Surviving Storms
Baggage
by
Diana Walker
This
work of adult fiction, loosely based on
characters portrayed by Russell Crowe, includes adult language and
experiences;
you have been warned. No
copyright
infringement on the original work is intended.
Copyright Diana Walker 2007.
TERRY
I watched Diana slip away from me on the ride home from the market. She’d not tried to disrupt my driving with well-placed hands. She shrank into herself and stopped looking at the livestock along our route. She’d forced herself, twice, to mention changes in our small community, but the effort became too much for her, and she lapsed into a preoccupied silence.
“You were quite Johnny-on-the-spot helping that woman and older chap at the market.”
“When they pulled into the handicapped space as we were walking out, she looked so lost, alone, tired, hopeless; I knew what she was feeling. I knew what even an offer of help or a kind word would mean to her. I had a flashback to Dad’s last set of strokes before he went into the hospitals.”
Diana was lethargically putting groceries into the pantry with Okie nosing through the bags as I sat at the computer, checking emails as a pretext to be near her, an arm’s reach away with Holly at my feet. Diana’s shoulders slumped forward, and she sank to the floor, the bag of rice in her hands. She sat, looking but not seeing, our food stocks. I swiveled our computer chair and leant down to touch her shoulder; it startled her.
“I hadn’t thought of it in years.” She looked up at me with lifeless eyes and then held her arms out to me in supplication, in need.
I dropped to the floor so quickly the chair rolled away from the desk, coming to rest where the carpet and the tile meet marking the separation between the lounge and kitchen. I couldn’t have her in my arms fast enough. She held onto my neck, clinging to me, and we sat in our kitchen, my legs round her cross-legged form, my whole being willing her to tell me why that parking lot encounter had struck her so hard.
“I can’t be yours. I WILL NOT belong to anyone ever again.”
DIANA
We sat silently in our kitchen until the cold tiles and my frozen heart finally overwhelmed me. We’d been there long enough the dogs had given up on us ever moving again and had taken up their places in the living room – Okie on the sofa and Holly in Terry’s big wing chair. Terry had to be uncomfortable with his legs wrapped around me; even with the yoga and riding, he still isn’t the most limber man in the world.
I stiffened my back in preparation to stand, and he rose with me still clinging to him. He drew his legs under him and knelt, carrying me with him until we stood with our arms wrapped around each other.
“Diana, I know more about your classified life than I do your bloody parents. Don’t you think it’s time?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, but yes, you need to know about why you have this damaged cargo.”
We walked to the sofa where Terry made a grumbling Okie move to the other side of the sofa and laid us on the seat with me stretched along the sofa back, and he stretched out in front of me, boxing me in and pulling a comforter over us. He wrapped his arms around me.
I tried to lighten my mood as much as his before getting started. “Are we nesting?”
His actions, from sitting unmoving in the kitchen to putting me under siege on the couch, and his words told me I was not going anywhere until I explained myself. “Yes, we are until you tell me.”
The afternoon was as bleak as my mood – grey and misty. I didn’t know where to start because the pain went back so far.
TERRY
“When Mom and Dad moved to Texas
“I’d come home from work, and I could see they had spent the day at my house. That was back when the rain was more regular, and you had to time when you mowed so the yard wasn’t wet. On the days I had scheduled to mow when I got home, the front lawn would be manicured. I felt like my parents were my gardeners!” There’s some emotion. It’s outrage, but she’s no longer lifeless.
“They hated my housekeeper. Mary would come in once every two weeks and do the public rooms; I kept shoving stuff in my bedroom to get it out of the public rooms because I worked too many hours to sort through shit. As long as the dogs and I had trails to get around, we were happy. They hated the way I kept house, but they didn’t like my housekeeper solution either. They wanted me to do it. I didn’t have the time.” Ah, now I understand why she is so resistant to having Celeste, Junior’s wife, work for us as well. It seemed a sensible solution to me – Junior to keep the barn in order and Celeste to keep the house sorted.
“I heard from Nancy
“The really odd part was that they only came out when I wasn’t here. A guy on my team at work suggested that we surprise them one day when they weren’t expecting me to be home and have them find us in bed. Oh, don’t look so shocked,” she jokingly grumped at me and smoothed my eyebrow back down closer to my eye than my hairline. “It was enticing. I hadn’t gotten laid in a long time. I almost took him up on it, but explaining his charitable actions to his wife was more than I could handle.
“It was a very wet evening, and the solutions got more outrageous as they are wont to do when you’ve been drinking. The last one we landed on was that I should get some size 0 little frilly things, clothes and underwear that were totally out of character for me, and leave them around with half the closet filled with them. All my drinking buddies thought that would be outrageous enough to stop the odd behavior.”
I wanted to ask why she didn’t change the locks, but she was on such a roll, I didn’t want to stop her and risk her being sidetracked from her soliloquy.
“After Mom died, I went back to work for a dot com company, but I wasn’t really suited for its freewheeling nature. They had only ever known good times, and I was trying to keep the payroll a bit tighter for when the business downturn would come. I negotiated a nice out package and started the rest of my life. I did take a bit of perverse satisfaction when they went bankrupt after I left; the news reports quoted the chairman as saying their bloated payroll costs had contributed to the legal filing.” She sighed and shook her head. “I made sure I saw Dad a couple of times a week. We went up to Oklahoma
“Even though the cemetery with the family plot is a full care one, Dad took landscaping equipment but for a mower ….” Good, she really didn’t intend to follow through on keeping me out; she’s still using some of my phrases. She’s begun using ‘but for’ instead of ‘except’ or one of her Texas
“Mom had the social graces in the family. Dad had some very distant cousins and people he went through school with whom he hadn’t seen since high school living close to the small cemetery where Mom is buried. He wanted to drop in on them without calling. In the beginning I went along with it ….”
I nodded my understanding when she looked at me. “Let him mourn in his own way.”
“Sounds good, but it had nothing to do with grief. He was trying to connect with old friends, and I really wanted to encourage that. He was far too dependent on me even then. Often he wouldn’t mention making the stops until we were leaving the cemetery so I couldn’t avoid the unannounced visits without starting another fight. I did the best I could for those people; some of them didn’t even remember him because he’d been gone from his hometown for over 30 years. I’d conveniently forget he wanted to stop and be a long way from where they lived when he’d mention stopping, or I’d drive by their homes quickly muttering, ‘Doesn’t look like anyone’s home.’ Very passive-aggressive, I know, but Mom had taught me well. Finally, I got tired of his rude drop-ins, hanging my head in shame, and apologizing profusely as I walked into homes of people I’d never met. Often they were not thrilled to see us. They had their own lives.
“I finally decided to handle the visits proactively. We were going to Oklahoma
Protect herself this time? “Had he done that before?”
“He’d hit me two times in my life. Once, when I was in college and flexing my independence, he bloodied my nose and once right after Mom died; he’d let Rabbit into the dog yard without blocking the holes Holly had dug. I was afraid Rabbit would break his leg by stepping in one. That time he hit me with a horse whip.”
Her recitation had inflection in it, rather like telling a friend about chance encounters with a mutual acquaintance. I was ready to jump in the Porsche, as it’s the fastest conveyance we own, drive to the wanker’s grave, dig him up, and give him a taste of his own medicine. Who in bloody hell strikes his own adult daughter – twice – in one lifetime?
“He said I was screaming at him, and the neighbors would hear. Maybe I was. I felt like my ears were concrete and deadened the sound.” No bloody way was she screaming. When she’s been angriest with me, I’ve had to lean in to hear her.
“How did you protect yourself the last time?”
“I held my arms up so he could see how tightly he was gripping me and told him to let me go. With my arms that high, if he did release me and hit me, I thought I had a chance to cover my face. I’d been lucky the first time he hit me he hadn’t broken my nose; I didn’t think I’d be that lucky a second time. I told him if he ever touched me again, I was pressing charges. That scared him. I was willing to have him beat me and not fight back so I’d be the only one with bruises to show the cops.”
I flashed to the one time I’d grabbed her arms; she’d gone limp.
“He’d been making some bad choices for about two years then – not dangerous but not logical. He’d had two traffic accidents in the previous year. His eyesight was failing; he needed more support than he was willing to accept from me, but he wouldn’t consider going to assisted living. I got so I hated for my phone to ring; it was him checking to see if I was all right. There was always an undercurrent of anger and violence in the calls. He’d call in the middle of a thunderstorm, and when I tried to hurry him off, he’d demand that I call afterwards. I stupidly said yes. I was a dutiful daughter; I always said yes.
“If I wasn’t home when he called, he’d start phoning my friends trying to track me down. I had no life of my own. I had to be at his beck and call.
