Dementia Nights

"I Got Where I'm Going, and Now I'm Resting"

He always wanted that to be his epitaph.  If you knew about his life - no dramatic hardships, but all the career setbacks, all the family difficulties, all the financial anxieties, a few years of retirement that turned into caring for my mother during her illness, then falling almost immediately into his own - if you knew about that, you'd understand.

Unfortunately there's no room for an epitaph on the urn or the facing of the niche.  So this post will have to stand in for it.

We got him home.  The rest of the trip was uneventful.  I didn't wind up buying him a beer - sorry, Al B., but that'll have to come later, when it's warmer.  I did take him to a couple of magazine stands.  You couldn't possibly pass up a visit to a magazine stand.  When he was putting out his magazines, he'd stop into every magazine stand and candy store he could find and ask the owner what was selling and why.

Another story: one Saturday afternoon in the early 70's, my parents and I were taking one of our regular family walks on Broadway.  The magazine business was going south at that point and my father was very concerned.  For some reason we'd gotten into a discussion about how the magazine consignment business worked.  I'm not sure if this is still the case, but at the time, the magazine distributor was on the hook for all the magazines that went to the newsstand.  The distributor bought them outright - on consignment - from the publisher.  Then, week after week, the distributor would pull the magazines that hadn't sold off the newsstand racks, send them back to the publisher, and collect a refund.  If a magazine wasn't returned, the publisher kept the money.  That was true whether the magazine had actually been sold, or if it had been damaged or stolen.  From the publisher's perspective, a theft was as good as a sale.

My father, in his frustration over the crashing sales figures, pointed this out.  "That's the trouble with kids today," he said, loudly.  "They don't steal enough magazines."

Right at that instant, a very proper-looking elderly woman passed us going in the other direction.  She heard this, was startled, then, until she was more than a block away, kept turning around to glare at him.

So today he and I went over to Hudson News to see what was on display and what people were buying.

Then I walked him through Penn Station.  I made it a point to go through the Long Island Rail Road waiting area - small tribute to all those years when he commuted out to Atlantic Beach during the summer when I was growing up.

I got slightly concerned again during our two short subway trips.  The station at Times Square was full of the NYPD's black-suited death squads (a technical term that a friend who's a former NYPD lieutenant sometimes uses).  But no one paid us any attention.  We stopped briefly at Grand Central, then boarded the Metro North train to Woodlawn.  A few last images on the way: when we came aboveground at 96th Street, we immediately rolled past Mt. Sinai Hospital, and I thought about watching the trains from a window on 11 Center that Monday afternoon when we brought my mother there two weeks before she died.  Then, a few minutes later, we rolled out of Manhattan for good and into the Bronx (fitting - he lived in the Bronx 'til he was four) and I caught a glimpse of the Polo Grounds Towers and remembered his telling us about all the time he'd spent at the Polo Grounds.  There was 1933, when he was 11 and the Giants won the pennant, and 1934, when he was 12 and they didn't ("Do you think Bill Terry is crying tonight?" my grandfather asked him).  And there were all the afternoons when he was a reporter and he and the other guys in the newsroom would blow off work and head up there for day games.  Toward the end of one of them, they left early and came back to the office and were greeted with a note from the chairman, Louis Fairchild.  "Thought you gentlemen would like to know the Giants won it on an infield hit in the bottom of the ninth."  He'd been sitting a few rows behind them the whole time.

From the Woodlawn Metro North station, it takes just a couple of minutes to walk through the cemetery gates and into the office.  That's what I did.  And then it was back into formalities - more documents to be signed, the certificate of cremation to be handed over.  Finally I gave them custody of my father - handed over the canvas bag, actually - so they could transfer him (decant him?) into the permanent urn.

The sales representative - a slightly nervous, well meaning guy who used to sell insurance - drove us over to the mausoleum.  It's nice, but different - open air, with a bit of traffic noise.  That's OK - my parents were urban people.  The staff had set up chairs in case I brought friends or family with me (I didn't).  They set up the two urns - my father's and my mothers - on a small table, and I stood with them for a couple of minutes.  Then they placed them in the niches and I stood with them a little longer.  Then I gave the nod to tell them I was done.  I didn't want to linger.  This wasn't really a contemplative event - not with the granite removed, and the sales rep and the groundskeepers standing off to one side, freezing.  They would have given me as much time as I needed, but it didn't feel right to press.  Come the spring, or the summer, when the engraving is in place, I might take a trip up there when it's just me, and spend some time by myself.  It'll be a nice walk from the Jerome Avenue gate, once the trees are all in bloom again.

I shook hands, and thanked them, and then walked down to the gate and took the Number 4 train into Manhattan.  I rode with a bunch of loud junior high school kids who'd just gotten out of class.  That's as it should be.  Life is for the living. 

And that's that.  Seven years, one month and five days after my mother died and I became his caregiver, I helped him get where he needed to be.  He got where he's going, and now he's resting.

To paraphrase Eisenhower - I always liked the directness of his communiques - the mission of this allied force was fulfilled at 1429 hours local time, March 3, 2010.

