Risk and Romance

My dad, who is 87, is taking a trip this week, to New York city to see a ballet. My stepmother was a dancer in her early years, she danced with the San Francisco Ballet for a time before she returned because of emotional pressure from her boyfriend at the time. I don't know how talented she was but she loved ballet and she shared that love with my dad. Their relationship has changed over the almost 3 years since her stroke. He visits her almost daily where she lives, and depending on the weather he takes her out for a little stroll in her chair and fusses over her, something she always did for him. He cheers her up, sharing little stories and amusements. He is sad. He doesn't get so much back but he is dogged in his dedication. On the weekends he goes to the Ballet. Not the real ballet, the simulcast ballet, downtown at the Scotia Center. He loves it. He has fallen in love with one of the ballerinas and that is who he is going to see in New York this week, he hopes. There is always the chance that the understudy will be dancing in her place.

I heard about the trip through one of my brothers. I assured him the trip was likely a fantasy. Dad has some fantastic ideas these days but none of them come to fruition. He feels his age. Many years ago he and my stepmother went to New York and had a fabulous time. She took care of everything and they went to many performances of music and ballet and art. Dad described feeling "stirred-up". He sent me an email letting me know about the trip and I sent one back but it was too late. The trip was booked. He was really going to go. He bought his ticket to the ballet and had his travel agent book a trip around it.

It's crazy of course. An old man alone in the city. He is a perfect target for abuse and that concerns me. On the other hand he is a risk taker, he always has been. He climbed mountains, flew planes, skied, hiked, and yes, traveled to Manhattan and many other big American cities and lived to talk about it. My dad and stepmother traveled to France and Switzerland some years ago after she had been diagnosed with Alzheimers. They were both in their 80's and I was convinced they had a suicide pact and they would never be seen again. They returned home revitalized and excited. 2 months later my stepmother had no memory of the trip. Dad still talks about it as pleasurable and extremely difficult.

So off he will go. I will feel nervous for him but excited too. New York is a wonderfully exciting place. If he dies there somehow he will have been doing something he loved. He is not a baby, we can't wrap him up and protect from his desires. Who knows how much longer he has on this earth so why not be reckless and take a long trip to see a beautiful woman dance in one of the most vibrant cities in the world. In addition to being a physical risk taker my dad is a romantic and as long as that is alive in him he is alive.

Housekeeping

We spent the weekend at my dad's. Summer is almost over and we have to finish up the work we started, painting some trim on his house. While he's capable of doing the work himself he is not naturally inclined in that direction. I am pretty sure my stepmother took care of all these things, doing some of the fix-it stuff herself, directing him on some jobs and hiring the rest out. She was conscious of how the house should look, he seemed oblivious but willing to do what she implored him to do. She has been away physically for over year but she stopped being able to care about these domestic details a few years before that. In some ways those last years before her stroke and fall were pleasant. She was more relaxed, less critical. Alzheimers took her need to have things just so. We were not always close. There were difficult years but I understood her and she knew it. We had a bond, ultimately she was a good mother and she and dad had a good relationship. She's everywhere in the house and I feel by helping him we are helping her too, carrying out her wishes, considering her preferences, keeping her present in a home in which she is absent. When we arrived Saturday dad was home eating his light lunch. He was wearing a huge pair of cargo pants, filthy and cinched around his waist, his now narrow hips no longer a match for a widening waist-band. I asked him if he maybe needed me to go with him to get some new pants for fall. I made a joke about back to school shopping but he's wary of me and my helpful hints about appearance and grooming practices. I have to tread lightly. I think of my stepmother and how she would have handled him and his over-sized pants. They would have simply disappeared in the laundry one day, gone to the poor, or the compost if they had no trace of wear left in them. She felt strongly that even the poor had standards. He wore shorts the next day and assured me that he has clothes to wear and we discussed wearing a greater percentage of them. This seemed to please him. Mark did some painting and I washed dishes and wiped up crumbs. I could go crazy cleaning the house but the cleaning woman had just been there so it felt pretty okay, considering. On Sunday we took a long walk punctuated with pie and coffee. We walked to Pt Grey Road and watched a race of Lasers in the bay. The single sails were so pretty moving together as a group gently changing shape as their sailors adjusted their trim and direction as they passed the race markers. It was hot and the dogs panted as we sat on a little knoll and watched the boats finish their heats and then begin again.