“I started controlling our interactions more. I called him daily at a big cost; if I called him in the morning, it drained all my energy for the rest of the day; if I called him late in the day, I dreaded it all day. I hated talking to my own father because all I heard was how bad the President was, the Cowboys played badly, the newspaper didn’t cover important news like what was happening in LA, his lawn service didn’t do a good job, Meal on Wheels was late. He hatedTexas
“On our phone calls, he always asked what I was doing not because he was interested; he only wanted to control my life. I finally learned not to tell him anything after enduring his objections to anything I was doing. He always had reasons. If I went anywhere, I was putting too many miles on my car. He hated that Jack was stabled atAlice Alice
“He really didn’t want me going to doctor appointments with him, but he finally let me start driving him around town as well as on the longer trips. That was when my life totally disappeared. At the point in their lifetime most adult children saw their parents once or twice a year, I was with Dad at least twice a week along with the daily phone calls. Before I started carting him to the appointments, I’d gotten so much garbled information from him about what his doctors were saying, the office staffs had started expecting me to call after one of his visits so they could tell me what the doctors had found, and I could explain to him what the doctors had said and meant. In a way, I was glad to go with him; it was easier than coming along behind him fixing what he had screwed up.
“When the extended family called, it was to find out how Dad was doing. I had become a non-entity even to them. The only thing they had to say to me personally was that life would get worse. I could only think, ‘Shoot me now’ because his mind was going, but he was physically strong as an ox. I was quite sure Dad would outlive me. He certainly was sucking all the life out of me.
“It was weird what he could remember, and most times there was a nugget of truth in what he told me, but I never knew for sure what was real. He reacted angrily or put the worst spin on anything that happened to him; that was nothing new; he’d done that my whole life. When I tried to point out a more productive way to approach something that had happened to him, like the lawn service not doing a good job edging his lawn, I wasn’t being supportive of him. When I tried to interpret what the doctors told him about his glaucoma, he lashed out at me as the bearer of bad tidings. He would never question his doctors about his treatments.
“One time when I talked to Aunt Faith, his sister, she said he’d had a chip on his shoulder when he was growing up as well; he’d been angry since his own father had died when he was a teenager. I trusted her not to tell Dad what we talked about, and we started comparing stories. He’d been a negative, critical, frustrated person his whole life. It was getting worse as he got older. Oh, you would have liked her – bright, sunny, cheerful, bit of a flirt, hopeful. More importantly, she would have loved you. She did love men in uniforms …married a submariner. It was hard to understand how two people from the same family who were so close in age could have such different outlooks on life.
“At his appointments, when the doctors started talking to me rather than Dad, I’d redirect them to Dad. I could hear and understand them very well, but they needed to make Dad understand them. I’m sure they thought I was a queen bitch; maybe I was, but their job was to interact with their patient. I wanted Dad to feel like he could maintain some sense of control. Part of my motivation was selfish; I wanted him to stay independent until a massive stroke killed him immediately.
“Dad wouldn’t ask the doctors questions no matter how much I tried to prompt him. He’d ask me before he’d go to the appointments, and I would ask the questions he had. I’d always phrase them, ‘Dad wants to know ….’ and direct their answers to him. I got so I could predict what he wouldn’t understand and made the doctors re-explain that information to him several times. I knew I’d have to clarify what they had said on the ride home; I was rapidly coming up to speed on all sorts of eye maladies, but I knew I didn’t understand ophthalmology well enough to teach Dad.
“Vision is such a subjective thing. All Dad’s objective tests showed normal; I couldn’t get inside his eyes and duplicate what he was seeing. For years after each of his appointments, I talked up the positives from the findings even as I reassured him I couldn’t see with his eyes. I had to walk a very fine line. God, I stayed bone-tired all the damned time, and I wasn’t even with him constantly.
“The thing that squicked me the most was Dad kept trying to turn me into his wife.” During her recitation, Diana had checked my reactions often; I’d been doing a fine job of keeping my masque in place until that moment. My revulsion overwhelmed my control; I buried my face in her hair so she couldn’t see.
“No, no. Not sexually. The man couldn’t use the words ‘I’ or ‘my.’ He referred to anything as ‘we’ and ‘our.’ It was always ‘our doctor’s appointment.’ I always corrected him to ‘your doctor’s appointment.’ Every Christmas he wanted to send out cards with both our names on them. I hadn’t sent out cards to my own friends since shortly after I got out of school, let alone have my name on some card to people I’d never even met. He never got used to being single again after Mom died.”
Diana went on autopilot again, but now she wouldn’t make eye contact with me. She looked at my chest, but she was back to not seeing again as she had been at the pantry. Okie sensed her unease and stuck his head over my shoulder; he wasn’t there to offer solace. The little bugger just wanted to be sure his life wouldn’t be disturbed by whatever was bothering Diana. Holly left her chair to lie on the floor beside us.
“Dad had been having mini-strokes since before Mom died. They were small and didn’t have any effect on his motor or speech skills. No droopy face. He just got tired. If I called late in the day, I could tell that he’d had one because he’d remark on how long a nap he took. He was already on aspirins, and the doctor had told me there was nothing that could be done to prevent the strokes at his age. He didn’t have high blood pressure, no heart problems; the blood vessels in his brain had simply weakened over time and gave way.
“The Friday before he was hospitalized, I called early. He complained about not being able to see well out of his good eye. That was nothing new; the first few times he’d said that, I rushed him to the ophthalmologist only to be told his glaucoma was fine, and his eyesight was 20/20. I blew it off this time as his complaint du jour. I went back to work on some data analysis for a pick-up compensation job I’d gotten. A little while later, I got a call from one of his neighbors that Dad had attracted her attention through the front window as she was walking her dog – she was calling from his house. He told her he couldn’t see; she waited with him until I drove down. You should have seen the glare she gave me when I got there.
“He walked towards me, and he bumped into walls, hit the grandfather clock in the hall, grazed the hearth, and couldn’t find his chair to sit down. I thought a blood vessel had burst in his good eye as it had in the eye where he was already blind, and he had lost the sight in it. I got on the phone to his ophthalmologist, and we drove down to the medical school where he teaches with Dad bitching the whole way about how far it was and how he didn’t need to go to the doctor less than an hour after complaining about not being able to see. Within three hours of arriving at the med school, Dad had seen three specialists – his regular glaucoma specialist, his retina specialist, and a new guy, a neuro-ophthalmologist – with Dad complaining to me about how long we sat in the waiting rooms between office exams; I was surprised they got him in so quickly. At one point, all three of the doctors and their interns were in the exam room with Dad and me. It also worried me that they all turned to so quickly; specialists only get that involved if they suspect something is really wrong. None of them could find a problem; his intraocular pressure was good, and he could see 20/20, but the neuro-optho wanted to do a biopsy on a vein on the side of his head to check for plaque build up. He scheduled the procedure for the following Thursday, and Dad had follow-ups with the other two on Monday and Tuesday. All he had to do was get through the weekend.
“When we got back to his house, I kept the keys to his car; I should have taken them a couple of years before. I got no support from any of his doctors on the subject of driving. His ophthalmologists all kept telling him he was fine to drive. His prostrate specialist said he didn’t have any jurisdiction; his GP was a wimp. Dad told me he’d kill me if I took his keys. I believed him.
“I had dinner with Dad and went back home to go back to work. I’d set him up in his recliner with ball games on TV and thought he’d be fine. After spending most of the day at clinics, I expected he’d fall asleep quickly. A couple of hours later, his next-door neighbor called me; Dad had wandered over to his house looking for help to call me. Dad had lost his ability to use the phone.
“We were having a brutally hot summer. I fed the dogs, made sure they had enough water to last them a couple of days, called Nancy and left a message for when they got home, and grabbed my go bag. The horses had plenty of grazing and water so they’d be fine for a day or so. When I got to Dad’s, he was sure someone (other than the hallucinations he’d been having that Mom and assorted dead relatives lived with him) had been in the house and had broken his glasses; he got in my face and accused me of sneaking back into the house and doing it. That was only the beginning of the escalating paranoia over the weekend.
“I had a really hard time convincing him his glasses weren’t broken and that I had been at home. He’d told me for years that I’d rather lie than tell the truth. I eventually weasel-worded everything I told him because if I was incorrect on anything I said, in Dad’s eyes I was lying. He accused me of lying to him again. Every time he started calming down, he’d lurch around his bedroom and start accusing me again. I had NO experience calming anyone as upset as he was. I thought he was completely out of control, and with his history of violence towards me, I was scared. I hadn’t seen out of control, yet.
“During one of his calmer moments, I asked him why he hadn’t called me. He told me he couldn’t find the phone. I went searching for it; it was right beside his chair in the living room. He changed his story and said he’d tried calling me, and I didn’t answer when he’d called; my phone hadn’t rung in the two hours I’d been home. It was possible he’d called in the fifteen minutes I’d been on the road. I suggested he show me how he had called me; he couldn’t. He started scribbling my phone number on notes; he must have written it five times himself, then had me write it several times. Between the times of writing my phone number, I kept reassuring him he wouldn’t need it; I was staying with him. He had me mark the phone with a purple felt tip pen with the buttons he had to push to speed-dial me. We must have gone over how to do that twenty times before he had me write the instructions; I wrote those three times. Right in front of my eyes, I saw him losing abilities and becoming even more confused, frustrated, and angry.