Now I'm back on Amtrak, just north of Baltimore and ready to be done.

Thanks yet again to all of you who decided to travel along with us.

I'll be back in a couple of days with some thoughts about where we might go from here.

Northbound

Aboard Amtrak Train 86 now, between Wilmington and Philadelphia.  He's in the luggage rack, under my coat.

A story he liked to tell: when I was very small, maybe a year or two old, he took me to a Memorial Day parade, back when they still had those.  It was very cold but I wanted to stay, and eventually he put me inside his coat.  I have a trace memory of this.

Another story: I was a colicky baby and kept my parents up all night for six weeks running.  One morning my father staggered into his office building, after spending the night walking me up and down.  The woman who ran the newsstand in the lobby asked him what was wrong, and he explained.

She looked at him in that steely East European way and said, "Now you carry him around.  Later he carry you around."  He always liked telling that.

At the risk of repeating: It's all unremarkable.  It happens. Someday I'll get carried around again.

I brought him through the Metro this morning and through Union Station and onto the train with no problems.  There was a very enthusiastic Yellow Labrador attached to an Amtrak police officer sniffing the passengers, but it was interested in explosives, not cadavers, and anyway, ashes aren't a cadaver.  So it sniffed and went on, and I stood in line for a few more minutes wondering idly how many laws I'd already broken.

Leaving Philadelphia now.  Lots of stories there.  Actually, lots of stories up and down the Northeast Corridor, or the Pennsylvania Railroad right-of-way, as it used to be called.  Trains were a big thing in my father's life.  Again, this is nothing unusual.  If you were of his generation you lived with trains, the way we live with cars.

Still, a few impressions: there were, first of all, his wartime years.  I wonder how many times he passed through Union Station.  He went into the Coast Guard in the spring of 1943, and he was assigned to headquarters in Washington a year later.  From then 'til the end of the war he commuted to New York every weekend to visit his parents.  The way he described it, the travel was always an adventure.  The trains were jammed with servicemen.  Freight had priority over passengers - war materiel had to get through, so every time a freight was in a position to overtake, the passenger train was pulled onto a siding and sat there.  The New York to Washington trip could easily take all night.

Stories: there was the night (I think I've mentioned it before) when he rode all the way to Washington in the baggage car, sitting on a coffin.  There were no seats but it was the last train of the night and a couple of Pennsylvania railroadmen took pity on him.  He was a little self-conscious, but they all decided together that he had to sit somewhere, and the guy in the coffin probably wouldn't mind.  They talked trains all night.  Once again, I could do something with the irony of this but won't.  The dead have to move somehow, and trains were efficient then and they still are, and I wasn't going to do the cemetery day trip by car, so here he is and here we are.

Then there was the night the train was boarding at Pennsylvania Station in New York, and there wasn't a seat to be had anywhere.  From the back of the car comes a loud, official-sounding voice: "The next stop on this train will be BALTIMORE, BALTIMORE!"  Half the passengers in the car scramble out of their seats and pile onto the platform.  The train starts moving.  The guy who shouted strolls down the aisle.  Turns out he's not a conductor, and he has nothing to do with the railroad.  He's a serviceman who wanted a seat.  He finds an empty one, settles down, opens his newspaper and has a nice, comfortable, relaxing trip all the way to Washington.

There was a Friday afternoon at Penn Station when my father introduced his friend Nevin Fiddler to his parents.  Fiddler was a talented Midwestern newspaper and communications guy who'd joined the Coast Guard PR unit.  He was a little more experienced than my father, and so he was one of the people who taught my father the trade.  They wound up rooming together at a boarding house on 14th Street and Rhode Island Avenue.  One night, during one of those wee-hours discussions (bull sessions, they called them) that people had during the war, Fiddler asked my father in all sincerity, "Bud, tell me - why are all Jews communists?"  My father, instead of taking offense, realized that he was probably the first Jew Fiddler had ever met.  He spent the rest of the night explaining why all Jews weren't, in fact, communists.  A little later, he invited Fiddler to New York to meet his parents - including his father, who had famously declared, "No Jew can ever be your enemy and no Christian can be your friend."  My grandfather and Fiddler hit it off right away and spent the bulk of the weekend drinking and playing cards.  It was one of those small wartime breakthroughs you may have heard about.  The train helped make it happen and my father did, too...

Now through Trenton...

Philadelphia was big in the family history.  My father's mother's family was from Philadelphia, so his parents would make regular train trips down to 30th Street Station.  More often than not these got out of hand.  There was heavy drinking and mental imbalance on both sides of the family - the way you expressed this was to say that these were colorful people - but my grandmother's people had a slight lead in this regard.  There are many stories, but the one that comes to mind - one of my father's favorites - is Jimmy's funeral.  Jimmy was my grandmother's much older brother.  He was a big personality and he touched many people and to hear my father tell it, they all trooped into Philadelphia to pay last respects.

As he was sitting in the packed funeral home, waiting for the service to begin, a female relative he'd never seen before elbowed my father in the ribs.

