Where's my Dad?

Well, we (my immediate family and I) went out to visit my folks over the long holiday weekend. My brother made it in as well. It was an awesome visit – all us young’uns made two dinners that we shared around the kitchen table, we all pitched in and did various chores to make their lives a little easier, and just had a really good visit.

While I have been focusing primarily on my Mom and her much more imminent, much more certain, future, I spent some extended time observing my Dad during our visit. Not because I am any less worried about Mom, but because when (not if) Mom dies in the near future, we will need to help Dad through the transition – to living alone for the first time, to living somewhere else, to meeting a whole lot of new people – etc. In my ongoing discussions with assisted living facilities in preparation for a move, I want to be able to communicate clearly what Dad’s needs and wants are.

In that process of observation, I learned that my Dad is not the same man anymore that he used to be. In some ways, that revelation is like, “Dah!!” You tend to remember your parents as they were when you were growing up, with them typically in the prime of their lives in their 30s, 40s, and perhaps 50s. With only one major exception, Dad was healthy as a horse and mentally as agile as anyone I’ve ever known while I was growing up.

Physically, he’s a shell of his former self. He’s on supplemental oxygen basically full time, and still needs to gasp for air at times. He’s at least 50 pounds lighter than his heaviest, and about that much lighter than I am at present (yes, I need a major-league diet). He’s on something like 11 different meds to help control the various maladies that have beset him.

However, most disturbing about the physical decline is the tremors in his hands. As far back as I can remember, Dad wrote long letters and other musings in his own in long-hand; he doodled incessantly; he even did crosswords and other similar games while on vacation and when he had the time.

No longer. It takes incredible effort for him to write down his BP, blood sugar, and other vital information he records daily. Forget about any writing or other manual communication. I am amazed he is even able to type correspondence on the computer, as bad as it’s gotten.

That said, the mental/emotional decline is even more disturbing. As I alluded to, Dad was extremely sharp and it was hard to pull anything over on him when I was growing up. About the only thing my Mom was ever able to really do to Dad that he didn’t catch on to was sewing the fly shut on one pair of his boxers and putting them into his drawer along with the regular laundry. When he wore that pair to work and attempted to use the urinal, apparently there was a terribly embarrassing scene in which my father had trouble locating his plumbing and spent too much time fumbling in the attempt. (Yes, I was old enough to know how embarrassing that must have been, but I was still on the floor laughing hysterically.)

At one point over the weekend, he was lamenting his age, his frailty, his inability to do much but sit around watching TV. I personally don’t begrudge him his time in retirement to sit and do nothing. He has earned it. But he’s not enjoying it. He’s worried about Mom, about himself, about us – his children (my wife included in that category) and grandson.

I’m sure, in the back of his mind, he remembers his Mother, my Grandmother. She had Alzheimer’s, no doubt, though they didn’t call it that back then. Bad. She lived many years with it, right into that end stages where she barely recognized family. I know, I remember visiting her.

He doesn’t want to go there, probably because he knows he won’t know or remember if it comes to that. And he doesn’t want to be a “burden”.

I don’t want him to go there either. Not because he’ll become a “burden”; not at all. He provided for all of us well, and I count much of what I am to what he and Mom instilled during all those patient years of my childhood. For good, and bad. And I will do my best to provide for him at this stage in his life.

No, I don’t want him to go there for purely selfish reasons. Let me explain my reasoning - as a child under normal conditions, we put our parents up on a pedestal, with something approaching godlike status. In my Dad’s case, I looked up to his physical strength, his mental strength and agility, and his intellect – and I wanted to be like him. He was, and remains, my role model.

Watching all those things I admire fade – that’s what’s scary. If he is my role model - by definition, showing me a likely path I will take due to similarities in genetics and approach in this thing we call life – I’m not liking the ending.

For either of us.