“I finally got him to bed, but it was close to midnight. That was one of the shorter incidents of the weekend. I was too exhausted to sleep, but I went to the guest bedroom and muscled the highboy in front of the door when I closed it. I was that afraid of what he might do.”
Her voice was still a monotone. Her impassiveness was her defense. All I could do was hold her to give her a physical barrier against the demons.
“I hadn’t met Reags yet. I had no one to call for help. Everyone was gone. Nancy and Bill were away for the weekend; my girlfriends were at horse shows. The perverse part of me liked being on my own; I wanted to see if I could handle Dad without a safety net. He’d never wanted to live in assisted living or a nursing home. It was obvious to me he could no longer live on his own though it wasn’t clear to him; I wanted to use that weekend to see if he could live with me. Looking back on it now, I guess I wanted to see if I could live with him without one of us killing the other.
“Saturday morning was the great pill debacle. He was taking so many pills; I had gotten him a seven-day, morning, lunch, dinner, night pill case to make it easier on him. He had left one day’s worth of pills in there; he refilled the rest of the days from that pattern. That concerned me. What if his ‘pattern’ day was wrong? When had it gone wrong? He was having such a hard time even getting the pills into the little boxes; I asked him if he would like me to do it for him. He agreed; I was shocked that he’d accept my help. Even though I knew a verbal beating was coming, I started working on them.
“I enraged him because I read the bottle and put the pills in by what it said and hadn’t followed his pattern day. It had taken him 15 minutes to fill two boxes; I had filled the entire week in five. He kept saying I was doing it wrong. I showed him each day looked exactly like his sample. He ended up dumping the whole thing on the kitchen table – even his sample; some of the pills landed on the floor.
“I don’t know if he was angrier because I could read, he saw his loss of control beginning, or his diminishing abilities began sinking in on him; it might have been a little of all, but he was mad about it, and I was back to being scared.
“I gathered all the pills up, put them down the garbage disposal, turned it on, and nothing. I added that to my list of things he’d tried to do on his own and fucked up, that I would have to fix. I didn’t cry then; I sat down and started refilling his pillbox. I worried about how to get his mail-in pharmacy prescriptions one week early for the pills I’d had to trash, but that was a worry for another day; I only wanted to survive until Monday.
“Dad didn’t have a computer; I could see getting the full compensation program set up for the software start-up company was not in the cards, at least not with me doing the work. I got Dad settled in watching some baseball, told him I had to go home for a bit, and I came home to print out the salary survey I had finished. At least I could send that on for the new compensation consultant to use when I called sometime the next week to bow out. I was gone less than an hour. I needed to do some grocery shopping, but I put it off since I didn’t know what disaster Dad would wreak while I was gone.
“When I got back to Dad’s, he was taking his pills except he had the Thursday morning pills in his hand, and it was Saturday afternoon. I got that sorted with much questioning from Dad about my trying to kill him, and we started talking about time and his perception of it. He didn’t know what time it was nor what day; he thought he had a doctor’s appointment the next day. I had to re-explain the next day was Sunday, and his doctor’s appointment was Monday. That got him complaining about doctors’ easy lives, not having to work on Sunday.
“He careened from one topic to another as we sat and talked. He wanted to know about my finances – again. He wanted me to teach him how use the speed dial on his phone – again. He tried to feed his cat who had died five years before. He even wanted Ward back in my life to take care of me. In a brave admission Dad admitted his confusion over the past few years probably had more to do with his brain aging than his eye trouble.
“He remembered he needed to reset the grandfather clock in the hall. He almost knocked it over in the attempt; I had the bruises from catching it on my shoulder, arm, and side for a couple of weeks. He never even noticed he’d almost bashed the clock. The poor clock! The weights and the chains they hung on were frozen in place from where he had tugged on them.
“I think it was at that point I KNEW I couldn’t care for him. He didn’t trust me to do anything, my abilities angered him, he resented that I could help him, and I couldn’t calm him. He still thought he could take care of me – a noble thought, but he was long past even being able to take of himself, let alone me.
“It was almost dark, and I was so grateful; Dad could go to bed, and maybe, just maybe, I could at least go to the bathroom. I hadn’t planned on it, but I fell asleep in the living room watching the Ranger game. It must have been midnight when Dad came in to tell me that someone had been in the house. I was at the end of my rope. I tried being logical with him that he may have heard the TV from the living room; he wouldn’t be used to that. He was sure that wasn’t it; he was convinced that someone had been in the house. He’d asked his brother, and HC wouldn’t talk to him. Of course Uncle HC couldn’t answer him! Uncle HC had been dead for years. By then I had gotten used to him referring to all the dead relatives in the house living with him and could usually bring him gently back to reality. Not tonight. It only provoked him into another rage. He started accusing a cousin who lived in Oklahoma City
“I let him rail until he was done about three AM. I had given up on trying to keep him in reality. Monday was only a day away.”
“I felt a little bit safer with Dad because he was now imagining someone else in the family was screwing him over, not me. I didn’t drag the highboy over that night, partly because I physically didn’t have the strength. I was glad I hadn’t when Dad came into the guest bedroom and woke me up bright and early Sunday morning claiming someone had stolen his car. I bounced out of bed and raced to the garage; there had been some thefts in town recently so it was a possibility. Both our cars, my little, beat-up Saturn coupe and his Lexus limo - it truly was a limo; all it needed was the privacy glass and some body armament panels to cart around some diplomat - were sitting there. The salesman certainly had taken advantage of Dad when he sold him that tank, another one of his bad decisions. I made a big show of checking his car before asking him why he thought his car had been stolen when it was sitting right here; I decided not to bring up that car thieves are not in the habit of leaving a replacement. He thought someone had taken his car and put a different one in its place – the same model, the same color, the same extras. I would have laughed but for the lump in my throat.
“I tried to convince him it was the same color, it had his distinctive umbrella in the trunk, and it even had his Cokes in the built-in cooler in the back seat. Nothing was convincing him. I asked him what would prove to him that the car sitting in the garage was his, not some duplicate the car thieves had run into the garage as a stand-in. He thought that if the State registration form, you know, the pink slip, matched the numbers on the car, it would help him believe.
“At that point, I was so crazy I wasn’t sure they would match. I wanted him to be the one to get the document from his LOCKED file cabinet; I knew if I did, he wouldn’t believe the numbers. He couldn’t open it. I eventually had him stand behind me as I unlocked the thing, got the car file out for him, and MADE him get the pink slip out himself so I never touched it before I relocked the cabinet at his insistence and re-hid the key. I read the VIN number on the dash to him while he tried to confirm the number on the registration form. With Dad’s eyesight, it took us close to 45 minutes to get the number confirmed. Dad still thought the car was a ringer – that they had peeled the VIN sticker from the dashboard and put it on the second car or that I had forged the pink slip. At that point, I gave up trying to reassure him. I flat told him that his car was sitting in the garage, and I was sorry he didn’t believe me.
“Go ahead and laugh.” Laughter was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to cry for her. “Looking back on it now, it all seems so absurd. I couldn’t take him to the hospital. What was I going to say? ‘He’s crazy!’ He was no threat to himself or anyone else. Would they believe me when I told them I was afraid of a frail, old man? No. I could have killed him if I’d cold cocked him. I was still trying to protect his dignity, misplaced, I know. I focused on getting him to the doctor’s appointment on Monday to the exclusion of everything else.
“I did get the senior citizen resource guide out and started making a list of assisted living homes. I was going to have him moved into a facility as soon as I could. At the rate I was going, he’d only go to the home when I admitted myself. On Friday, his retina specialist was surprised to hear Dad was still living independently; he pulled me aside and said, ‘It’s time.’ Easy for him to say. I started figuring who all I’d need to take with me to get him out of his house. Bill with his shotgun came to mind first.
“When we got to the med school on Monday, I must have looked like that woman did today. I hadn’t showered in three days by then; I’d tell Dad I was taking a shower, but every time I got in the bathroom, Dad would forget and have a crisis that had to be solved right then. We pulled into the parking area, and I had three valet parking attendants at the car, not because there weren’t many cars. One came to me; he put his hand on my arm and smiled at me. He said, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ The other two were helping Dad so gently, reassuring him they had all the time in the world as they walked him across a very busy driveway. It was the first kind thing that had happened to me all weekend.
“The glaucoma specialist found his intraocular pressure to be good, and his eyesight 20/20 for the second time in a very few days. I took the chance of elevating Dad’s paranoia again and dragged the ophthalmologist aside; at least if Dad had another tantrum it would be in public. I was betting Dad would have his ‘company manners’ on and not make a scene. I told the doctor about all that had happened over the weekend, and he took pity on me. He called the neuro-ophtho for a referral for an MRI that day and set up the appointment for the neuro-ophtho with the results the next day.
“Dad was so concerned about the MRI he forgot to be paranoid about what I had told his doctor. By now I’d gotten good at skirting the truth; I’d promised Dad sometime over the weekend I would never lie to him. The poor guy was having a hard enough time telling reality from fantasy, I had to be his sounding board even though a lie would have made my life easier.
