Two months ago, my octogenarian father fell.
The old people fall. We all fall, but when old people drop a trap door opens. A broken hip can mean a broken life. We’ve been through it twice now with dad. This time, he’s five years older. Five years deeper into ill health, five more years of smoking, stress, and sadness.
Dad fell through the trap door and we went with him. Two months now in an alternate universe. We’ve toured all the floors of the hospital. He’s encountered AFib, sky high blood sugar, alarmingly low blood pressure, several infections, a gastric bleed, transfusions, and “hospital induced delirium.” Two surgeries. Two different rehab units. Two rushed trips back to the hospital. We are lost in a maze at the bottom of a hole.
He speaks of death (“I’ve had a long life, if it’s time then I’m ready”), but still has a sense of humor. Still flirts with ladies.
In the ER, the heart doctor asks, “How are you feeling right now?”
“I’m surrounded by beautiful women but I feel like shit.”
In the ICU: “I’ll remember Patsy as the woman who stole my underwear.”
Pre-surgery: “I’ll have a bacon burger.”
Post: “A hot dog and a gin and tonic.”
Fourth floor: “Get me Socrates’ phone number!”
That was before the delirium, a terrifying experience that is supposedly very common among elderly hospital patients. I suppose I’m lucky to have not known about this until now. Long, surreal days of mad tremors and convulsions. Hallucinations, garbled speech. I sit next to a twitching shell of my father and desperately try to gather myself. Is daddy dying? Should he? The suffering is relentless and brutal.
Is it sappy symbolism to point out that one of the fires died? Our main wood stove, the central hearth, broke in the midst of this high winter panic and we can’t be home long enough to get it fixed. It’s cold and the firelight is gone.
He’s back in rehab now, almost four weeks — longer than any other stay. It’s hard and depressing, but the therapy staff is great. He’s making slow, physical progress, but we still see signs of confusion, enough to keep him from going home. The delirium has changed my previously brilliant, independent father into a cognitive question mark. What will we find today? Every day.
I can’t locate myself in all this. Am I just here to carry my small but burdensome father for an unspecified amount of time, until he goes the way of his ancestors? He’s often confused and sometimes wets the bed. He is sometimes lucid, but also stares bewildered, as if he can’t locate himself. It’s heartbreaking and feels often like a weight I may not be able to bear.
Sleep is, at times, elusive. I have a nervous stomach and occasional vertigo. I wrestle with the specter of my own madness. When you love someone who is losing their mind, it’s a tiny step to am I losing mine?
I drink too much wine and watch the first episode of various unsatisfying shows. Nothing sticks. Everything seems silly and overacted, or impossible to connect with. Only One Day swallows me whole and spits me out weeping and remade. Now I just want to watch it again, but Steven isn’t interested and we can’t do anything apart. We do it all together. We’re in it together, thank the gods.
I am edgy and distracted. I do not want to talk about it, whatever it is. I wake thinking about Daddy and drift to sleep at night (if I drift at all) thinking about Daddy. He has consumed my life and I’m not happy about it. We divorce our parents and build big lives, and then the shit hits the fan and roles are flipped. Was I too distant? Have I been a good-enough daughter? Every day I think I’ll write about it, but it doesn’t come. I’ve got so much, but also nothing.
I’m unmoored, “off my pins,” as daddy used to say. Maybe this is grief, but what am I grieving? His old life? Mine? C.S. Lewis said, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” So very much like fear.
I know that my father will die and I’ve made peace with it. He’s old and unwell, it’s the natural order of things. What is nearly impossible to make peace with is the suffering. The uncertainty. Will he suffer indefinitely? Will we? Over the last two months, we’ve made funeral plans and consulted with palliative care, and I’ve bought him new pants and cleaned his apartment. We’re living, we’re dying, we’re living, we’re dying. It’s no way to live.
Today, we will meet with the rehab team to discuss what next? What next, I fear, is more of whatever this is. This gray area, this knife edge between suffering and some semblance of life. “I just want to live like a real human being,” he said. Can he? Maybe that’s what we’re doing, living like real human beings.
And so we continue. When we’re not at the hospital, or the rehab facility, or in a doctor’s office, we water the plants and play music in the dining room. We eat the leftovers and watch the show. We drag to the grocery, and to our own appointments. We drag the trash and recycling to the road. The wind blows and sometimes the sun shines. We fix the wood stove and fill it, wash the dishes and the laundry, pick up the dust bunnies gathered in the corners. We cobble together the basics of daily life and watch the season change.
The living, the dying, the suffering, and the grief. Better get at the living when you get a minute. It’s the best part.
The elephant in the room is the abysmal state of elder care in America. We are, each of us, hurtling towards the inevitable need for care in our later years, or care for our beloved elders. Every one of my midlife friends has been through it, is in the thick of it, or is hand-wringing about which card will bring the whole house down. Hospital stays that spiral out of control (as with my poor dad); rehab situations that can make things worse; independent living that tips into assisted living; the warehousing of infirm elders. Where do we put them? How do we love them and keep them safe? Who pays for it? Why is it all so fucking expensive? The system is broken badly and will not be fixed in time for any of us. We need to be creative and resilient — no easy task in the stew of midlife.
I am currently reading The Measure of Our Age by M.T. Connolly. The subtitle captures it: Navigating Care, Safety, Money, and Meaning Later in Life. It’s illuminating and depressing, I recommend it to everyone (sorry).
I also read Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande. It’s been on my shelf for years, but I didn’t want to read about such a dark subject. Turns out we all should. It’s a brilliant examination of what will be the bottom line for each of us (sorry again).
Mary Oliver’s Devotions has helped me through each day and will be worn out soon. Keep it by the bed.
I am absolutely loving Fellowship Point by
. Agnes and Polly are the best company each evening and I’m already sad that it will end.As mentioned, I absolutely loved (and was completely destroyed by) the Netflix series One Day. Thankfully, I never read the book or saw the universally panned Anne Hathaway film. I was clueless, thinking it was light viewing, which is what I thought I wanted in these trying days. Turns out, what I needed was a real story to fall into and an excuse to be wrecked by something completely outside myself. Just watch it.
Just got back from spending a week in Florida with my own aging parents and the whole time all I could think was, "My dad's going to fall and then everything will get so very much worse." He hasn't yet, but I see it around me with all my friends and their parents. It's coming and there's really no way to prepare. And no path laid out for how to negotiate any of it. So, yeah, we're all so very alone in it and so very together.
My heart goes out to you. My Dad was 87 when I returned from a trip to have the doctor tell me Dad had mesothelioma and two weeks to live. I decided moving in with dad in his own home so he could die peaceably at home was the best idea. My husband would bring groceries and sometimes cook for us. It was anything but peaceful as Dad slowly lost his ability to reason, to speak in sentences and frequently got frustrated that he couldn’t say what he wanted to say. He constantly asked me why he was so stupid and was fighting the death sentence the doctor gave him. Dad fought so hard he lasted three months. It wasn’t easy but in his lucid moments I enjoyed the time where we could talk and although it was sleep depriving and exhausting, I would do it again to have more time with him.