Post solstice wrap-up

5 days into summer. The solstice came but I didn't celebrate on the day and instead I ambled next door and did it belatedly with some longtime friends on Friday. We sat around under my white — ever useful in many circumstances—farmers market canopy in folding chairs, while the rain poured with all it's might and we agreed that this was certainly the only way to welcome summer in the Pacific Northwest. The very next day I got caught out in a thunder and lightening storm that blew down trees around the county and soaked my jeans and shoes, and dog. Yesterday it was okay all day weather wise and I went to the Cone Sisters Show at VAG with my sister and seriously considered whether or not we should dedicate our lives to leisure and art. You know, make a name for yourself in better circles like those Cone Sisters did. My sister gave me change for transit because I had none and showed me where to catch the sky-train to visit our stepmother which I felt was terribly good of her. It felt exciting to be inside the Gallery. Matisse's Odelisques were inspiring and hopefully, affirming.

I started this painting. That is all I have to report. After I have made about 400 of these I will have more of an idea of what it is I am doing. I think I should spend some more time on this one and then make another one right away. You heard it here first. I saw my stepmother again today so that my dad could go freely to Walmart to replace a pair of pants for her. I rolled her out to the garden and we sat and she laughed out loud, almost hysterically at times at what was going on around her. She was lively for a time but then began to think that one of the men was her father. She said, "my father never wore white shoes". She looked lost and agitated. I reassured her that everything was going to be okay. "I feel mad with madness" she said. On the way home I got lost on United Boulevard amongst road construction and landfill traffic looking for the good fabric store. Mark wrote his final securities exam and we went for a walk in the late afternoon with the dog and it was hard to tell what day it was because we had not spent the whole weekend together.

I have been alone much of the last 10 days which has been somewhat novel and certainly rejuvenating. Initially I felt freaked out about releasing my death grip on my young charge but a cooler head prevailed and I took the time off willingly and I am glad I did. The growing pains we experienced a few weeks back are gone and a new phase is upon us. This parenting is a tricky game of push-me pull-you and I for one do not always see the changes in direction coming but clearly there is no stopping them and that as it turns out is a good thing. The process is much like painting, you start, the colors run, you try madly to see the shapes and values and then you wait, and when it's all dry it looks totally different to what you planned or imagined.

Rite of Spring

A pair of Robins. One lays on the road, breast up, her fragile neck no match for the passing farm vehicles and minivans. Her live mate swoops and waits airborne, and the morning passes with cars and trucks too heavy for the road slowly grinding the little carcass into the blacktop, red breast no more.

My father is this bird waiting for his mate to rise again, her brain filled with blood. He flies to her side on the city bus twice a day and darts into her room in the neurosciences ward at VGH. He swoops behind her curtain and waits, places his large hand on her shrinking head. She smiles in her sleep but eats little. I say like a bird, and he reminds me birds eat many times their body weight each day. I adjust my analogy. She eats like a person who is not convinced she wants to keep on going with this particular charade.

Some days she smiles up at him when he comes in and they look at each other, what is there to say, they are both run over by sadness. She can't speak and so he holds her small hand or reads to her and tries to understand what her experience is. If she knows the difference between here and home, between black top and black hats, if she remembers about spring and Robins and how they hang together even when one is struck down.

The black top is not as solid as it seems. From her vantage point, the dead Robin can see it is many small rocks held together by tar that overtime shrinks away. And so it is possible to come apart and disappear in to the spaces in between, bones crushed upon impact, organs pulverized by tires, feathers damp with rain and demolished. The lucky ones taking flight on the spring breeze swooping and soaring across nearby blueberry fields in search of city buses.

The Quiet Room

In the quiet room there is the sound of the oxygen pump and Mark mistakes it for the pattern of Eddy's breathing and worries it is slowing down. We stand around Eddy's bed and pet him, his chest and legs, and his head. Occasionally Mark pets his cheek. At first we don't know what to say and the nurses are there swabbing out his mouth and turning him in the bed and then realizing they need to change his gown that is wet with sweat they ask us to step out and we do. In the common area there is a dog lingering between the water dispenser and an open office and a man comes out and goes in and the dog changes from bored to attentive and then back to bored. People wheel by in wheelchairs wearing socks with grippy pads. Some people sit listening to music, some people just stare. A woman I saw crying at one of the many dining tables one day is today folding clothes, over and over. We go back into the quiet room and continue our petting and stroking and quiet weeping. We talk over Eddy and to Eddy and around Eddy and eventually we put on music and we all sit down and forget about Eddy and then we take turns looking over at him. From where I am sitting I can see his pulse in his neck expanding and contracting against the white white pillow. The lights are low in the quiet room and the decor makes it seem like you are in a cottage at the beach, in Greece. If you were on morphine this would all be believable. You could easily tune out the pumping sound of the oxygen and the sound of the fan and all the sounds coming from the front desk of this vast building filled with other afflicted humans who can no longer care for themselves. You could focus instead on the voices of the people you loved most in this world even if you had no ability to understand what anyone was saying, the pumping sound might register as waves lapping on a distant shore. No one asks questions about how long it will be until we arrive at the place we are all going and the day passes and we come and go from the quiet room, and later in the evening after we have all gone home, Eddy dies. And that is where we are now. This is the day that we knew was coming but we didn't know how and we didn't know when and yet here we are doing exactly what we knew we would need to do.