“When the MRI tech brought Dad back out, the tech had a big envelope in his hands. He told me he would send the MRI electronically to the school, but he wanted a back up to be sure the doctors had them to read. That seemed a little odd to me so when we got home and I got Dad situated, I pulled those pictures out and created my own light screen in the kitchen. It was a huge bleed – but low in the back – so it didn’t affect much except for his memory. The swelling in Dad’s brain from that big a stroke had magnified all his natural personality traits on top of his finally recognizing his memory was failing. He was frightened and angered by the turn his life had taken. He lashed out at me more, but I was used to it. Once I saw the MRI, I felt so much better. I finally understood what had triggered that horrible weekend.
“Nancy
“Dad never went back to his home. The neuro-ophtho admitted him to the hospital. The cardiologists put him on blood thinners; they caused a second stroke, much smaller than the first but more devastating because of its location. He stayed in the hospital six weeks. He finally began understanding how like Swiss cheese his brain was and that he couldn’t live on his own any more. The doctors didn’t exactly lie to him, but they gave him a hopeful prognosis on getting some of his short-term memory back. He really wanted to live with me. When I asked him if he wanted me to be the one to change his diapers and bathe him, he finally got that there were no good choices left for him.
“He wanted me to stay at the hospital with him constantly as I had with Mom. I couldn’t. With Mom, her final illness was quick; with Dad, it would be a very long haul. I did stay with him ten to twelve hours a day the six weeks he was in the acute care hospital.
“With Mom, I made one phone call to the extended family, and within four hours I had ten cousins to share the load. With Dad, once he was hospitalized, I made ten phone calls, and a week later one cousin showed up at the hospital because she had a seminar in Dallas.
“Once he was released from the hospital to the nursing home, the complaints about the nursing home started. They had hookers coming in at night. He warned me off getting too close to his roommate, Dennis Krogh, a very nice, old man. According to Dad, Dennis had had sex with one of the hookers. The way Dad told the story was almost pornographic. As if Dennis could fuck anyone; the poor man was in a wheel chair, paralyzed from the waist down, and had a feeding tube. He couldn’t even speak clearly. I had toughened up a lot by then. I came back with ‘Wrong Crowe, Dad.’ He didn’t understand why I was laughing so much.
“My laughter was because Dennis pronounced his name the same way Crowe does; I guess I was trying to get some of my language skills back though my wittiness was lost on Dad.
“I never understood why his initial complaints had to do with sex – probably because he’d been so repressed all his life. I’d only seen him kiss Mom once my whole life, and he only gave her a peck on the cheek; that was the day I graduated from college. That was also the day my first fiancé dumped me. I stayed numb that day. I suppose I felt that if all marriage would get me was a peck on the cheek in public every twenty-one years and all the shit in between, I wasn’t missing much.”
She’d become more animated with the college story; she dipped her head and shrugged her shoulders, though she didn’t look at me. With her parents’ relationship as her prototype for marriage, it was a wonder she’d ever considered it at all. Peer pressure and social conventions are strong influences. I’ll be buggered; Diana’s brought up the reason-not-to-marry subject I hadn’t expected her to revisit.
“One day when I went to visit him, he had pulled all his clothes from his closet so he could take them when he went home the following week. He wasn’t going anywhere. He tried me every so often to see if I would relent on his living with me. I’d tell him his home was there now. He gave in more easily each time.
“I got nothing but grief over Dad not having a phone from people who would call him once a year. The man couldn’t operate a phone, for Christ’s sake! I broke down and got a cell phone, programmed their numbers into it, and called one set of friends or relations every week when I went to visit. I finally had to quit calling his acquaintances. He was so confused he often didn’t know who was on the phone, and he eventually forgot how to hold a phone.
“The home had lots of activities; he wouldn’t participate in any of them. He really was their star patient; he was in much better physical shape than the rest of the patients – all he was missing was parts of his mind. I kept trying to encourage Dad to make new friends. He wouldn’t. He’d warehoused himself. I was his property; he only wanted me.”
She’d finally finished.
DIANA
I finally came out of the trance I’d been in for the last hour reliving Dad’s horrible weekend until the doctors got their shit together to hospitalize him and then unintentionally making his condition worse with the blood thinners. What brought me out of it was Terry kissing the top of my head.
“I know you’re enamoured of my arms, Lady, but one of them’s asleep.”
He hadn’t moved an inch or said a word until he was sure I’d finished the worst of it. “I’m sorry, but thank you. I don’t think I’d have been brave enough to tell you all of it if you’d interrupted me. I love you for listening to me.”
He extricated his arm from underneath me, and I began trying to rub some life back into it. With our movement, the dogs decided we were alive and went back to their own doggie lives.
“Was that the first time you’d told anyone about it?”
“Nah. Several people had asked. I gave them the shorthand version. I only told Reags about the medical aspects of the strokes in the hospital when we were trading stories about our deceased fathers.”
“You’ve kept those days inside for a long time. That wasn’t good.”
“Everybody else has their own tough times they got through. They didn’t need to hear the specifics. It happened; I lived to tell about it.”
“You really did have to fight him every day of your life.”
“Until the day he died. I used to feel stupid that my parents had such a hold on my life, that I should have gotten over the childhood baggage the way everyone else had. I got over that feeling because I DID have to fight their control over me my whole life, and being a dutiful daughter, I compromised. I couldn’t dump them; at the end, Dad had no one else. Dad had such a warped view of what ‘family’ meant. I was his property. To him family meant ruling our lives, Mom and me. Picking and choosing for us.”
His smile was soft and warm. “Didn’t work too well with you, did it? He didn’t count on having an infinitely curious, intelligent daughter.”
“You’d be wise to learn from his mistakes, Terry. Don’t try to shield me from the nasty parts of life. I’ll find out sooner or later, and I won’t be as easy on you as I was when you kept Dino’s indiscretion from me for so long.”
I really didn’t want to hurt him or push him away, but now that I’d ripped off that scab, some of the infection would get on him as well. I’d always wanted one person who wasn’t tainted by my rocky relationship with my father; I thought that by keeping Terry mostly in the dark about it, he’d be the one. In truth, by keeping that defining relationship from him, I had kept him from knowing what really drove me. I’d only wanted him to know the happy, happy shit, not the darkness that lurked in the depths of my psyche. I wanted it to be easy for him to love me. I had done the exact opposite.
“Noted.” His smile was gone. “He’s gone now, Diana. The war’s over. Don’t let him win. Throw the baggage off the train.”
“What baggage?”
“For starters, let’s get a housekeeper. At least let Celeste come down when you’ve a yen to hit the heavy spring-cleaning as you’ve done recently. Once a year. Don’t you see your resistance to having some help around here goes back years?”
“You’re right.” I smiled my agreement to him, and he returned it. “I’ll go you one better. Whenever I’m gone on assignment, if I ever get called again, I’ll call Celeste myself and have her come down to clean for you.”
“You’d best warn her how you’ve trained me to pullLevis
“Aww. Give her a thrill. You starkers.”
“We want both Junior and her to continue working for us. I can’t think of anything that would make them leave quicker.” We shared a giggle, our first since early morning, before a pained smile came to his face.
“I need to ask you a question about something I did. When I shook you, you went limp in my arms. Why?”
I thought for a moment and chose to answer all the questions that one word implied. “I wasn’t afraid of you. I didn’t think you’d hurt me, but I was giving you a chance. I felt like I deserved it right then. I’d hurt you. Even if you had hit me, I wouldn’t have called the cops.”
“I promise you, I will never touch you again in anger. I’ll take a page from Max’s book; I’ll walk away.”
“When I make you that angry, will you hold me instead?”
“Doesn’t work that way, Lady.” He tapped my forehead with his index finger. “Your romantic notions are interfering with real life again. I won’t walk that far away, but I’ll have to move from you. You trigger such strong emotions in me; I won’t trust myself within arm’s reach. I will stay in the same room; I won’t abandon you.”
“That’ll do.”
“The question now becomes how fully can you love me?” Terry asked an honest, loving question that I thought had been settled a long time ago.
“Where the hell did that come from?”
“‘I can’t be yours. I WILL NOT belong to anyone ever again.’”
“Who the hell said that?”
“You.”
“I did not!”
“You most certainly did. It’s so much a part of you; you didn’t even hear yourself say it.”
“When did I say that?”
“On the floor, in the kitchen.”
“What did I mean?”
“I was rather hoping you could tell me. I’ll never control you, Diana. I wouldn’t want that from you. I do rather fancy that some day you’ll give over.”
“I thought I already had.”
“In some ways. In most ways. My parents’ marriage was very different from what you saw. They were warm and loving to each other. They embarrassed us kids. I learnt to check on dinner with you from watching me dad.”
“I love when you do that. Your ass may be dragging when you walk in the door, but you manage to get to me. I always thought you didn’t trust my cooking.” I thought we had returned to our joking ways.