"Eh!" she whispered.  "It's not Jimmy in the box!"

My father looked at her.  "Well," he said, "the guy in the box - is he dead?"

She blinked at him.  "Is he dead?  Yes, of course," she said.

"Then do you think either of them is really going to complain?" he asked.

While this conversation takes place, they're all sitting in the funeral home and the funeral isn't starting.  The reason for this is that, at roughly the same time that the female relative was getting agitated about whether this was or wasn't Jimmy, the funeral director had pulled my grandfather aside.

"I'm not sure how to tell you this," the funeral director said, "but we're going to need someone to guarantee the payment."

"What do you mean, guarantee the payment?" my grandfather asked in that rolling basso of his.

"No one has done that," said the funeral director.  "And without a guarantee, we're not going to be able to go forward."

A couple of hours later, there was my grandfather, pacing up and down the length of the platform at 30th Street, muttering to himself, "Guarantee the payment!  Guarantee the payment!"

My father paced next to him, saying, "Calm down, Dad.  Calm down, Dad," over and over.

"I didn't marry a woman," my grandfather said.  "I married a goddamn institution!"

Of course I wasn't there, but I can still hear my father acting it all out - our previous train-based funeral.  We brushed by it this morning on the way to our own.

More trains.  Flash forward a generation.  My wife's family is also from Philadelphia, and in the spring of 2002, my parents took the train down on a Sunday morning to attend my in-law's 50th anniversary brunch.  It was the last trip they took together before my mother had her final illness and everything came apart.  They had an extremely nice time that lasted all the way to the return trip, when my wife and I joined them and I managed to smack my father in the head with the door to the overhead baggage compartment...

Flash forward again, and there's my two years commuting by train from Washington to New York every week - 2007 'til 2009, all Alzheimer's management and blinding fatigue.

And now here we are in Metropark.

There's a processional quality to this morning's trip - something funerary, for me privately, at least.  There's a good slow reflective rhythm to it.  For everybody else, it's just another Amtrak ride.  Or maybe not.  You never know what baggage people are carrying.

I guess the stories add up to sort of a wake.  Wakes are a good thing.  It occurred to me that maybe, when we get to New York, I ought to take him out for a beer.  But maybe we'll just travel straight through.

It's nice to have all this pass in review but the important thing is that he's nearly back where he belongs.

Going Home

On October 29 I brought him from New York to the DC suburbs.  Tomorrow I'll take him home.  Paperwork is in order and train reservations are set.  I have a nagging concern that Amtrak security won't be enthusiastic about ashes, but I'm told the cremation certificate will get me through.  We'll see.

Technology permitting, I'll post tomorrow on the trip to New York, and again on the trip back.

We're nearly there.

Lost Dad? Of Course Not - He's Right There, Next to the Tax Returns

Finally a mostly normal week.  No crises, no funeral arrangements.  Instead, a full slate of work assignments and household tasks.  It's amazingly disorienting.

We're not totally finished with unreality, though.  I've also had a week-long back-and-forth with the brokerage, that spilled over into a series of discussions with the elderlawyer and the accountant.  The brokerage sent me a set of forms and instructions so I can take full control of my father's assets - necessary so I can pay his funeral expenses, the final nursing home bill, and a decent (I hope) sum to E, his old NY home health aide, who earned it.  The forms looked strange and the instructions didn't make sense - because, as it turns out, they were completely wrong.  I can't roll over the IRA - I need to move it into a new beneficiary IRA account.  And I'm not trying to open a trust - I'm trying to terminate a trust, according to the terms of the trust agreement, which the brokerage has but didn't bother to review.

At one point I got so confused - and I hadn't yet heard from any of my professional friends - that I pulled out my own copies of the trust agreement and the will, and sat down at my desk to read them against each other.  I spent about 20 minutes doing this - taking detailed notes and also glancing at four or five e-mails - before I looked over at my filing cabinet and realized I'd left the top drawer open.  And there was my father, all packed up in his temporary cardboard urn that's wrapped in the green canvas "dignity" bag.  It was a moment of complete disconnect.  I'd been preoccupied when I opened the drawer and didn't look at the left side of it.  And over the course of my desk work I stayed focused on the documents and the brokerage and the expenses and the lawyer, not him.  And suddenly, there he was, sitting on top of a few copies of a magazine article I'd once written (he didn't like the fake names I'd used for my sources and was angry I hadn't let him edit it) and next to a vertical file of tax returns.  Fortunately the cats were elsewhere and hadn't gone to investigate him yet.

I immediately packed up the will and the trust agreement and closed up the drawer, and reminded myself that we really, really need to get him to the cemetery.  It may be that there's something to be said for closure after all.

Barring anything else unforeseen, he and I will make the trip next Wednesday.

I may post before.  I'll definitely post during and after.

Kaddish and Other Thoughts

We held the service this morning.  Thankfully it produced nothing inappropriate or mindbending.  The opposite, in fact - it did what we needed it to do.  It began to move us beyond the immediate circumstances of his death and into a different state, still transitional but suddenly at a remove from the nursing home and the Alzheimer's. 

