My mother, Caroline Bennett, insisted she was doing what was best for him, which is a sentence adults often use when they are trying to convince themselves as much as everyone else. She moved him into Meadowbrook Care Center, a facility that smelled faintly of antiseptic, artificial flowers, and quiet resignation.
“He needs professional care,” she explained repeatedly. “He needs stability, routine, medical supervision.”
What he needed, though nobody asked my opinion, was a reason to feel alive.
Every Tuesday and Friday, Mother dropped me off after school, and I sat beside him while he stared at photographs arranged carefully on his bedside table. There were pictures of open roads, sunlit deserts, mountain passes, and chrome gleaming under endless skies. There were pictures of his motorcycle, a midnight blue touring bike that had once carried both of us through summers I still remembered vividly.
Two months after the stroke, Mother sold the motorcycle.
“He will never ride again,” she said with finality. “Keeping it would only torture him emotionally.”