“You didn’t get to see how good marriage can be. I love you, Lady. Don’t let the bastard win.”
Copyright Diana Walker 2007.
TERRY
I watched Diana slip away from me on the ride home from the market. She’d not tried to disrupt my driving with well-placed hands. She shrank into herself and stopped looking at the livestock along our route. She’d forced herself, twice, to mention changes in our small community, but the effort became too much for her, and she lapsed into a preoccupied silence.
“You were quite Johnny-on-the-spot helping that woman and older chap at the market.”
“When they pulled into the handicapped space as we were walking out, she looked so lost, alone, tired, hopeless; I knew what she was feeling. I knew what even an offer of help or a kind word would mean to her. I had a flashback to Dad’s last set of strokes before he went into the hospitals.”
Diana was lethargically putting groceries into the pantry with Okie nosing through the bags as I sat at the computer, checking emails as a pretext to be near her, an arm’s reach away with Holly at my feet. Diana’s shoulders slumped forward, and she sank to the floor, the bag of rice in her hands. She sat, looking but not seeing, our food stocks. I swiveled our computer chair and leant down to touch her shoulder; it startled her.
“I hadn’t thought of it in years.” She looked up at me with lifeless eyes and then held her arms out to me in supplication, in need.
I dropped to the floor so quickly the chair rolled away from the desk, coming to rest where the carpet and the tile meet marking the separation between the lounge and kitchen. I couldn’t have her in my arms fast enough. She held onto my neck, clinging to me, and we sat in our kitchen, my legs round her cross-legged form, my whole being willing her to tell me why that parking lot encounter had struck her so hard.
“I can’t be yours. I WILL NOT belong to anyone ever again.”
DIANA
We sat silently in our kitchen until the cold tiles and my frozen heart finally overwhelmed me. We’d been there long enough the dogs had given up on us ever moving again and had taken up their places in the living room – Okie on the sofa and Holly in Terry’s big wing chair. Terry had to be uncomfortable with his legs wrapped around me; even with the yoga and riding, he still isn’t the most limber man in the world.
I stiffened my back in preparation to stand, and he rose with me still clinging to him. He drew his legs under him and knelt, carrying me with him until we stood with our arms wrapped around each other.
“Diana, I know more about your classified life than I do your bloody parents. Don’t you think it’s time?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, but yes, you need to know about why you have this damaged cargo.”
We walked to the sofa where Terry made a grumbling Okie move to the other side of the sofa and laid us on the seat with me stretched along the sofa back, and he stretched out in front of me, boxing me in and pulling a comforter over us. He wrapped his arms around me.
I tried to lighten my mood as much as his before getting started. “Are we nesting?”
His actions, from sitting unmoving in the kitchen to putting me under siege on the couch, and his words told me I was not going anywhere until I explained myself. “Yes, we are until you tell me.”
The afternoon was as bleak as my mood – grey and misty. I didn’t know where to start because the pain went back so far.
TERRY
“When Mom and Dad moved to Texas
“I’d come home from work, and I could see they had spent the day at my house. That was back when the rain was more regular, and you had to time when you mowed so the yard wasn’t wet. On the days I had scheduled to mow when I got home, the front lawn would be manicured. I felt like my parents were my gardeners!” There’s some emotion. It’s outrage, but she’s no longer lifeless.
“They hated my housekeeper. Mary would come in once every two weeks and do the public rooms; I kept shoving stuff in my bedroom to get it out of the public rooms because I worked too many hours to sort through shit. As long as the dogs and I had trails to get around, we were happy. They hated the way I kept house, but they didn’t like my housekeeper solution either. They wanted me to do it. I didn’t have the time.” Ah, now I understand why she is so resistant to having Celeste, Junior’s wife, work for us as well. It seemed a sensible solution to me – Junior to keep the barn in order and Celeste to keep the house sorted.
“I heard from Nancy
“The really odd part was that they only came out when I wasn’t here. A guy on my team at work suggested that we surprise them one day when they weren’t expecting me to be home and have them find us in bed. Oh, don’t look so shocked,” she jokingly grumped at me and smoothed my eyebrow back down closer to my eye than my hairline. “It was enticing. I hadn’t gotten laid in a long time. I almost took him up on it, but explaining his charitable actions to his wife was more than I could handle.
“It was a very wet evening, and the solutions got more outrageous as they are wont to do when you’ve been drinking. The last one we landed on was that I should get some size 0 little frilly things, clothes and underwear that were totally out of character for me, and leave them around with half the closet filled with them. All my drinking buddies thought that would be outrageous enough to stop the odd behavior.”
I wanted to ask why she didn’t change the locks, but she was on such a roll, I didn’t want to stop her and risk her being sidetracked from her soliloquy.
“After Mom died, I went back to work for a dot com company, but I wasn’t really suited for its freewheeling nature. They had only ever known good times, and I was trying to keep the payroll a bit tighter for when the business downturn would come. I negotiated a nice out package and started the rest of my life. I did take a bit of perverse satisfaction when they went bankrupt after I left; the news reports quoted the chairman as saying their bloated payroll costs had contributed to the legal filing.” She sighed and shook her head. “I made sure I saw Dad a couple of times a week. We went up to Oklahoma
“Even though the cemetery with the family plot is a full care one, Dad took landscaping equipment but for a mower ….” Good, she really didn’t intend to follow through on keeping me out; she’s still using some of my phrases. She’s begun using ‘but for’ instead of ‘except’ or one of her Texas
“Mom had the social graces in the family. Dad had some very distant cousins and people he went through school with whom he hadn’t seen since high school living close to the small cemetery where Mom is buried. He wanted to drop in on them without calling. In the beginning I went along with it ….”
I nodded my understanding when she looked at me. “Let him mourn in his own way.”
“Sounds good, but it had nothing to do with grief. He was trying to connect with old friends, and I really wanted to encourage that. He was far too dependent on me even then. Often he wouldn’t mention making the stops until we were leaving the cemetery so I couldn’t avoid the unannounced visits without starting another fight. I did the best I could for those people; some of them didn’t even remember him because he’d been gone from his hometown for over 30 years. I’d conveniently forget he wanted to stop and be a long way from where they lived when he’d mention stopping, or I’d drive by their homes quickly muttering, ‘Doesn’t look like anyone’s home.’ Very passive-aggressive, I know, but Mom had taught me well. Finally, I got tired of his rude drop-ins, hanging my head in shame, and apologizing profusely as I walked into homes of people I’d never met. Often they were not thrilled to see us. They had their own lives.
“I finally decided to handle the visits proactively. We were going to Oklahoma
Protect herself this time? “Had he done that before?”
“He’d hit me two times in my life. Once, when I was in college and flexing my independence, he bloodied my nose and once right after Mom died; he’d let Rabbit into the dog yard without blocking the holes Holly had dug. I was afraid Rabbit would break his leg by stepping in one. That time he hit me with a horse whip.”
Her recitation had inflection in it, rather like telling a friend about chance encounters with a mutual acquaintance. I was ready to jump in the Porsche, as it’s the fastest conveyance we own, drive to the wanker’s grave, dig him up, and give him a taste of his own medicine. Who in bloody hell strikes his own adult daughter – twice – in one lifetime?
“He said I was screaming at him, and the neighbors would hear. Maybe I was. I felt like my ears were concrete and deadened the sound.” No bloody way was she screaming. When she’s been angriest with me, I’ve had to lean in to hear her.
“How did you protect yourself the last time?”
“I held my arms up so he could see how tightly he was gripping me and told him to let me go. With my arms that high, if he did release me and hit me, I thought I had a chance to cover my face. I’d been lucky the first time he hit me he hadn’t broken my nose; I didn’t think I’d be that lucky a second time. I told him if he ever touched me again, I was pressing charges. That scared him. I was willing to have him beat me and not fight back so I’d be the only one with bruises to show the cops.”
I flashed to the one time I’d grabbed her arms; she’d gone limp.
“He’d been making some bad choices for about two years then – not dangerous but not logical. He’d had two traffic accidents in the previous year. His eyesight was failing; he needed more support than he was willing to accept from me, but he wouldn’t consider going to assisted living. I got so I hated for my phone to ring; it was him checking to see if I was all right. There was always an undercurrent of anger and violence in the calls. He’d call in the middle of a thunderstorm, and when I tried to hurry him off, he’d demand that I call afterwards. I stupidly said yes. I was a dutiful daughter; I always said yes.
“If I wasn’t home when he called, he’d start phoning my friends trying to track me down. I had no life of my own. I had to be at his beck and call.