The visual was this: my father's remains in their temporary container, a black cardboard cube ten inches high by eight inches wide by five inches deep, placed on a small round table with a big menorah (electric but strangely somehow tasteful) behind it.  A new image - my father as a sort of abstraction - the essence, not the person.  Like all radical new images, it takes its place alongside all the others and re-informs them.  Somehow, all of a sudden, the past few years seemed extremely distant, and the more distant past - when he was whole, and before I knew him - was more immediate.  For an instant I thought of the koan: "What was the face you had before your parents were born?"  My father as black monolith was a sort of answer.

The rabbi did well.  It can't be easy to make a coherent statement about someone you've never met, based only on scraps of information from a phone call.  Most can't manage it but this one did.  I'm not sure how.  Simplicity helped.  The readings were basic and essential: Psalm 23, the memorial prayer, Mourner's Kaddish.  A few comments about my father's finally coming to a place of rest (something I'll expand on a little when I get him to Woodlawn).  And a comment about his names - the fact that he was officially Barnett, preferred to be called Bud, and then there was the name that only G-d knows.  Cf. "What was your original face?", above.  The overall effect of the ceremony was quiet and in equal measure warm and austere - just right, in other words.

About Kaddish - it's a remarkable prayer, worth knowing.  A cantor I knew described it in a sentence as, "I will praise G-d no matter what."  To praise G-d - which is also to say, to praise existence - in a moment like this takes a degree of strength.  Christian friends will recognize it as The Lord's Prayer, which borrows its first two lines directly from Kaddish and parallels much of the rest.  Jesus may in fact have been praying Kaddish at that moment, or a variation on it - his audience would have recognized it.  In a different way, there's a parallel to the koan I mentioned the other day: "The great way is not difficult if you just don't pick and choose."  This experience has been about working with the whole existential package.

We took a few moments to reflect... and then, back to present reality.  Miss Pothole (earnest again and very eager that everything go right - she's really grown on me) took the container and placed it in a small green canvas bag, with handles on it and the word "Dignity" stenciled on the side.  I took it, along with the transit paperwork, and put it in the car and brought it home.  From now until March 3, my father will reside in my office, in the top drawer of my file cabinet.  It keeps him safe from the cats.  Did I say we were through with cognitive dissonance?  No, not yet, not exactly.  About urns and cats - there's a story I'll get to, from the time of my mother's funeral.  It's not what you're thinking - not nearly that bad - but it sheds some light.  There's a lot of the past yet to explore and I'll be doing that here, so stay tuned.

For the moment, though, we've arrived at a resting place.  So for the weekend at least I'm going to do that.

To close this phase - the movement from death to funeral - there's another reading.  I thought about adding it to the service but it doesn't entirely fit with the theme of accepting life in its totality - swallowing it whole, so to speak.  Still, it gets at the Alzheimer's mourning experience, which is separate from mourning the whole life, and - eleven days into the process - still doesn't seem like mourning at all.  The reading is a free translation by Joseph Campbell of a section of a Middle Kingdom Egyptian text called "A Dialogue Between a Man and His Soul,"  written around 2000 B.C.E.  It goes like this:

Death is before me today:
  like the recovery of a sick man,
  like going forth into a garden after sickness.
Death is before me today:
  like the odor of myrrh,
  like sitting under a sail in a good wind.
Death is before me today:
  like the course of a stream;
  like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.
Death is before me today:
  like the home that a man longs to see,
  after years spent as a captive.

You may have seen it before - it gets around.  Neil Gaiman even used it, memorably, in The Sandman #8, as part of an extraordinary riff that also includes the Shema, a reference to Mary Poppins, and a representation of Death as an an extroverted, high-energy Goth girl.  But to me, more than anything else I've read, it captures what the exit from Alzheimer's feels like - certainly to me, and maybe to my father, too.

More to follow.

The "Cremains" of the Day, or, Funeral Games

Two days of back-and-forth by phone and e-mail with Woodlawn Cemetery.  They offered space in their newest mausoleum - the one with waterfalls, statuary, climate control and lounges.  I was tempted to ask about guest rooms but didn't.  More on this below.

The price was astonishing.  The price at the neighboring, not-quite-so-over-the-top mausoleum was marginally less astonishing, though just by a few hundred dollars.  That's the one I picked.  The clincher wasn't price so much as location (I was right - it's a real estate thing).  At the Ultimate Mausoleum, my parents would be placed side by side... 10 feet up the wall.  At the Lesser Mausoleum, they'll be roughly at knee level.  Knee level wins it.  At least you can reach out and touch them, or at least you can touch their engraved granite facings.  That's better.  I don't want to have them out of reach.  Maybe it's also that I don't want to look up to them anymore.  But Lesser Mausoleum wins it.  I'm assured it's very nice in its own right.

