On parent holidays.
May. 5th, 2003 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moominmollyMother's Day makes me sad and grumpy. I don't want to buy tulips. Certainly not yellow tulips. *grump*
Father's Day just makes me sad and depressed.
I knew the last Father's Day I spent with my dad was going to be the last one. He hadn't known I was going to visit, so when I went to wake him up (with a brand new bright wooly hat to replace the one he lost in England) he lit up. I sat on the bed next to him and we had a good chat. He talked about how disorienting it felt to never have any conception of what time it was. "Your mother, she decides it's 7 in the morning, and suddenly it's 7 in the morning. She decides it's dinnertime, and it's dinnertime. I don't know what to do with it!" Just like that: matter-of-fact, more open about his own internal state than I'd ever heard him be. And it must have been disorienting. I mean, here he was, completely lucid and honest. He could still speak in well-reasoned paragraphs. He knew who everybody was. He knew, when holding a pile of change in his hand, that he was holding money and that if he gave some to the cashier, the cashier would let him walk out with a Milky Way. Knowing that didn't help, though: he'd still stare at his hand, completely unable to parse what was there.
So we sat there, him under the covers in underwear, t-shirt, and new hat, and me perched on the edge of the bed in my combat boots and the leather jacket that my mom always hated and my dad always secretly dug. When I got up so he could get dressed and come downstairs to breakfast, I walked out and noticed that my thigh was a little wet. He'd wet the bed while we were chatting. While we were having an interesting, engaging discussion about his limitations. I'd really enjoyed the talk, and I could tell he had wanted to get a lot of that out, but still, seeing that splotch of urine was the most heartbreaking thing ever. Visiting him in the hospital when he couldn't move or talk was less sad than that moment.
Later that day, we drove along the coast down to Rockland. We went to the Farnsworth museum and then walked out the breakwater. Even with his new cane, Dad made it over halfway out the path, which was pretty rocky. He sat down for a rest, then, and took pictures of seagulls, while Mom and I went to the end and back. We came back and rejoined him. Somewhere, in my rubbermaid bins full of photos I have yet to sort, is a roll of pictures of rocky Maine coast taken from the Rockland breakwater and one photo of Mom holding Dad's arm while they walked back to shore.
She was never really the nursing sort. That was my dad. In her eyes, if you weren't vomiting, and there wasn't visible blood, you were probably more or less okay and it was mostly in your head. She was making Dad go outside and cook steaks on the grill pretty much up to his last hospitalization. This seemed to work for both of them: it made him feel like he was doing something, and it made her feel like he was still there. When we were heading out together to the breakwater lighthouse, she was confiding to me about how hard it was to see the splotches of blood on the walls where he'd accidentally hit his hands. Everything was making him bleed. He couldn't stop it; they couldn't talk about it. She just kept wiping them down. She was proud of what a good nurse she was being, though, and she was, in her way.
A year later, when we were cleaning up the house, one of the door mouldings still had a streak of dried blood on it that I suppose she'd failed to notice and then never had the heart to wipe off.
Father's Day just makes me sad and depressed.
I knew the last Father's Day I spent with my dad was going to be the last one. He hadn't known I was going to visit, so when I went to wake him up (with a brand new bright wooly hat to replace the one he lost in England) he lit up. I sat on the bed next to him and we had a good chat. He talked about how disorienting it felt to never have any conception of what time it was. "Your mother, she decides it's 7 in the morning, and suddenly it's 7 in the morning. She decides it's dinnertime, and it's dinnertime. I don't know what to do with it!" Just like that: matter-of-fact, more open about his own internal state than I'd ever heard him be. And it must have been disorienting. I mean, here he was, completely lucid and honest. He could still speak in well-reasoned paragraphs. He knew who everybody was. He knew, when holding a pile of change in his hand, that he was holding money and that if he gave some to the cashier, the cashier would let him walk out with a Milky Way. Knowing that didn't help, though: he'd still stare at his hand, completely unable to parse what was there.
So we sat there, him under the covers in underwear, t-shirt, and new hat, and me perched on the edge of the bed in my combat boots and the leather jacket that my mom always hated and my dad always secretly dug. When I got up so he could get dressed and come downstairs to breakfast, I walked out and noticed that my thigh was a little wet. He'd wet the bed while we were chatting. While we were having an interesting, engaging discussion about his limitations. I'd really enjoyed the talk, and I could tell he had wanted to get a lot of that out, but still, seeing that splotch of urine was the most heartbreaking thing ever. Visiting him in the hospital when he couldn't move or talk was less sad than that moment.
Later that day, we drove along the coast down to Rockland. We went to the Farnsworth museum and then walked out the breakwater. Even with his new cane, Dad made it over halfway out the path, which was pretty rocky. He sat down for a rest, then, and took pictures of seagulls, while Mom and I went to the end and back. We came back and rejoined him. Somewhere, in my rubbermaid bins full of photos I have yet to sort, is a roll of pictures of rocky Maine coast taken from the Rockland breakwater and one photo of Mom holding Dad's arm while they walked back to shore.
She was never really the nursing sort. That was my dad. In her eyes, if you weren't vomiting, and there wasn't visible blood, you were probably more or less okay and it was mostly in your head. She was making Dad go outside and cook steaks on the grill pretty much up to his last hospitalization. This seemed to work for both of them: it made him feel like he was doing something, and it made her feel like he was still there. When we were heading out together to the breakwater lighthouse, she was confiding to me about how hard it was to see the splotches of blood on the walls where he'd accidentally hit his hands. Everything was making him bleed. He couldn't stop it; they couldn't talk about it. She just kept wiping them down. She was proud of what a good nurse she was being, though, and she was, in her way.
A year later, when we were cleaning up the house, one of the door mouldings still had a streak of dried blood on it that I suppose she'd failed to notice and then never had the heart to wipe off.
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no subject
Date: 2003-05-05 09:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-05 09:37 am (UTC)I'm not happy about Father's Day, either. Getting the heck out of town for it, and that will help. I think my mom's not looking forward to Mother's Day - it makes her think of dad, not me.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-05 01:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-05 10:04 pm (UTC)"Old Man."
My Dad is an old man. Sure, I don't think of him as such. He doesn't look that much older to me than when I was a child, because Age is patient. Slow but industrious, Age feels no need to rush things, it is happy to claim you one day at a time and you won't notice the effects. (Unless you're a woman in Italy, they stay gorgeous until 39 and then jump directly from 39 years old to 80. I don't know why.) I remember my father saying he was an old man twenty something years ago. I didn't think he was old then, and I don't think he's old now. But he's 60 and a half now, and by most people's reckoning, that's the very start of "old". I like to put in that "and a half" because it sounds younger-- children do that.
But that's the problem. I said that at first I was happy that I was going to bed later than my parents. But you know what? I, for the most part, got over trying to prove my adultness to my parents years ago. On some levels they will never be able to accept me as an adult, and on some levels they'd be right. And I now see the other side of this "victory". As people get older they often swing on the pendulum back to childhood. "Now who's the adult, huh? Tell me that, Old Man!" How long before the answer stops being "we both are" and is reduced to just me? I watched Alzheimer's claim my father's father. It's a cruel disease. I was very glad that when my mother's father went, he did it quickly, quietly, and with as little fuss as possible, as was to be expected from him. I hope both of my parents go like that.
My eyes are tearing. As fœtid as they are, I wish I could blame the colossal farts I'm ripping for these tears.