“I started controlling our interactions more. I called him daily at a big cost; if I called him in the morning, it drained all my energy for the rest of the day; if I called him late in the day, I dreaded it all day. I hated talking to my own father because all I heard was how bad the President was, the Cowboys played badly, the newspaper didn’t cover important news like what was happening in LA, his lawn service didn’t do a good job, Meal on Wheels was late. He hated
“On our phone calls, he always asked what I was doing not because he was interested; he only wanted to control my life. I finally learned not to tell him anything after enduring his objections to anything I was doing. He always had reasons. If I went anywhere, I was putting too many miles on my car. He hated that Jack was stabled at
“He really didn’t want me going to doctor appointments with him, but he finally let me start driving him around town as well as on the longer trips. That was when my life totally disappeared. At the point in their lifetime most adult children saw their parents once or twice a year, I was with Dad at least twice a week along with the daily phone calls. Before I started carting him to the appointments, I’d gotten so much garbled information from him about what his doctors were saying, the office staffs had started expecting me to call after one of his visits so they could tell me what the doctors had found, and I could explain to him what the doctors had said and meant. In a way, I was glad to go with him; it was easier than coming along behind him fixing what he had screwed up.
“When the extended family called, it was to find out how Dad was doing. I had become a non-entity even to them. The only thing they had to say to me personally was that life would get worse. I could only think, ‘Shoot me now’ because his mind was going, but he was physically strong as an ox. I was quite sure Dad would outlive me. He certainly was sucking all the life out of me.
“It was weird what he could remember, and most times there was a nugget of truth in what he told me, but I never knew for sure what was real. He reacted angrily or put the worst spin on anything that happened to him; that was nothing new; he’d done that my whole life. When I tried to point out a more productive way to approach something that had happened to him, like the lawn service not doing a good job edging his lawn, I wasn’t being supportive of him. When I tried to interpret what the doctors told him about his glaucoma, he lashed out at me as the bearer of bad tidings. He would never question his doctors about his treatments.
“One time when I talked to Aunt Faith, his sister, she said he’d had a chip on his shoulder when he was growing up as well; he’d been angry since his own father had died when he was a teenager. I trusted her not to tell Dad what we talked about, and we started comparing stories. He’d been a negative, critical, frustrated person his whole life. It was getting worse as he got older. Oh, you would have liked her – bright, sunny, cheerful, bit of a flirt, hopeful. More importantly, she would have loved you. She did love men in uniforms …married a submariner. It was hard to understand how two people from the same family who were so close in age could have such different outlooks on life.
“At his appointments, when the doctors started talking to me rather than Dad, I’d redirect them to Dad. I could hear and understand them very well, but they needed to make Dad understand them. I’m sure they thought I was a queen bitch; maybe I was, but their job was to interact with their patient. I wanted Dad to feel like he could maintain some sense of control. Part of my motivation was selfish; I wanted him to stay independent until a massive stroke killed him immediately.
“Dad wouldn’t ask the doctors questions no matter how much I tried to prompt him. He’d ask me before he’d go to the appointments, and I would ask the questions he had. I’d always phrase them, ‘Dad wants to know ….’ and direct their answers to him. I got so I could predict what he wouldn’t understand and made the doctors re-explain that information to him several times. I knew I’d have to clarify what they had said on the ride home; I was rapidly coming up to speed on all sorts of eye maladies, but I knew I didn’t understand ophthalmology well enough to teach Dad.
“Vision is such a subjective thing. All Dad’s objective tests showed normal; I couldn’t get inside his eyes and duplicate what he was seeing. For years after each of his appointments, I talked up the positives from the findings even as I reassured him I couldn’t see with his eyes. I had to walk a very fine line. God, I stayed bone-tired all the damned time, and I wasn’t even with him constantly.
“The thing that squicked me the most was Dad kept trying to turn me into his wife.” During her recitation, Diana had checked my reactions often; I’d been doing a fine job of keeping my masque in place until that moment. My revulsion overwhelmed my control; I buried my face in her hair so she couldn’t see.
“No, no. Not sexually. The man couldn’t use the words ‘I’ or ‘my.’ He referred to anything as ‘we’ and ‘our.’ It was always ‘our doctor’s appointment.’ I always corrected him to ‘your doctor’s appointment.’ Every Christmas he wanted to send out cards with both our names on them. I hadn’t sent out cards to my own friends since shortly after I got out of school, let alone have my name on some card to people I’d never even met. He never got used to being single again after Mom died.”
Diana went on autopilot again, but now she wouldn’t make eye contact with me. She looked at my chest, but she was back to not seeing again as she had been at the pantry. Okie sensed her unease and stuck his head over my shoulder; he wasn’t there to offer solace. The little bugger just wanted to be sure his life wouldn’t be disturbed by whatever was bothering Diana. Holly left her chair to lie on the floor beside us.
“Dad had been having mini-strokes since before Mom died. They were small and didn’t have any effect on his motor or speech skills. No droopy face. He just got tired. If I called late in the day, I could tell that he’d had one because he’d remark on how long a nap he took. He was already on aspirins, and the doctor had told me there was nothing that could be done to prevent the strokes at his age. He didn’t have high blood pressure, no heart problems; the blood vessels in his brain had simply weakened over time and gave way.
“The Friday before he was hospitalized, I called early. He complained about not being able to see well out of his good eye. That was nothing new; the first few times he’d said that, I rushed him to the ophthalmologist only to be told his glaucoma was fine, and his eyesight was 20/20. I blew it off this time as his complaint du jour. I went back to work on some data analysis for a pick-up compensation job I’d gotten. A little while later, I got a call from one of his neighbors that Dad had attracted her attention through the front window as she was walking her dog – she was calling from his house. He told her he couldn’t see; she waited with him until I drove down. You should have seen the glare she gave me when I got there.
“He walked towards me, and he bumped into walls, hit the grandfather clock in the hall, grazed the hearth, and couldn’t find his chair to sit down. I thought a blood vessel had burst in his good eye as it had in the eye where he was already blind, and he had lost the sight in it. I got on the phone to his ophthalmologist, and we drove down to the medical school where he teaches with Dad bitching the whole way about how far it was and how he didn’t need to go to the doctor less than an hour after complaining about not being able to see. Within three hours of arriving at the med school, Dad had seen three specialists – his regular glaucoma specialist, his retina specialist, and a new guy, a neuro-ophthalmologist – with Dad complaining to me about how long we sat in the waiting rooms between office exams; I was surprised they got him in so quickly. At one point, all three of the doctors and their interns were in the exam room with Dad and me. It also worried me that they all turned to so quickly; specialists only get that involved if they suspect something is really wrong. None of them could find a problem; his intraocular pressure was good, and he could see 20/20, but the neuro-optho wanted to do a biopsy on a vein on the side of his head to check for plaque build up. He scheduled the procedure for the following Thursday, and Dad had follow-ups with the other two on Monday and Tuesday. All he had to do was get through the weekend.
“When we got back to his house, I kept the keys to his car; I should have taken them a couple of years before. I got no support from any of his doctors on the subject of driving. His ophthalmologists all kept telling him he was fine to drive. His prostrate specialist said he didn’t have any jurisdiction; his GP was a wimp. Dad told me he’d kill me if I took his keys. I believed him.
“I had dinner with Dad and went back home to go back to work. I’d set him up in his recliner with ball games on TV and thought he’d be fine. After spending most of the day at clinics, I expected he’d fall asleep quickly. A couple of hours later, his next-door neighbor called me; Dad had wandered over to his house looking for help to call me. Dad had lost his ability to use the phone.
“We were having a brutally hot summer. I fed the dogs, made sure they had enough water to last them a couple of days, called Nancy and left a message for when they got home, and grabbed my go bag. The horses had plenty of grazing and water so they’d be fine for a day or so. When I got to Dad’s, he was sure someone (other than the hallucinations he’d been having that Mom and assorted dead relatives lived with him) had been in the house and had broken his glasses; he got in my face and accused me of sneaking back into the house and doing it. That was only the beginning of the escalating paranoia over the weekend.
“I had a really hard time convincing him his glasses weren’t broken and that I had been at home. He’d told me for years that I’d rather lie than tell the truth. I eventually weasel-worded everything I told him because if I was incorrect on anything I said, in Dad’s eyes I was lying. He accused me of lying to him again. Every time he started calming down, he’d lurch around his bedroom and start accusing me again. I had NO experience calming anyone as upset as he was. I thought he was completely out of control, and with his history of violence towards me, I was scared. I hadn’t seen out of control, yet.
“During one of his calmer moments, I asked him why he hadn’t called me. He told me he couldn’t find the phone. I went searching for it; it was right beside his chair in the living room. He changed his story and said he’d tried calling me, and I didn’t answer when he’d called; my phone hadn’t rung in the two hours I’d been home. It was possible he’d called in the fifteen minutes I’d been on the road. I suggested he show me how he had called me; he couldn’t. He started scribbling my phone number on notes; he must have written it five times himself, then had me write it several times. Between the times of writing my phone number, I kept reassuring him he wouldn’t need it; I was staying with him. He had me mark the phone with a purple felt tip pen with the buttons he had to push to speed-dial me. We must have gone over how to do that twenty times before he had me write the instructions; I wrote those three times. Right in front of my eyes, I saw him losing abilities and becoming even more confused, frustrated, and angry.