About the price... without going into details, let's just say that the combined cost of the Maryland funeral and the Bronx in-urn-ment now comes to two month's stay at my father's nursing home.  Does it sound like I'm being taken for a ride?  It should, because I am.  I'm sure there's no basis in fact for most of these charges.  But what am I going to do at this stage - comparison shop?  Of course, that's what I should have done.  But until my father developed his first pneumonia in mid-January, I was operating in a different mode.  I was trying to hold onto every dollar, against the chance (remote, but still not zero) that I'd have to pay for his care all the way to his Medicaid qualification date in October 2012.  A prepaid funeral didn't exactly fit with that. 

Once he went onto hospice, it was a different story, and I should have done something.  But I was preoccupied with dental surgery and my two flus and haggling over death and God with Dr. H.  I'd actually written a note to myself to start contacting funeral homes on Monday, February 1.  But I came down with the second flu the night before, and decided to put off the research for a few days.  Then there was the blizzard and the power outage, and when my father went, he went in about eight hours, and here we are.  I tell myself it's not nearly as bad as it could be.  What if he'd outlived all his funds, and then we had to bury him?  How would we do it?  I suddenly understand why people scatter ashes, or keep them at home on the shelf.  But where would I scatter him?  West End Avenue?  I'm guessing the police would object.  The Tidal Basin, in honor of his Coast Guard years?  Can't do that, it's federal land.  The ocean?  That might work, he loved the ocean.  So if I think better of the current arrangements, the ocean is a possibility.  A nice setting, as long as the wind is right...

Woodlawn is sending its own set of contracts and authorizations.  Among other things, there's an Disinterment Affidavit for my mother.  Understandably, they don't like moving their residents around without formal permission.  And they've instructed me that, when I go up there the week after next, I'm to bring the "cremains" with me.  Yes, they actually call them "cremains" - though thankfully, they call the process an interment, not an in-urn-ment.  That's a Maryland thing.  If they'd told me to bring the "cremains" for "inurnment," I'd probably have gotten violent.

How am I feeling?  Like it's on par with our family funeral experiences.  By our standards, nothing extreme is going on.  Though I'll admit that the description of Woodlawn's deluxe option reminds me of a story my father used to tell.  Back in the 1930's, when he was a child, there was a family friend who used to visit regularly.  I don't know what the relationship was, and the visitor was supposed to have been a boring, self-involved person, but they put up with him for some reason.  One Saturday afternoon he showed up with a sheaf of blueprints, and spent a couple of hours going over them in detail.  My grandmother tried to pay attention but couldn't, and wandered off mentally to think about other things.  She was brought back to reality by the guest who said, insistently, "So what do you think?"

My grandmother tried to recover.  "It's a lovely house," she said.  "When are you moving in?"

There was a wounded cry.  "It's not a house!" the guest said.  "It's a mausoleum!"

The story came back to me at roughly the same instant that I found myself wondering whether Woodlawn's top-end facility - the one with the waterfalls - had guest rooms, too. 

Tomorrow morning my wife and I will head up to the funeral home and try to restore some dignity to the proceedings.
 

Mr. Funeral Does His Job

Finally, after all the delays, Mr. Funeral made it to the funeral home this morning.

Was greeted by Ms. Pothole, who gave me a big, cheery, over-energized "Hello!!!"  It felt like I'd fallen through a trapdoor into a bizarre subset of the hospitality industry.  She would have fit right in in a small, not-too-sophisticated public relations firm, too.

But she grew on me.  She's young and maybe she's nervous.  But I was calm and she calmed down and she turned out to be an effective guide through more than an hour's worth of paperwork.  There were contracts and authorizations and transfer certificates and schedules of charges.  About the charges - they're staggering, more than double what my mother's funeral cost in New York.  Not including the cemetery costs (more on those in a moment), the whole affair - which will involve me, my wife, my father and a rabbi - is going to run as much as a full month at the nursing home.  My father would be horrified - I can hear him demanding that we forget about the ceremony and lose the rabbi and put him in a third-class envelope and mail him to New York.  But there's a right way to do these things and that doesn't involve sending him off in a FedEx box.  So we'll do what we have to do.

Ms. Pothole was also extremely helpful in opening the negotiations with Woodlawn, the Bronx cemetery where he'll end his travels.  Like everything in New York, his interment (or "in-urn-ment," I think she called it) seems to revolve around real estate.  What would death be without a complicated property transaction?  The issue is that my mother, who's been there for seven years, is established in a small crypt in a very nice chapel, right by the Woodlawn stop on the Number 4 train.  But there are no adjoining spaces, and to get him into the same chapel would mean placing him several crypts away - down the hall, so to speak.  That doesn't work for me.  So we'll need to have her disinterred (dis-in-urned?), and moved, so that they can be placed together.  There'll be additional costs for the dis-in-urn-ment, and for removing her name from the granite facing of her old home (studio?)  And since I own the crypt (actually the only real estate in my name), Woodlawn will have to broker it for me.  Then they'll set them up in a new crypt - either in adjoining spaces or in one big one.  About that - Ms. Pothole asked whether I'd want a big urn so that their ashes could be commingled.  I was horrified, because at that instant, in some other dimension, my mother was horrified.  Privacy, dignity, autonomy, please!  It's bad enough that he's showing up next door.  I can hear her, too - "What?  You again?"

