In the late fall of 1977 my father, age 92, decided to check into a nursing home. It had been suggested five or six years earlier by a physician. I use the word “suggested” loosely. Dad was ordered into a nursing home.

He had been taken to the hospital by ambulance with some sort of a digestive upset and everyone was worried about it. Before the hospital released him it was discovered that he could not walk.

The physician, whom neither my father nor I had ever seen before, immediately told my father that I was arranging for him to go into a home.

This, as you can imagine, went over like the proverbial lead balloon. Moreover it was the first I’d heard of it. I tried to talk to the physician about it, but to put it frankly, I was not permitted to talk, only to listen.

The medical man told me that dad couldn’t walk and in all probability could never walk again. When I suggested that we could get a walker, he shouted that dad was too old to learn to use a walker. Ironically dad was then a year younger than I was when I found it helpful to use a walker in getting around.

The doctor ended his tirade by shouting that there was no choice at all, dad must go into a home. I responded, without raising my voice, that there was indeed a choice and it was my father’s.

Nurses helped me get dad into my car by way of a wheelchair, I managed to get a walker and we went home. A snow storm was on the way. I managed to get dad and the walker onto the stoop and asked him to cling to the banisters until I could get back and help him into the house.

When I came back both dad and the walker had disappeared and I rushed into the house to find him calling to me to watch him running up and down the cellar steps. The walker was standing in one corner never to be used.

“Why didn’t you do that at the hospital?” I asked.

“They didn’t think I could, and you knew I could,” he said.

He never used a cane either and the older he grew the more active he became. He used to be up early in the morning walking thither and yon. The neighbors sometimes called to tell me that he had fallen, once across the railroad crossing.

At that point even my mother, then 90, urged me to get him into a nursing home and surprisingly he was now willing. We couldn’t find one in Albert Lea that suited us, so we found one out of town. I managed to visit him three times a week until the weather became better at which point I went every day.

He liked the people at the home and they liked him. But he was getting tired. They called me early in the morning and said he had developed a bad cold. I had asked about it earlier in the evening and they assured me it was nothing. He spent two or three days at the hospital and then was sent back to the nursing home.

The doctor at the nursing home told me he had been sent back too early, the congestion had not been cleared up. When I asked the doctor (the same one who had demanded dad go to a nursing home) he said that because of Medicare you could only keep a patient so long. He said that if his grandfather was as old and sick as my father he’d just let him die quietly.

At the nursing home they told me dad was no longer eating. I noticed his lips were parched and said that if he weren’t eating at least he should have water. Oh, they couldn’t do that. If they tried to give him water he’d choke. It would have to be done intravenously.

“Well do it intravenously,” I said.

No that couldn’t be done except at a hospital and the doctor didn’t want him to go to the hospital.

I stopped at the first telephone and called an ambulance. Fortunately the driver at that time was Jesse Jackson. The Jacksons and the Cruikshanks had been friends back in Nebraska for at least three generations. I met the ambulance on my way back to Albert Lea.

Dad didn’t live long after that, but he had food and water.

We had some good talks and I was with him when he went, holding my hand so tightly that his fingers had to be unclenched by a nurse when it was over.

The head of the nursing home was a kindly man, who was genuinely bewildered by my attitude.

“But you and your father both said that you didn’t want heroic methods if he became ill,” he said.

“Food and water are not heroic methods.”

I still don’t see them as heroic. I am not a religious right zealot. I think the person concerned has the right to make important decisions about his care. I don’t think any other mortal has the right to make them for him.

(Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column runs Thursday.)