“I finally got him to bed, but it was close to midnight. That was one of the shorter incidents of the weekend. I was too exhausted to sleep, but I went to the guest bedroom and muscled the highboy in front of the door when I closed it. I was that afraid of what he might do.”
Her voice was still a monotone. Her impassiveness was her defense. All I could do was hold her to give her a physical barrier against the demons.
“I hadn’t met Reags yet. I had no one to call for help. Everyone was gone. Nancy and Bill were away for the weekend; my girlfriends were at horse shows. The perverse part of me liked being on my own; I wanted to see if I could handle Dad without a safety net. He’d never wanted to live in assisted living or a nursing home. It was obvious to me he could no longer live on his own though it wasn’t clear to him; I wanted to use that weekend to see if he could live with me. Looking back on it now, I guess I wanted to see if I could live with him without one of us killing the other.
“Saturday morning was the great pill debacle. He was taking so many pills; I had gotten him a seven-day, morning, lunch, dinner, night pill case to make it easier on him. He had left one day’s worth of pills in there; he refilled the rest of the days from that pattern. That concerned me. What if his ‘pattern’ day was wrong? When had it gone wrong? He was having such a hard time even getting the pills into the little boxes; I asked him if he would like me to do it for him. He agreed; I was shocked that he’d accept my help. Even though I knew a verbal beating was coming, I started working on them.
“I enraged him because I read the bottle and put the pills in by what it said and hadn’t followed his pattern day. It had taken him 15 minutes to fill two boxes; I had filled the entire week in five. He kept saying I was doing it wrong. I showed him each day looked exactly like his sample. He ended up dumping the whole thing on the kitchen table – even his sample; some of the pills landed on the floor.
“I don’t know if he was angrier because I could read, he saw his loss of control beginning, or his diminishing abilities began sinking in on him; it might have been a little of all, but he was mad about it, and I was back to being scared.
“I gathered all the pills up, put them down the garbage disposal, turned it on, and nothing. I added that to my list of things he’d tried to do on his own and fucked up, that I would have to fix. I didn’t cry then; I sat down and started refilling his pillbox. I worried about how to get his mail-in pharmacy prescriptions one week early for the pills I’d had to trash, but that was a worry for another day; I only wanted to survive until Monday.
“Dad didn’t have a computer; I could see getting the full compensation program set up for the software start-up company was not in the cards, at least not with me doing the work. I got Dad settled in watching some baseball, told him I had to go home for a bit, and I came home to print out the salary survey I had finished. At least I could send that on for the new compensation consultant to use when I called sometime the next week to bow out. I was gone less than an hour. I needed to do some grocery shopping, but I put it off since I didn’t know what disaster Dad would wreak while I was gone.
“When I got back to Dad’s, he was taking his pills except he had the Thursday morning pills in his hand, and it was Saturday afternoon. I got that sorted with much questioning from Dad about my trying to kill him, and we started talking about time and his perception of it. He didn’t know what time it was nor what day; he thought he had a doctor’s appointment the next day. I had to re-explain the next day was Sunday, and his doctor’s appointment was Monday. That got him complaining about doctors’ easy lives, not having to work on Sunday.
“He careened from one topic to another as we sat and talked. He wanted to know about my finances – again. He wanted me to teach him how use the speed dial on his phone – again. He tried to feed his cat who had died five years before. He even wanted Ward back in my life to take care of me. In a brave admission Dad admitted his confusion over the past few years probably had more to do with his brain aging than his eye trouble.
“He remembered he needed to reset the grandfather clock in the hall. He almost knocked it over in the attempt; I had the bruises from catching it on my shoulder, arm, and side for a couple of weeks. He never even noticed he’d almost bashed the clock. The poor clock! The weights and the chains they hung on were frozen in place from where he had tugged on them.
“I think it was at that point I KNEW I couldn’t care for him. He didn’t trust me to do anything, my abilities angered him, he resented that I could help him, and I couldn’t calm him. He still thought he could take care of me – a noble thought, but he was long past even being able to take of himself, let alone me.
“It was almost dark, and I was so grateful; Dad could go to bed, and maybe, just maybe, I could at least go to the bathroom. I hadn’t planned on it, but I fell asleep in the living room watching the Ranger game. It must have been midnight when Dad came in to tell me that someone had been in the house. I was at the end of my rope. I tried being logical with him that he may have heard the TV from the living room; he wouldn’t be used to that. He was sure that wasn’t it; he was convinced that someone had been in the house. He’d asked his brother, and HC wouldn’t talk to him. Of course Uncle HC couldn’t answer him! Uncle HC had been dead for years. By then I had gotten used to him referring to all the dead relatives in the house living with him and could usually bring him gently back to reality. Not tonight. It only provoked him into another rage. He started accusing a cousin who lived in Oklahoma City
“I let him rail until he was done about three AM. I had given up on trying to keep him in reality. Monday was only a day away.”
“I felt a little bit safer with Dad because he was now imagining someone else in the family was screwing him over, not me. I didn’t drag the highboy over that night, partly because I physically didn’t have the strength. I was glad I hadn’t when Dad came into the guest bedroom and woke me up bright and early Sunday morning claiming someone had stolen his car. I bounced out of bed and raced to the garage; there had been some thefts in town recently so it was a possibility. Both our cars, my little, beat-up Saturn coupe and his Lexus limo - it truly was a limo; all it needed was the privacy glass and some body armament panels to cart around some diplomat - were sitting there. The salesman certainly had taken advantage of Dad when he sold him that tank, another one of his bad decisions. I made a big show of checking his car before asking him why he thought his car had been stolen when it was sitting right here; I decided not to bring up that car thieves are not in the habit of leaving a replacement. He thought someone had taken his car and put a different one in its place – the same model, the same color, the same extras. I would have laughed but for the lump in my throat.
“I tried to convince him it was the same color, it had his distinctive umbrella in the trunk, and it even had his Cokes in the built-in cooler in the back seat. Nothing was convincing him. I asked him what would prove to him that the car sitting in the garage was his, not some duplicate the car thieves had run into the garage as a stand-in. He thought that if the State registration form, you know, the pink slip, matched the numbers on the car, it would help him believe.
“At that point, I was so crazy I wasn’t sure they would match. I wanted him to be the one to get the document from his LOCKED file cabinet; I knew if I did, he wouldn’t believe the numbers. He couldn’t open it. I eventually had him stand behind me as I unlocked the thing, got the car file out for him, and MADE him get the pink slip out himself so I never touched it before I relocked the cabinet at his insistence and re-hid the key. I read the VIN number on the dash to him while he tried to confirm the number on the registration form. With Dad’s eyesight, it took us close to 45 minutes to get the number confirmed. Dad still thought the car was a ringer – that they had peeled the VIN sticker from the dashboard and put it on the second car or that I had forged the pink slip. At that point, I gave up trying to reassure him. I flat told him that his car was sitting in the garage, and I was sorry he didn’t believe me.
“Go ahead and laugh.” Laughter was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to cry for her. “Looking back on it now, it all seems so absurd. I couldn’t take him to the hospital. What was I going to say? ‘He’s crazy!’ He was no threat to himself or anyone else. Would they believe me when I told them I was afraid of a frail, old man? No. I could have killed him if I’d cold cocked him. I was still trying to protect his dignity, misplaced, I know. I focused on getting him to the doctor’s appointment on Monday to the exclusion of everything else.
“I did get the senior citizen resource guide out and started making a list of assisted living homes. I was going to have him moved into a facility as soon as I could. At the rate I was going, he’d only go to the home when I admitted myself. On Friday, his retina specialist was surprised to hear Dad was still living independently; he pulled me aside and said, ‘It’s time.’ Easy for him to say. I started figuring who all I’d need to take with me to get him out of his house. Bill with his shotgun came to mind first.
“When we got to the med school on Monday, I must have looked like that woman did today. I hadn’t showered in three days by then; I’d tell Dad I was taking a shower, but every time I got in the bathroom, Dad would forget and have a crisis that had to be solved right then. We pulled into the parking area, and I had three valet parking attendants at the car, not because there weren’t many cars. One came to me; he put his hand on my arm and smiled at me. He said, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ The other two were helping Dad so gently, reassuring him they had all the time in the world as they walked him across a very busy driveway. It was the first kind thing that had happened to me all weekend.
“The glaucoma specialist found his intraocular pressure to be good, and his eyesight 20/20 for the second time in a very few days. I took the chance of elevating Dad’s paranoia again and dragged the ophthalmologist aside; at least if Dad had another tantrum it would be in public. I was betting Dad would have his ‘company manners’ on and not make a scene. I told the doctor about all that had happened over the weekend, and he took pity on me. He called the neuro-ophtho for a referral for an MRI that day and set up the appointment for the neuro-ophtho with the results the next day.
“Dad was so concerned about the MRI he forgot to be paranoid about what I had told his doctor. By now I’d gotten good at skirting the truth; I’d promised Dad sometime over the weekend I would never lie to him. The poor guy was having a hard enough time telling reality from fantasy, I had to be his sounding board even though a lie would have made my life easier.