As of 5 p.m. today, I haven't heard back from Woodlawn about spaces or dates or other terms that need to be settled.  So negotiations will have to drag on into tomorrow.  Like I said, it's a New York thing.

After contracts were set, it was time for me to go downstairs and identify the body.  This is always a strange experience, but always in a different way.  In my mother's case, it was satisfying.  I'm not much for the idea of "closure," but there was a degree of it there.  She'd died a hard cancer death and what I remember about my last sight of her was how relaxed and at peace she seemed - her face had fallen out of all that pain and she looked like herself again.  My father, by contrast, looked like no one I'd ever seen before.  I took one quick glance and turned away - and then turned back again, because there was something unexpectedly striking about him.  The skin on his face had fallen and tightened, and he was overly made up, and his nose was more prominent than it had ever been in life.  He looked for all the world like one of the pharaohs you might see in a display case at one of the better art museums.  As a result, he seemed to have acquired the calm and self-possession and detachment that he struggled for all his life.  He wasn't at normal ease, he was at a sort of regal ease.  So what he gave me in that last moment wasn't closure, rather a certain opening - a whole new aspect of himself that might be a distortion, or it might have been there all along, but in either case I'll have to factor it in and work with it.

In the end, Ms. Pothole sent me off with shopping bags full of shiva candles and stationery and document folders and small prayer pamphlets.  We scheduled our miniature funeral for Friday morning at 11.

From the funeral home I drove to the nursing home one last time to pick up his belongings.  I'd already donated most of them - all his clothing, and also a table radio we'd set to a classical station (he used to love classical music, and in the nursing home it calmed him).  What was left was a shopping bag full of photographs that I'd meant to use to decorate his room.  They were family pictures, and also a portrait and a candid of my father in his Coast Guard days.  He enjoyed them in his apartment, then slowly lost the ability to recognize them (on one of my last visits, in the early fall, I had to tell him that the Coast Guard picture was of him).  I never got them hung in the nursing home - he had that very difficult transition, and soon after that he lost all his ability to connect to them.  There was one old picture of a pet cat from my childhood, and the staff put that up for a while, but he never noticed it.  I'd always wanted to wind up with those pictures and now I have them.  It's a consolation, though not a big one.

I didn't have an appointment - I just showed up unannounced - but through some sort of providence or coincidence or however you like it, I immediately ran into all the staff people I'd worked most closely with - P, and A from palliative care, and H the charge nurse.  It was very nice.  I got to thank all of them for what they'd meant to me, which is really beyond expression but you try.  P said, "Now it's Alan's time - you need to concentrate on that."  I agreed with her and I suppose she's right, but I have no idea what it means or how to go about it.  I guess I'll have to make that a project at some point.

Afterward I drove home - stopping for errands at CVS and the ATT store (life goes on). 

This afternoon there was a call from the rabbi, who seemed nice and warm and will probably be good at his impossible job, which is to eulogize someone he's never met.  I'm not sure why  but I got the sense that unlike his New York colleague, he'll probably remember to keep his cell phone off.

Now I'll wait for services on Friday, and hope that before then, Woodlawn will be willing to settle on a date so I can take him home to New York.

He Will Lie at Rest This Weekend, Near These Exciting Discounts

We made it through the Wednesday blizzard.  The lights flickered at 9:30 in the morning and that was a bad moment.  We spent the rest of the day eyeing them nervously, but the power held.  I used to enjoy snow but I've never been so happy to see clear sky.

The roads are in better condition than I would have expected, but there are still massive problems.  The funeral director called me this morning to say that Rockville Pike is OK, but their driveway is completely blocked.  Could I come in another day?  She's off this weekend, and it doesn't make sense to me to have to brief somebody else.  So I moved the appointment to next Tuesday morning.

As always, she was perky and upbeat - "Oh, that's so kind of you," she said when I suggested holding through the weekend.  Once again I felt like I was talking to her about booking a stay in a nice hotel.  She has a more-than-faint Texas accent that, combined with the cheery tone, reminded me of somebody that I couldn't quite place.  I finally realized that I was thinking about the voice of the pothole in that Geico commercial.

This made it even more unsettling when she took her customer service thing just a step, maybe, too far and said, "OK, then we'll just keep him in our cooling room so he won't..."  Mercifully, she caught herself and trailed off, but I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed.  I mean, where was she going to go with that?

"...so he won't... y'know... decompose n'junk...?"

There are times when imagination is not my friend.

In fairness, under the circumstances, there's reason to be compassionate about the local funeral industry as well.

But it seems that we're going to continue at the current pace, which means a slow walk through the ceremonials.  No choice when we're dealing with forces bigger than we are - death, snow, plowing, power companies...

The strangeness this weekend - not a different strangeness really, just an extension of the current one - will enter in when I drive past him, and past the neighboring major retailers running their Presidents Day sales, on the way to run my errands at CVS and Whole Foods.  As before, I'll try to take this as yet another way of working with the experience.

More evidence, in case it was needed, that things are just so and not otherwise.

