ah, coping mechanisms.... what do you do when you spend a couple hours driving around town with your dad, during which, for the first time in your experience, he (1) gets completely lost going someplace he goes often; (2) refers to you in the third person ("when [birdfarm] was little, she used to say..."); (3) points out "there's the church I go to," apparently not remembering that this was also the church you attended for much of your childhood; and (4) periodically pops out with a sentence that makes no sense whatsoever--in summary, what do you do after spending a couple of hours realizing that dad is pretty much gone, that the final remaining marbles are lost, or at least inexorably circling the drain--well, what do you do?
i was laughing on the phone with my dear friend from high school about my answer to this question. see, if you're me, you follow up a morning like this by announcing that you really have to go buy a picture frame, RIGHT NOW, but then go nowhere near any store you think might have a picture frame. Instead, spend two hours wandering the aisles of "Wild Oats" (same idea as "Whole Foods"), ultimately emerging (after Mom calls to point out that it's been two hours) with shampoo, lotion, and a cranberry bagel.
this activity, is not only (as the title of the post suggests) cheaper than many other helpfully mind-numbing activities, but also smells of ylang ylang and calendula--which you certainly can't say about the race track, the bar, or the crack house. (nb: it could have been less cheap had I not managed to resist temptation at the putomayo kiosk, even after listening to short samples of about half the cds on there....).ah well. then after dinner i had a fun little chat with my Mom about her question, "should I keep taking him to the hospital or just let him plotz in the living room the next time he has a stroke?" gee Mom, I dunno but did you ever think of asking your doctor this question??? Hmmm... I'm here til Tuesday, and if this keeps up, there's a good chance I'll be coming home with a cd or two (or at least a bar of "taos sunrise" high desert hand-crafted soap).
I absolutely have to go to bed.
hey, I didn't eat that bagel yet... where is it anyway...
2 comments:
Funny, I can spend a lot of time at Whole Foods and the nearby new age bookstore for the similar reasons - easy to zone out looking at interesting stuff, smells good, and at the bookstore there's relaxing music.
We've had a fair number of discussions about old age, illness, death and insurance recently.
I'm one step removed and mostly watching my Dad deal with his mom's decline. And a few years ago I watched Chip's grandmother also decline (when she was asked who Chip was, she said - "that's some other man").
In an odd way, that is helping us have discussions with my parents about themselves (what plans do they have, how are their finances etc). They don't like talking about this stuff, understandably. But I want to make sure they'll be OK.
I'm glad you're talking with your parents now. I tried to talk to Dad today about the finances (one of the goals of my trip) and it was just impossible. At first when we were talking about Mom, I saw some flashes of the old Dad in there, but once we got onto shakier ground (and a new question/decision that required new thought processes), he couldn't seem to follow the train of thought, or pull his own thoughts together to respond. It was depressing. That means we may have to just take the financial control away, which could mean having him declared incompetent or something horrible like that. I would like to do this in a more dignified manner, but I guess I just didn't anticipate that, at some point, there might not be enough synapses there to even process the question, never mind debating the answer.
this has been a very difficult trip.
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