“When the MRI tech brought Dad back out, the tech had a big envelope in his hands. He told me he would send the MRI electronically to the school, but he wanted a back up to be sure the doctors had them to read. That seemed a little odd to me so when we got home and I got Dad situated, I pulled those pictures out and created my own light screen in the kitchen. It was a huge bleed – but low in the back – so it didn’t affect much except for his memory. The swelling in Dad’s brain from that big a stroke had magnified all his natural personality traits on top of his finally recognizing his memory was failing. He was frightened and angered by the turn his life had taken. He lashed out at me more, but I was used to it. Once I saw the MRI, I felt so much better. I finally understood what had triggered that horrible weekend.
“
“Dad never went back to his home. The neuro-ophtho admitted him to the hospital. The cardiologists put him on blood thinners; they caused a second stroke, much smaller than the first but more devastating because of its location. He stayed in the hospital six weeks. He finally began understanding how like Swiss cheese his brain was and that he couldn’t live on his own any more. The doctors didn’t exactly lie to him, but they gave him a hopeful prognosis on getting some of his short-term memory back. He really wanted to live with me. When I asked him if he wanted me to be the one to change his diapers and bathe him, he finally got that there were no good choices left for him.
“He wanted me to stay at the hospital with him constantly as I had with Mom. I couldn’t. With Mom, her final illness was quick; with Dad, it would be a very long haul. I did stay with him ten to twelve hours a day the six weeks he was in the acute care hospital.
“With Mom, I made one phone call to the extended family, and within four hours I had ten cousins to share the load. With Dad, once he was hospitalized, I made ten phone calls, and a week later one cousin showed up at the hospital because she had a seminar in Dallas.
“Once he was released from the hospital to the nursing home, the complaints about the nursing home started. They had hookers coming in at night. He warned me off getting too close to his roommate, Dennis Krogh, a very nice, old man. According to Dad, Dennis had had sex with one of the hookers. The way Dad told the story was almost pornographic. As if Dennis could fuck anyone; the poor man was in a wheel chair, paralyzed from the waist down, and had a feeding tube. He couldn’t even speak clearly. I had toughened up a lot by then. I came back with ‘Wrong Crowe, Dad.’ He didn’t understand why I was laughing so much.
“My laughter was because Dennis pronounced his name the same way Crowe does; I guess I was trying to get some of my language skills back though my wittiness was lost on Dad.
“I never understood why his initial complaints had to do with sex – probably because he’d been so repressed all his life. I’d only seen him kiss Mom once my whole life, and he only gave her a peck on the cheek; that was the day I graduated from college. That was also the day my first fiancé dumped me. I stayed numb that day. I suppose I felt that if all marriage would get me was a peck on the cheek in public every twenty-one years and all the shit in between, I wasn’t missing much.”
She’d become more animated with the college story; she dipped her head and shrugged her shoulders, though she didn’t look at me. With her parents’ relationship as her prototype for marriage, it was a wonder she’d ever considered it at all. Peer pressure and social conventions are strong influences. I’ll be buggered; Diana’s brought up the reason-not-to-marry subject I hadn’t expected her to revisit.
“One day when I went to visit him, he had pulled all his clothes from his closet so he could take them when he went home the following week. He wasn’t going anywhere. He tried me every so often to see if I would relent on his living with me. I’d tell him his home was there now. He gave in more easily each time.
“I got nothing but grief over Dad not having a phone from people who would call him once a year. The man couldn’t operate a phone, for Christ’s sake! I broke down and got a cell phone, programmed their numbers into it, and called one set of friends or relations every week when I went to visit. I finally had to quit calling his acquaintances. He was so confused he often didn’t know who was on the phone, and he eventually forgot how to hold a phone.
“The home had lots of activities; he wouldn’t participate in any of them. He really was their star patient; he was in much better physical shape than the rest of the patients – all he was missing was parts of his mind. I kept trying to encourage Dad to make new friends. He wouldn’t. He’d warehoused himself. I was his property; he only wanted me.”
She’d finally finished.
DIANA
I finally came out of the trance I’d been in for the last hour reliving Dad’s horrible weekend until the doctors got their shit together to hospitalize him and then unintentionally making his condition worse with the blood thinners. What brought me out of it was Terry kissing the top of my head.
“I know you’re enamoured of my arms, Lady, but one of them’s asleep.”
He hadn’t moved an inch or said a word until he was sure I’d finished the worst of it. “I’m sorry, but thank you. I don’t think I’d have been brave enough to tell you all of it if you’d interrupted me. I love you for listening to me.”
He extricated his arm from underneath me, and I began trying to rub some life back into it. With our movement, the dogs decided we were alive and went back to their own doggie lives.
“Was that the first time you’d told anyone about it?”
“Nah. Several people had asked. I gave them the shorthand version. I only told Reags about the medical aspects of the strokes in the hospital when we were trading stories about our deceased fathers.”
“You’ve kept those days inside for a long time. That wasn’t good.”
“Everybody else has their own tough times they got through. They didn’t need to hear the specifics. It happened; I lived to tell about it.”
“You really did have to fight him every day of your life.”
“Until the day he died. I used to feel stupid that my parents had such a hold on my life, that I should have gotten over the childhood baggage the way everyone else had. I got over that feeling because I DID have to fight their control over me my whole life, and being a dutiful daughter, I compromised. I couldn’t dump them; at the end, Dad had no one else. Dad had such a warped view of what ‘family’ meant. I was his property. To him family meant ruling our lives, Mom and me. Picking and choosing for us.”
His smile was soft and warm. “Didn’t work too well with you, did it? He didn’t count on having an infinitely curious, intelligent daughter.”
“You’d be wise to learn from his mistakes, Terry. Don’t try to shield me from the nasty parts of life. I’ll find out sooner or later, and I won’t be as easy on you as I was when you kept Dino’s indiscretion from me for so long.”
I really didn’t want to hurt him or push him away, but now that I’d ripped off that scab, some of the infection would get on him as well. I’d always wanted one person who wasn’t tainted by my rocky relationship with my father; I thought that by keeping Terry mostly in the dark about it, he’d be the one. In truth, by keeping that defining relationship from him, I had kept him from knowing what really drove me. I’d only wanted him to know the happy, happy shit, not the darkness that lurked in the depths of my psyche. I wanted it to be easy for him to love me. I had done the exact opposite.
“Noted.” His smile was gone. “He’s gone now, Diana. The war’s over. Don’t let him win. Throw the baggage off the train.”
“What baggage?”
“For starters, let’s get a housekeeper. At least let Celeste come down when you’ve a yen to hit the heavy spring-cleaning as you’ve done recently. Once a year. Don’t you see your resistance to having some help around here goes back years?”
“You’re right.” I smiled my agreement to him, and he returned it. “I’ll go you one better. Whenever I’m gone on assignment, if I ever get called again, I’ll call Celeste myself and have her come down to clean for you.”
“You’d best warn her how you’ve trained me to pull
“Aww. Give her a thrill. You starkers.”
“We want both Junior and her to continue working for us. I can’t think of anything that would make them leave quicker.” We shared a giggle, our first since early morning, before a pained smile came to his face.
“I need to ask you a question about something I did. When I shook you, you went limp in my arms. Why?”
I thought for a moment and chose to answer all the questions that one word implied. “I wasn’t afraid of you. I didn’t think you’d hurt me, but I was giving you a chance. I felt like I deserved it right then. I’d hurt you. Even if you had hit me, I wouldn’t have called the cops.”
“I promise you, I will never touch you again in anger. I’ll take a page from Max’s book; I’ll walk away.”
“When I make you that angry, will you hold me instead?”
“Doesn’t work that way, Lady.” He tapped my forehead with his index finger. “Your romantic notions are interfering with real life again. I won’t walk that far away, but I’ll have to move from you. You trigger such strong emotions in me; I won’t trust myself within arm’s reach. I will stay in the same room; I won’t abandon you.”
“That’ll do.”
“The question now becomes how fully can you love me?” Terry asked an honest, loving question that I thought had been settled a long time ago.
“Where the hell did that come from?”
“‘I can’t be yours. I WILL NOT belong to anyone ever again.’”
“Who the hell said that?”
“You.”
“I did not!”
“You most certainly did. It’s so much a part of you; you didn’t even hear yourself say it.”
“When did I say that?”
“On the floor, in the kitchen.”
“What did I mean?”
“I was rather hoping you could tell me. I’ll never control you, Diana. I wouldn’t want that from you. I do rather fancy that some day you’ll give over.”
“I thought I already had.”
“In some ways. In most ways. My parents’ marriage was very different from what you saw. They were warm and loving to each other. They embarrassed us kids. I learnt to check on dinner with you from watching me dad.”
“I love when you do that. Your ass may be dragging when you walk in the door, but you manage to get to me. I always thought you didn’t trust my cooking.” I thought we had returned to our joking ways.
“You didn’t get to see how good marriage can be. I love you, Lady. Don’t let the bastard win.”