Mourning, Sort Of

A very strange couple of days.  I have to keep reminding myself that my father died.  It isn't top of mind.  Understandable when you think about it.  There really haven't been any cues.  I didn't know 'til late Sunday night that he was in crisis.  He died just eight hours after that.  And the only interactions I've had (apart from all of your comments, of course) were the two phone calls from the nursing home, and the series of calls I made afterward to try to get the funeral set up.  I wasn't there when he died.  I hadn't seen him for nine days.  I haven't been able to get to the funeral home (and given the latest blizzard, I might not be able to get there tomorrow).  Minute by minute, I've been much more caught up in storm preparations.  Yesterday morning, like everyone in and around DC, I rushed to the grocery store and spent a couple of hours stocking up on food and supplies.  Then I hunkered down and started praying that the power would hold this time.  Wasn't there something else, too?  Oh, yeah, my father died on Monday.  Right.

Part of this is the usual way that reality refuses to conform to your cliched notions of How Things Should Be.  Part of it is also the reality of Alzheimer's.  As you know, I'm highly resistant to Alzheimer's cliches.  One that I dislike the most is the tendency to refer to Alzheimer's as "The Long Goodbye."  When you're going through it, that's not how you experience it.  It's not the slow fade of someone you recognize, it's a descent into a nightmare world where damaged cognition turns the person into something alien and grotesque.  Beyond that, you have your hands full managing the day to day realities and don't get to linger or reflect on then/now comparisons, or think in terms of your loved one's disappearing.  But after a death you realize that there's something true about it after all, and that the person with Alzheimer's disappeared when you weren't looking.  What would you normally think about after a death?  Your last conversation?  But my last real conversation with my father happened sometime in 2007, if not earlier.  Or maybe you'd think about sharing something today, like the blizzard (my father loved severe weather), and you realize that you can't.  But there's no way I could have talked to him today about the blizzard - if he were alive, and I'd tried, he wouldn't have had any idea what I was talking about.  Or you have to go break up the family home or apartment, and deal with all those memories.  But I've already done that.  By the time died he was mostly already gone.  So yes, in that sense it was a long goodbye.  I was just too busy to notice him slipping away.

So there's no reaction.  Except that there is.  At times, without warning, there are these moments of extraordinary clarity.  At one point Monday afternoon when I'd finished the phone work and the heat had come back on, I looked out onto the snow fields and had a sudden flashback to an early family trip to a Catskills resort called Grossinger's.  It was so vivid that for an instant I was actually there, at age 5, and it was all real.  An instant later I suddenly took in my whole childhood and realized that that experience and everyone and everything in it was gone.  And then that awareness vanished and I was back to thinking about how many batteries I needed to buy for my flashlights.  A little later, there was an instant when the world seemed to be swept clean and I was alone in it and in place of the burden of caregiving there was a blank-slate future that was full of possibilities.  And then there was a moment where I had a shock of mourning for my mother.  I'd never had the chance before.  When she died, I had to jump right into managing my father, who was exhausted from caring for her and registering his grief by not experiencing any and needed everything to be business-as-usual.  One morning I went up to Woodlawn for her interment, then took the subway and a crosstown bus to his apartment and spent the afternoon helping him clean out her closets and dealing with his wonderment that she'd bought so many clothes.  He was on the leading edge of his Alzheimer's symptoms then - we had to set up a new checking account for him and he had an unusually hard time following the process.  So I stepped into Alzheimer's caregiving fairly quickly after that.  The whole mourning process got deferred and it's only now starting to kick in.  I suppose there'll be more of this as I go along.

But like the earlier moment, this one was over in a second or two.  Cognitive dissonance keeps jogging you back to the present.  Even when you're focused on his death - setting up the funeral, for example, as opposed to restocking your freezer - it's mostly the weirdness that comes through.  For example, there's the funeral home.  As an ex-New Yorker, I'm used to neighborhood funeral homes.  You always knew that Riverside was there for you and you knew you could find it at 75th and Amsterdam.  But now, after I've scrambled to pick one from a list, here's the funeral director - a nice-seeming young woman who's just a touch too eager and upbeat and customer-service oriented, telling me how to find them: "You know the Best Buy?  Well, we're right next to that!"  Oh, great.  We're taking him to a big box mortuary.  Right now, as I write this, his remains are in repose somewhere between the electronics retailer and the BMW dealership.  She also told me she was confident that she'd be able to find us a rabbi "who's been plowed out."

I suppose there'll be more of that as I go along, too.

