A Down Hill Ride

If there is anything that can be considered normal with Dad's care, it's that from day to day, his care is unpredictable. Like with Forrest Gump's infamous box of chocolates, 'you never know what you're gonna get.'

I guess the most consistent aspect of life with Dad has been that it is mostly a down hill ride. When he first came to us, he walked with a cane and drove a Lincoln.  As a long-time driver for SEPTA, our local public transit authority, he loved to drive and continued to do so long after doing so was sensible. 

One day I was doing chores around the house and just happened to notice him backing the Lincoln down the drive.  Problem was, my truck was parked just 20 feet behind him.  I rushed down the drive waving my arms, somehow managing to stop him just before he played bumper cars with my grill.  I moved the truck on to the street and returned to my tasks in the house.  Some time later, I looked out and there was the Lincoln, still parked on the drive.  I went to see if he was okay.  He said, "Oh, yeah, I just didn't realize you had moved the truck already." 

Eventually, for his own safety and the good of the driving public, we convinced his doctor to keep him off the streets.  The cane morphed into a walker.  After some time we began to notice, Dad was pushing the walker forward but forgetting to move his feet along at the same pace. If you know anything about gravity, you realize this is not a good scenario, so the walker became walker-with-assistance.  Long walks got too difficult with the walker, so his favorite trips to church and Booth's Corner, a local farmers' market, became trips in a wheel chair, but he continued his walks through the house to lessen his anxiety or stretch his legs, what we affectionately termed his 'caged lion act.'  

Two years ago this month, Dad attempted to walk alone to the bathroom.  He lost his balance, fell over backward, smacking his head hard on the edge of a glass table. He spent several months in a nursing facility.  Mobility has been a major issue for him ever since. 

Today, with the help of his remote controlled electric lift chair, Dad can some times push himself up to a standing position, but just as he was forced to give up driving the Lincoln, walking has become a memory, an activity of the past.  And so the down hill ride continues.

Recently, even Dad's sitting has become less active, spending many hours each day sleeping. No requests. No conversation. No sharing of memories of days gone by.  Just the long periods of sleep, staring at the TV or into the empty space between his chair and the walls before him. 

Funny. I remember days as a young son-in-law when I thought I couldn't bare to hear another word from him.  It seemed like so much endless jabbering, bottomless pits of information about the past, his beloved hobbies, his friends, the things he'd seen and done, all words wasted on a young man too self-focused and self-centered to place on them any value or significance. 

Now his voice is mostly silent, his nervous energy gone.  Each time he speaks a half sentence or a stammering phrase, I want to reach into his heart and, by pure force of my will, pull out a memory, something to remind us both of who he is, what he's done, what role he played in the life of my wife and family.  Sometimes I succeed, in part.   But most of the stories are incomplete, incoherent, or a confused mixture of vague reality and TV land fiction.  

Like Dad, perhaps I just have to recognize that some opportunities have passed me by and are forever relegated to my past.   As it always does, time will tell.