Deconstructing My Father – Part Five
Deconstructing My Father is a linear narrative about a weird point in my life – late 2018 / early 2019 (I’m not entirely sure) – where my estranged father developed dementia and I had to take over running his life and the lives of both of my little brothers. I started documenting it in a weird journal using pseudonyms for my brothers and family. It was probably the most stressful time of my life.
You should probably start with part one if you want this to make any sort of sense.
Decode. Decipher. Decide
My father’s house is a mess. It’s not quite at the level where I will end up cleaning rooms with a shovel and blow torch; but it’s not lacking in piles of things that I will eventually have to decipher. For at least the past five years my father has worn a path between the following locations in house:
- The couch in front of the television. He’s built himself a makeshift command center here. His laptop sits on the coffee table immediately in front of the couch. It’s surrounded by his cell phone, tv remotes and cheap cigars. There’s an old CB Radio on the end table – a throwback to a hobby he had when he and my mom were married. Apparently he talked one of the neighbors into climbing on top of the roof and installing an extended CB antenna. I’m sure the rest of the neighborhood was thrilled. Everything else around this “operation center”, as far as I can tell, is organized in boxes and stacks of boxes. At first blush it appears as though if it is of any importance; it can be reached from the couch.
- The kitchen. More accurately the fridge where the box wine was stored. There are pots on the stove with remnants of a meal cooked, I’m guessing, at least three days ago. There’s a plate of salmon currently in mid science experiment that I am not willing to carbon date. His pantry is stocked like a Y2K paranoid; loaded with bachelor staples like rice-a-roni and Zatarain’s red beans and rice. When I encourage Patrick to clean up the mess that our father will never get around to cleaning, and make himself some food that isn’t ordered from his car window I check the expiration date of one item: March 2012. I’m told that it wasn’t the oldest item when Patrick cleaned the pantry
- The porch, though this location has not had the frequency of visits that it once did; since it requires actually getting up from the couch. This was the closest my father came to social interaction; when he went outside to smoke. Patrick tells me that he’s given up on the pretense and just smokes in the house now. The war chest of bulk purchase swisher sweets on the side table of the command center certainly attests to that fact.
- His bedroom. I’m convinced he slept here only as a justification of, “well at least I don’t sleep on the couch.” I could probably write an entire entry just on the mental dysfunction on display here.
1400 plus square feet of suburban, 4 bedroom, 2 bath house. And he’s only stalked his way through three hundred square feet of it.
The only clean room in the house is the “guest” room. Though I can’t figure out why.
This is the physical manifestation of the data archive that is my father’s life that I now have to decode and turn into actionable, quantifiable, data points.
The only upside of this situation (if there is one to be found) is that my current career has equipped me oddly well for my task at hand. By profession I am a project manager. I take nebulous concepts and dissect them down until I have a to-do list of things that must occur to make nebulous concepts manifest. I am, by no means, attempting to apply any grandiosity to what I do for a living…it’s just fortuitous.
“Unfuck my father’s life to the point where I can run it” is too big. Too grand. You couldn’t write that on a post it, hand it to a stranger, and expect them to come out on the other side with anything less than an aneurysm; but “Find dad’s taxes” is something you can check off the list. Yes, in finding them I will undoubtedly have a thousand other questions; but it will give me answers to some basic questions and inform questions that I don’t know that I need to ask yet.
There’s a lot of big categories to this project. There’s a veritable mountain of discovery that I have to do and I think, in my poorly wired brain, that they boil down into some basic, large, overarching categories.
- Lawyer stuff
- Money stuff
- Doctor stuff
- Brother stuff
- Organize and catalog all of this.
I’m not this organized and diligent with my own life. My wife handles all of our finances and pays all of our bills. I organize my comic book collection by author. Quit looking at me like that; I am an actual grown up.
The taxes for my father and brothers, for the last few years, are in the top box on the stack closest to the couch (told you). Now I know his income, his expenses, who he banks with and a general idea of his financial situation. I make a note in my notebook of the agent at H&R Block who filed his taxes. It’s on my checklist of “calls to make.”
“When’s the last time you checked the mail?” I ask Patrick.
“I don’t have a key.” Of course he doesn’t. Yet another thing my father didn’t trust his children with. Can’t let them check the mail lest they know the mechanisms behind the curtain. I dangle the key ring I took from my father’s belongings in front of him.
“Which one is it?”
He singles out a small brass one.
We go across the street to the community mailbox. It’s brimming with mail. I’m sorting through the mail as we walk back to the house, trying to quickly identify any troubling mail. One item has a “final notice” stamped across it in red, surprises like this are something I’ve been dreading. It’s from a storage unit place in our home town.
“Dad has a storage unit?”
“He does?” Patrick is just as surprised as I am.
I open the letter in the driveway. The bill is for $64 and it’s a month overdue. Neither of us knows what is in there; but I can’t in good conscience let it get auctioned off. For all I know it could be my brother’s baby pictures or a cache of family treasures.
‘Call storage unit’ goes to the top of the list.
Great, on top of everything else, now there’s an actual mystery to solve.
Thanks a lot dad.
Asshole.