Saturday with the folks

I guess it's in the air. Everyone's parents are getting old, failing and decrepit. Our roles as parents and children are crossing over one another at the dividing line. We make suggestions and come up with solutions, shouting them from where we stand, our minds and bodies still keeping pace, mostly. Saturdays we visit Eddy first, now in care, it's depressing. We stay a shamefully short amount of time, but how long can you sit watching someone sleep? We move west to the city and see my dad, now 84 and his wife. My parents I say and pause, my mother is dead. My stepmother, now my only female parent has Alzheimers or some other dementia-like disease, and my father are the parents of record. They are one unit, bound tighter now that she is dependent on him entirely and he is more dependent on us, our open arms, palms raised up offering help with anything, everything. We eat lunch with them, bake cookies, clean up here and there. We are jovial and encouraging, helping her with the words she can no longer connect with, seeing that he is not becoming overwhelmed with this new position of care giving he has been thrust into. After a time we go outside with him discreetly and discuss things that need to be discussed while the dogs pull and sniff around the block that surrounds the house, circumnavigating the island of their despair. On the way home we stop to see Mark's mother who is the best off of all of them fiercely independent still and able to mother us a little which feels like a relief because we are not ready to cut loose that generational buffer between us and our own eventual demise. At night I dream again and again of my mother and relive her illness, she is well and then not well and then dead again and I forget how it happened but I am grateful she comes to visit me and I suppose it will be this way with all of them and then me and on and on.

Going Away

My dad and stepmother at the Reifel Wildlife Sanctuary, Westham Island BC

Have just spent a few days at my fathers house and not surprisingly woke up this morning with a raging headache, nausea and fear and anxiety rising like a raging river. It's been a few hours and I feel more normal but also tender. I had wanted to go and spend some time with the old folks to see how they're doing and now I know. I would say they are ready for some help. My dad is good for his age and my stepmother has Alzheimer's which we have known about for some time. She's mostly okay, generally cognizant but justifiably pissed off and prone to fussing. She was always this way but it's heightened now. We had some good chats over multiple glasses of wine and she seemed herself but there were moments when she would lash out and that was a bit hard to witness. My dad is not a touchy-feelie overly nurturing guy so it's hard for him to deal with her in this new and devolving state. He's used to her being capable and in charge and she is so much less that way now. I feel pretty drained after only 4 days, I can only imagine how they feel. I need to get in touch with all my siblings and report my findings, there are 8 of us between them. I am not looking forward to this but I feel like the time is right and there have not been any big crisis yet but there is certainly potential.

The good news I suppose is that when we arrived on Tuesday they were both tense and when we left they were cheerful which proves to me that they need more contact with all of us. It seems a simple solution considering the severity of what's happening.

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March 20th, West Spanish Banks, Vancouver BC

Nothing to say except that if you sit really still for a really long time everything is revealed to you and in the meantime if you have to get up and move around it is good to do a little sewing, carry a bit of firewood around and sometimes getup early and notice that the birds are singing and that you got through the winter, another winter without driving into a median somewhere.

I saw my dad today, his sweater had a small stain on it and it reminded me that they aren't as buttoned up as they once were and everything feels frail. We took a walk to the beach and I didn't talk to him about any of the issues, the big issues that are hanging over all of us. I just wanted to amble along next to him with the west wind blowing in our faces, hoping that it had already dropped its radioactive particles somewhere farther out at sea. And I feel more and more centered and unwilling to deal with bullshit because everything is fleeting and so I work on my knitting and chop the wood and hug my kid and at night I lay next to another human being whose dreams intersect with mine but aren't dependent on them. Tomorrow is Monday and I will rise and do and go and act and things will get moved along and it will seem purposeful and it will be, because I say so, because actions speak louder than words and that is what I am paying attention to.