Dad
On Christmas Day when I called Dad, he asked about the weather, whether we had been affected by the storms—a December derecho!—last week. No, I said, the worst of the storms passed west and north of us. He told me that a longtime member of his church, a man who claimed Hatfield (of Hatfield–McCoy feud fame) blood, who had fought in Vietnam and had suffered long-term effects of Agent Orange poisoning, died last week. He told me that he was working on a jigsaw puzzle (of the National Parks), that there was a marathon of old television Christmas specials on TV, and that the TV was up too loud to hear very well. So we said good-bye.
It was just last spring that J—— called to say that Dad had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. I wasn’t surprised. When in 2018 we drove through Iowa as J——’s RAGBRAI support team, I was struck by how narrow his world had become. One night, I stepped out to write this on my phone:
Who is Dad now? When we are alone and he is driving to the next town, he resembles the man I’ve know the last several years – talkative but not to the point of conversation, exactly: he’s disinterested in anything I have to say or think. He tells the same stories, about his storytelling competitions, how difficult it is to fix cars these days, his exploits shooting rats at the Searcy city dump and wayfinding in the woods as a boy, his nervousness and anxiety, his hikes in the woods with the dogs, the animals in general; he repeats the same complaints about J——’s sister (she’s lazy, overweight, irresponsible with debt) and about land in Searcy (neighbors renege on verbal agreements their parents made, oil and gas companies cheat you and lay waste to the land). But once we stop, he thinks of nothing but when J—— will arrive, what she needs to know to get to the RV, and making himself a sandwich. When she does arrive he hovers, doing what she tells him to do (“Why don’t you go sit outside? This RV is too crowded for you to be standing around.” “Why don’t you separate these grapes and put them in a container?”), until mid-afternoon, when he nodds off in his chair. He isn’t quiet—so many sounds come out of his mouth! Belches, nonsense rhymes and exclamations (“Argle-bargle,” “Toot toot!”) repeated again and again, whistles, made-up songs (to the tune of Camptown Races, mostly for the effect of repeating “Doo dah, Doo dah”), exhortations to or about the dog all create a patter of extraordinary noise. But when he sits down he drifts into himself, quiet, staring ahead seeing nothing. He is timid. He fears the possibility that the propane tank on the RV might go empty because he doesn’t know what to do to fill it. He looks suspiciously on the RV levelers, which let the water drain, because he isn’t sure they’ll actually level the RV, and what if we drive off and leave them behind?
At the time I didn’t chalk Dad’s behavior up to anything specific or especially new. He had never been a model of manners or candid conversation; it seemed that all his worst habits were amplified. He had changed, and to what degree was the subject of a lot of my thinking after the week was over. Perhaps the constant pain he lived with, a consequence of years standing on concrete floors, which put a hitch and slowness in his step, was overwhelming. Perhaps he deeper connections with other people. Who could say for sure? Meanwhile, it became more difficult to connect with him—literally, because emails, phone calls, and texts grew sketchier, and it was impossible to sustain a conversation. He had always been difficult, and now he had both harder edges and softer focus. So when “Parkinson’s” was said out loud, it made sense.
The diagnosis didn’t make much sense to Dad. In June I spent two weeks with him while J—— was to be out hiking the Appalachian Trail. He complained about the physical therapy he had been asked to do; he said he didn’t think the medications he was taking were very effective. He circumnavigated each day, up by 5:00 and out by 8:30 every morning to run errands and feed the stray cats around town, returning by 10:30 to watch Gunsmoke. He would then tap on his phone, eat some trail mix, nap, work on a puzzle, one thing or another like that, until about 6:30 in the evening, when he put on his pajamas and retreated to bed to fall asleep to Wheel of Fortune. To shake him from that routine took a lot of cajolery, and even then—as we found when he stayed in the car while we toured James Madison’s plantation—only shook him so far. Our phone call on Christmas Day was tragically consistent.
Is anyone ever truly ready to face their parents’ decline? What prepares us to stitch together how like our families are? It was J—— who reminded me that my grandfather’s last years were spent in worry, over his own failing health, over fears my grandmother could no longer take care of him, over the smallest things. Mimi rolled her eyes at Papa, she threw up her hands, and now J—— does the same for Dad. And me, I can little more than watch it happen, from a thousand miles away.
