We're into last rounds now. Saturday, the final visit with his cousins, Harriet and Arthur. The relationships go back to... I'm not sure, at least the early 1930's, maybe earlier than that. Now they won't see each other again. Monday, the cats were taken out for boarding. He won't have cats anymore. And so on. Nothing remarkable here. There's a last time for everything, and in the course of life you come up against that. Wednesday night E will leave and won't come back. Thursday my father will walk out the door of the apartment where he's lived for 50 years. In about a month I'll walk out the door of the apartment where I grew up. Both of those events were always going to happen. The only thing that changes is that now we know the date, and - this is always surprising when concepts turn into reality - there'll be unanticipated details, like weather, and his bags not fitting into the elevator, and such. No sense in building dramas around any of it. Those are just layers of fiction ("here I am at a dramatic point in my narrative personal journey"). They drain energy and don't help. When we took my mother from the hospital to the hospice - from Mt. Sinai to Calvary if you like the symbolism - I had a moment where I realized that she'd left Manhattan for the last time. The next moment I realized the ambulance had missed the exit, and I had to spend the rest of the trip trying to get the ambulance crew turned around. My mother said something ironic about getting lost on the way to Calvary. Getting lost on the way to Calvary wasn't drama. It was, however, Zen - which is another way of saying that it was life.
But people like their dramas, which means that over the past couple of days I've gotten soundly beaten up. First there was Harriet, who told me how good my father looked - all happy and talking and petting his cats - then said, "I sure hope you know what you're doing. Because I don't think he's going to do well. In my experience people don't do well in nursing homes - sitting around staring into space..." The idea being that he's thriving in the apartment, and that I'm moving him out of the selfish desire to have him closer, and that I'm going to kill him. I took a couple of deep breaths and let her talk. There are several issues. The first is self-fulfilling prophecy - he always does better when she's around, so she doesn't see him the way he really is most of the time. Then there's the fact that she's 94 and suddenly not well and the whole idea of the nursing home is extremely threatening. Then there's her grief at losing him. It all comes out as angry self-righteousness. What am I going to do - convert her? Persuade her otherwise? Better to let it play out.
Then there's E, who's gone from grief to rage. A long speech from her the other night about how she'll never find work again, work is scarce, she went to school to come back onto this job and she never thought it would end, at least not 'til he died, she's up all night (still), her kids can't sleep, her daughter said to her the other night, "Talk to Alan, maybe something will change." I listened, then told her that nothing will change. Again, there's the same basic interpretation - I'm moving him for selfish reasons. Again it's driven by grief at the parting, and in E's case, the inability to see people or problems beyond the end of her nose. She can't be anything other than she is, and I can't really blame her for feeling the way she does. But I can't make it come out differently, either. This is a series of acts of violence and people are going to get hurt - Harriet, E, and who knows, maybe even my father. I have no idea whether I'm doing the right thing. I hope so but I can't be certain.
He seems to be getting agitated. My goal has been to shield him as much as possible, but facts get through the barriers, and he's responsive to emotional charges, and there's stuff in the air. So last night I had him on the phone for an hour, while he told me not to come up because there was snow and ice and people playing baseball and football (content was bleeding through from the television news) and he'd just found out that he didn't have to go to New York and could stay where he was the rest of his life and he had no idea that something like that was possible. Huge sense of urgency, heavily distorted language, many repeats and variations. I'd been planning to tell him again about coming to visit us in Washington but decided not to bother. Looks like I'm going to treat Thursday morning as more of a snatch-and-grab - get him downstairs into the car, fasten seatbelts and go.
Management work continues. Yesterday I picked up the nursing home contract and ran it up to the elderlawyers. Also found out what's due at signing, and spent this morning talking to the broker and the accountant about how to move the funds so everything will be covered, and in the right ways. Dr. B gave us her medication orders (extra Seroquel, no other sedatives), I've stopped the newspapers. Tomorrow I'll redirect the mail, then go up to his apartment and have dinner with him and try to get him packed. I've set the visit a little later in the hopes that he'll fall asleep, and then I can just stuff clothing into bags. It's a little like fleeing from the Gestapo but what can you do?
Tomorrow and Thursday, I'm going to try to liveblog the move. You might be interested, and it'll give me something to concentrate on other than the mayhem under my nose. Am not sure it'll work - it depends on the Typepad app for the iPhone, which I've never used before and which I've heard mixed things about. I understand it doesn't let you edit posts, so expect a lot of short, choppy entries - or, in the event of system failure, no entries at all. A lack of entries probably indicates an iPhone problem instead of anything really dire.
Thanks for all the support so far. I hope you'll come along for the ride.
Good luck and I'll be sending positive energy and Pixie Dust.
Posted by: julie | October 27, 2009 at 07:43 PM
Good luck! Looking forward to the updates, and sending you and your dad lots of good vibes.
Re: E -- absolutely, I can understand her emotional reaction. But she'll be fine. There's a great need for caregivers, and she's someone with a solid track record.
Re: Harriet. I'm really sorry about that. I didn't get hassles on that side -- mine were more "you should move him" for a couple of years before that was feasible, and some long-distance second-guessing that the place I was moving him to was not sufficiently nursing-home-y to accomodate his physical needs. It's all quite obvious from the outside, of course. But you know that you've chosen a place that's not "stare vacantly into space".
You're doing good, Alan.
Posted by: Rachel | October 28, 2009 at 09:45 AM
All the very, very best to you and to your dad as you gently apply some scissors between "before" and "after". There's no way to do it with a scalpel and surgical precision. People are involved. So many other variables are involved. It will be hard but then it will be over and other chapters of (challenges and successes) will begin.
Change is frequently a bitch, but it happens -- as you say, it's life. And it's coming for all of us. You have been and continue to be a really wonderful advocate for and carer of your father. All we can do is the best the situation allows. What we learn we don't really get to use again because the damn disease is progressive and the rules change instant by instant.
Courage my friend. You have it in spades. And your dad does, too; it is so apparent how deep through to his core he is just a very, very special gentleman.
Vaya con dios!
Respectingly,
Shu
Posted by: Shu | October 28, 2009 at 06:57 PM