again in hospital.

He tried to work again, but could not. Clearing out his practice was painful, and he began to experience ordinary actions as things he was doing for the last time. Though he lived with his new family, he increasingly felt like a burden. Life with the children was difficult, and the household he had only just found was not ready for his illness. His bitter decision was to leave Lübeck and return to the family home. There he sat sick and alone, in the middle of the psychiatric hospital.

The move also altered the son’s place in the story of the illness. After two months without seeing his father, he tried to conceal his shock at the change in him with a quick embrace. His father’s body had grown heavier, but its former robust fullness had given way to a weakened, diminished presence. The son remembered the father’s eyes as once capable of flooding another person with confidence and interest; the intervening months had dimmed them. The return home therefore marked not a restoration of the old family life, but the visible beginning of a more severe decline.

Pain and the Limits of Treatment

At home, the disease and its pain continued to advance. The pain seemed to move from one adjacent organ or bone to another, each new focus arriving after his father had struggled to accommodate the previous one. What had seemed an unsurpassable peak repeatedly became, in retrospect, a comparatively bearable state. Its force seemed to exceed the father’s body: it radiated through the house, reaching the son in his former bedroom and leaving him unable to find a comfortable position.

Morphine began too late. By then, the pain had become so difficult to control that enormous doses were needed; his father injected them into his swollen abdomen. The son describes the difference between trying to contain pain early and attempting to suppress it after it had grown feral. The doses that his father required would have been fatal to a healthy person, while the otherwise invisible pain became legible through his intense hunger for morphine.

When the disease reached the spine and spinal cord, his father endured a night of unbearable pain, screaming as the psychiatric patients also cried out around the house. The son repeatedly went to sit with him, but could remain only briefly before the sight of his father’s suffering overwhelmed him. The morphine produced hallucinations as well as relief from neither the ordeal nor its terror; in his delirium, his father repeatedly insisted that only a Kaldewei bathtub was any good.

Care, Reconciliation, and Aftermath

The return did not end in permanent isolation. When the father’s illness worsened again, the mother contacted their son and had already resumed contact with her former husband. Later, when the father awoke after the crisis that left him paralyzed from the chest downward, he was unexpectedly cheerful: for the first time in almost two years, he was without pain. His mother cared for him devotedly, and the son found that visits brought him to two people who seemed, against his expectations, to be lovers again—exhausted and playful, sustained by attention to one another.

That respite did not restore his father’s health. After several months, breathing became increasingly difficult; new pain gathered around his shoulders, and the morphine he still needed threatened to suppress his breathing. A life-threatening choking attack brought him back to hospital, where his mother moved in with him. The parents endured the final weeks together, away from the father’s former theories and absorbed instead in the practical labor of dying.

The move back to the family home is thus a hinge in the father’s final illness. It follows the collapse of his new household under the pressure of disease and places him alone in a home already emptied by separation. Yet the house also becomes the point from which care and intimacy return: the mother comes back into his life, and the son witnesses a relationship he had not thought possible. The return offers no cure and no recovery of the old domestic order; it changes the empty house into the setting of his parents’ late, fragile companionship.