Deconstructing My Father – Part Ten
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.
Demands of the Father
“You have to come pick me up. I need to go home.” My father doesn’t ask. He demands.
How do you tell someone that they’re never going home? That the way that they have lived their life – by their choices (no matter how terrible they may be) – is over? You can no longer be independent. That you are currently in the process of regressing back to the stage where you need help eating, and bathing, and the most insulting of all; going to the bathroom? That you are basically a child and, from now on, you are going to be treated as one?
In my case you do it in a clumsy, indelicate way in a McDonald’s drive thru.
I’ve been in a meeting with my father’s financial advisor for the better part of three hours. This is step four of whothefuckknows to understand the finer details of my father’s life.
My favorite part of all of this is the fact that, to every professional who helped run my father’s life; I am a complete and total surprise.
“I had no idea he had an older son.” – The Financial Advisor
“He told me that his two young kids were at home.” – The nurse at the rehab facility.
“I didn’t write estranged next to your name. Those were his words.” – The life insurance agent.
It’s nice to know exactly where I fit in my father’s world view.
During my three hour meeting with the financial advisor the rehab facility called twice – five minutes apart. When I finally picked up the nurse on the other end seemed frazzled, “Mr. G. your father wants to speak with you.”
I’m almost forty and no one calls me Mr. G.
“I’m in a meeting. I’ll have to call you back.”
After another five minutes Ryan is calling me.
“Dad just called asking for his keys and for me to pick him up.”
For fuck sake. I took his cellphone away from him so he couldn’t do this.
“I’ll call him when I am done. Go do what you need to do. I’ll handle it.”
When I finish with the financial advisor I call the skilled nursing facility on the bluetooth thing in my car.
“You have to come pick me up. I need to go home.”
“Yeah, can I get a large Dr. Pepper and a water please? I’m not going to take you home.”
“Why not?”
“Because you are too weak to be at home by yourself and you are not remembering things correctly.”
“I need you to come up here. I can’t do this on the phone.”
“I can come up there; but it’s going to be hours from now. If I’m coming up, is there anything you want from the house?”
The drive thru attendant gives me a weird look and I shrug and mouth “sorry”.
“My car keys so I can move the truck.”
“You can’t drive and you don’t own a truck.”
“Like hell.”
“Are you talking about your silver truck?”
“NO! The white one that you’ve been driving.” He hasn’t had a white truck in close to ten years.
“You don’t own a white truck. I’m driving my car.”
“Then bring me my god damn cell phone and charger.”
“I took your cell phone. You can’t have it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because you texted Jane to bring you cigarettes and she went to your house and thought you were inside dying and broke in.”
“I don’t remember any of that.”
“I know.”
“Has anyone told him that he’s not going home?” I’m on the phone, two days later, with the social worker. I can’t exactly drop everything and run to my father’s side to assuage his concerns. He may have been an absentee father but I’ll be goddamned if I am.
“Yes. Almost every day.”
Thank fucking god. I am not qualified to walk my father through the existential dread that might accompany this sad and harsh truth.
“Even if you came up here and told him, it’s very unlikely that he’ll remember.”
The orderly, according to the social worker, may not have been able to redirect my father and used the phone call to me to pacify him. What the outcome was after that conversation is unclear to me.
My father’s health is not great; but that doesn’t mean that he is nearing the end of the line. His mother was in her 90’s when she finally passed; and she once told me that she was going to give up smoking cigarettes in favor of a corn cob pipe. Because it would piss the neighbors off.
I’m not really sure that I’m ready to play “fifty first dates” with my father about his maladies and tragedies.
Getting his life in order is enough work, reciting the story to him everyday so he can follow the bouncing ball seems like a bit much.
Travis
is that who i truly am?
