Photo courtesy of Emily Lodish

Growing up, I had like 12 Ghanaian moms. Actually, there were four, but it seemed like more and it might as well have been 12 for how ever-present they were in my life.

They were there when I came home from school. They were there when I picked up the phone. And, perhaps most notably, they were there in the middle of the night when I returned from having oh-so-skillfully snuck out of the house, looking at me sideways and wearing floral scrubs.

My Ghanaian moms were home health care workers who had been hired to help my dad, who was sick for many years with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's Disease) and needed round-the-clock care. For those of you unfamiliar with ALS, it’s just about the worst there is. Your motor neurons slowly die, which means your muscles deteriorate until you’re paralyzed, and all the while your brain functions remain intact. It’s like having a ringside seat to your own demise, my dad would say.

So, these women had extremely important things to do in terms of my dad’s care. They needed to help him with basic tasks like eating and getting in and out of bed. And they were constantly making sure the beeps and hums coming from the various machines he was hooked up to were the good kind of beeps and hums.

But when they weren’t helping my dad, they had time on their hands. My soap operas gave way to their soap operas, which wasn’t always a welcome development. Nor was it terribly convenient to wait an hour before being able to do a load of laundry. My mother would silently seethe when she couldn’t boil an egg.

This won’t make perfect sense unless you’ve seen the layout of my house growing up, but basically there was no way they could use the upstairs bathroom without crossing into the wing that had my bedroom. I had a running tally in my mind of who breached that line and when. These days, I’m set in my solitary ways, but sometimes I think I chose to live on a busy street because I don’t know what to do without the sound of other people’s lives.

Janet was one of the aides who had been there the longest. She was down-to-earth, and extremely good at her job. There was minimal chit-chat, but we had the occasional substantial conversation, and there was always a solid feeling of security when she was around. I know my dad trusted her.

My version of going over to her house came in college when I spent the summer at a school in Ghana. When I came home wearing my batik outfit and talking about groundnut soup, she took it well, even though it was not lost on me that my plane ticket to Ghana would have been better used by her. She’d given me 24 bars of Dove soap to deliver to her husband.

So, we had encroached on one another’s territory, but we had also figured out how to live together. The circumstances were pretty exceptional, but my relationship with Janet was not especially personal. There were no fights, or unreasonable expectations. There weren’t even always words exchanged when we passed one another about the house. It was an everyday relationship that I didn’t often appreciate because it had been foisted upon me.

But when my father finally passed away nearly two years ago, after a record bout with ALS that wouldn’t have been possible without Janet, hers was one of the only faces I wanted to see.

At one point after the funeral I retreated downstairs to find her sitting in the large leather chair that someone had given us when my dad first got sick and could still sit in something that wasn’t his wheelchair.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. I knew she was referring to my dad, and blaming herself to some extent for his death. “How many times did I go in that room?”

“You did everything right,” I remember saying. Janet told me she still missed her own dad, but she had come to view mine as a father figure. She cried.

Upstairs the living room was filled with people who kind of looked like me and certainly meant well, but whom I didn’t know as well as I knew Janet. They hadn’t been around.

ODDS FACTS:

• The odds a person has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis are about 1 in 9,956 (US, 2008). According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, roughly 5,000 people in the US receive an ALS diagnosis every year.
• The odds an employed person 16 or older is a home health aide are 1 in 151.5.

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