Several years ago - not long after my mother's death - I first discovered the Zen teacher and writer John Tarrant through this extraordinary article, which is about his mother's death.  Among many other things, some of them far-reaching, he describes his last conversation with her - the one in which he called her, she picked up the phone, spoke into the wrong end, couldn't figure it out, and finally threw it aside.  Her last words to him were "Bloody thing!  I never liked it!"  That reminded me instantly of my mother's funeral - the one where my father, talking compulsively as usual out of nervousness, got into an interpretive debate with the rabbi in the middle of Kaddish.  I was immediately annoyed with him - why is he destroying my reflective experience - until a few seconds later, when the rabbi's cell phone went off in the middle of the recitation.  At that point I decided that the experience wasn't going to conform to my expectations, and the fact that it was bizarre and unpredictable was a good match for my mother, who was an acute and volatile person and who probably would have gotten a kick out of it all.  That's Tarrant's point - that life works better when you aren't trying to force it to match your concepts about it.  His article is built around the koan that begins, "The great way is not difficult if you just don't pick and choose."  I was rereading it earlier today and I'm going to keep rereading it as I go through this experience, at least 'til some of the major pieces settle.  Because under any circumstances - but especially under these circumstances, with the blizzards and the impassible roads - this is all going to go its own way.  Life is like that.  Death, too.  So I'll manage as best I can, but mostly I'm going to try to stand back and let it all be. 

Because that's what it's going to do that in any case.

Barnett R. Ampolsk, 1922 - 2010

He died this morning at 6:55.

It's a blessing.  I've said that before but I need to say it again, because this time it counts.

As to the circumstances - I mentioned absurdity last night, and things continue absurd.  They always are, but the particulars are always a surprise.  Specifics, briefly: the nursing home called exactly at 7.  The sound that announced his death was the xylophone ringtone on my iPhone.  Of course I've known for years that someday I'd likely get a call announcing his death.  And the ringtone on my iPhone has been set to "xylophone" since I bought it.  But somehow I never managed to put two and two together.  So the sound of death was exceptionally upbeat and cheerful.  I have no problem with that.  Neil Gaiman would understand.  But no, nothing I would have foreseen.

As soon as I got off the phone I pulled on my coat and an enormous fur hat - the temperature in the apartment had fallen into the 20's - and sat down at the dining room table to start making funeral arrangements.  Taking notes was difficult because the ink in my pens had frozen.  Funeral arrangements are a mess because the area is still staggering in the aftermath of the blizzard.  The route to the funeral home is barely passable.  I won't be able to get there 'til Thursday to sign the cremation order, and since there's an enormous backlog of rescheduled funerals, our (very small) ceremony probably can't happen until next week.  Interment, in New York, will be later still.  I suppose it's all a throwback to our old family funerals in Russia - the ground is frozen and we'll have to wait for spring. 

There was one other notable telephone moment.  At one point, the funeral director put me on hold and I got to listen to hold music.  They play classical, not surprisingly, and at that particular moment what they were playing was a Schubert song called Der Lindenbaum - The Linden Tree.  It's the fifth song in a cycle called Winterreise - Winter Journey - which is about a young man who, rejected in love, goes wandering across an increasingly bleak winter landscape that's both real and metaphoric and winds up insane, welcomed by a figure who represents madness or death or both.  In Der Lindenbaum, the narrator speaks to the tree, and the tree speaks to him, just as he's starting out on the journey.  It sounds like a lovely, comforting song - "Come here, my friend," the tree says, "here you will find peace" - until you realize that the tree is actually inviting him to commit suicide by hanging himself from its branches.  I'm sure whoever programmed it for the funeral home thought that it was just lovely and peaceful.  I think it was an interesting choice - both for itself, and for the way it went together with the xylophone ringtone.  It made the morning that much richer.

Having resolved the funeral mechanics, and after a brief conversation with the elderlawyer (dealing with estate issues all of a sudden now, and trying to find out what paperwork has to be handled, when, by whom), I got back into bed to try to keep the cats warm.  Power came on a couple of hours later, then went out, then came on again, and now seems to be holding.  It'll take several more hours to warm up the apartment.  I'm able to write this at my computer, not on the iPhone, but I'm still in my coat and hat.

No, not the way I would have expected a solemn thing to play out.  But memorable - yes, it is that.

P was kind enough to call to check on me, and to give me particulars.  The end was sudden, but comfortable.  She saw him on Friday, and helped cut his fingernails.  He was talkative and cheerful and incoherent.  On Saturday the respiratory distress began.  On Sunday evening they stepped up the morphine, and finally gave him the "breakthrough dose" - a carry-forward of the dose that would normally be given four hours farther out.  It didn't reverse the distress but it calmed him down, and he died quietly in his sleep.  She suspects that, given the problems he'd had eating, he aspirated food, and that led to another pneumonia, and that was what killed him.

I suppose I'm grateful that the last time I saw him - a week ago Friday, before my flu - he was unusually comprehensible, and we had something resembling a conversation.  If I'd seen him last week he would have been worse again, the way he was after the first pneumonia in mid-January.  It doesn't make a huge difference but I'm glad there was some recognition at the end.

I'll have a great deal more to report - death is a labor-intensive process, especially for the living, and I'm sure there'll be fresh incidents and more to reflect on.  For the moment I'm just going to try to assimilate it all, though the temperature is still keeping me from getting at anything really profound.

I really appreciate everybody's comments over the past day or so.  I probably won't be able to respond individually for a couple of days.  But I'm grateful for everybody who decided to go on the journey with me, and especially now.  Of course I'll keep you updated.

Again - be happy for him and for us.  This is a liberation.

More soon.