Standing By for Takeoff

Dad in the Hospital

A picture of Dad my sister took a few years ago. She caught him in motion as he tossed a toy glider at a local park. He was beginning to show his illness then, but he was still vertical and still, as he always had, loved airplanes of all kinds.

I know, now, why they make ghosts transparent in pictures. When you see someone who is leaving this life, he seems to be dissolving into the ether. Dwindling, a friend of mine calls it.

My Dad left the Big Fancy Nursing Home on the Hill late yesterday and is now in the hospital. Whatever it is we've been fighting--an infection?--within him for almost a month has laid him low again. A month ago, he was home, walking with a walker, sitting outside in the sun, and singing "Hail, Hail, The Gang's All Here" every day when I walked in the door.

Now he is ethereal. At the local hospital he is in a private room, looking fragile and sleeping quietly. He was unresponsive almost all day yesterday, sick to his stomach, and sleeping all the time. That's why the nursing home sent him to the hospital.

Now he's getting hydrated and looks a little better. He awoke when my Mom and I walked in this morning, and when I wrote "We Love You" on a notepad, he read it and tried to clap his hands. I wrote to him that he was in El Camino Hospital and he said "I'm in a private room. That's nice." And, to see if I could get him to smile, I wrote: "No one else could stand you, so they put you in by yourself." He read this very slowly then he looked around to see my face and he cracked a smile. It's the first one I've seen from him in a couple of weeks.

He said before we had our reunion party--well, my Mom and I were there, and I guess he figured we must be having a party--he wanted to put on his shoes and use the bathroom. "I have to perform my natural functions, you know," he said, slurring his words but using the careful vocabulary he always uses in spite of his dementia. "I want to ascertain my condition," he said later. "The food here is superior. I plan to eat all day and night," and then he dozed off again, having eaten a crumb or two of a muffin and drinking a little juice.

The doctor had a long talk with me about resuscitation and extraordinary measures and I said I couldn't imagine it would come to that, yet. And he just looked at me and said Dad was very sick.

I'm trying to remember the days Dad loved when my sister and I were kids and he'd built a model plane and we took it up into the Stanford Hills and flew it all around us in the California sky, above the brown fields and oak trees. No one gave us permission. We just went up there and made sure we didn't annoy the cows. It was freedom of a kind you don't see much anymore and it involved engineering and planes and children and these were all things he loved.

Dad and me and a neighbor boy with the "Sparky K" in the Stanford Hills beyond Los Altos. The "Sparky K" was named for my sister and me, Sparky, because my grandad called me "Spark Plug" and "K" for my sister Kimberly. The "Sparky K" had a gasoline engine and we crashed it quite a lot. I guess we were lucky we didn't start any fires.

He was so happy then. Years later, when he had retired, he flew real planes for fun. He joined a flying club and he and his friends took up the Cessnas and flew from one local airport to another, had lunch, and flew home. He felt so free up there, and there were rules to it that he understood. Unlike life and people, which he almost always found annoying or frustrating.

I don't want him dissolving on me or becoming invisible, but that's what happens in life as we come to the end. In the midst of life we are in death. I just haven't wanted it. He's like a Star Trek crew member, being beamed somewhere that I can't follow. I know he'll be free then and somewhere much nicer than here.

And wherever it is, I know it will be filled with airplanes, for soaring.

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Missed it by That Much: Another Reprieve for Pop

I don't know if my angel friend the Patron Saint of Parking stepped in or what, but my father has made a miraculous recovery from his infection and yesterday was back on his feet. It appeared he had been to Lourdes, the difference was that great.

I didn't have the heart to okay his transfer to the nursing home when they called and said they had a space in a three-bed room. I asked them to put us on the wait list for a semi-private or a private room, and that's where we are today. He's still very rickety on his feet and is always one step away from disaster at every moment. But ...

... he missed Old People Jail by that much.

When I saw him yesterday, after two straight days of being unable to get out of a chair, he was standing in his underwear, getting ready for a shower! When he saw me peeking into his room, he took his hands off his walker and did a little dance. Later he was very funny and said; "You're my granddaughter and you should not see me nekked like that."

Well you weren't naked, I told him. Then later he told me, "Hey you're not my granddaughter. You're my daughter." Seems he's coming around in mind and body.

Also, today is his 65th wedding anniversary.

In the course of this latest crisis, I was feeling mighty low about putting him in the home (even though I still haven't done it), and, rooting through some old pictures of him, I found a baby picture taken in about 1920 in Birmingham, Alabama of my Dad as a toddler.



That big smile is so familiar, and now it is back again, for however long we have. Something else: my father is known for his big feet (which he managed to pass on to me) and I want you to take a look at that photo. Look at the size of that baby's shoe!

He's again walking around on those big feet, though it is more of a shuffle now than a walk. You have to give him a lot of credit for that. It is mostly his will to live that is keeping him upright. That and a very good-sized foundation.

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All the Leaves are Brown, And the Sky is Grey ...

Wow, the last ten days have been so challenging I haven't been able to blog. We've had the final hot days of the California summer season, and I, watching things at my parents' home, realized I was approaching meltdown myself.



I took a few days off during this final heat wave and headed up to the Sierras where it was really beautiful: but even then I couldn't write about it. I visited all the little Gold Rush towns: Twain Hart and Angel's Camp, Copperopolis and Murphys, Sonora and Railroad Flat, winding my way through Calaveras County and crossing the Stanislaus Rivers. It was good to get away, but I knew there were big decisions looming about what to do regarding my father.

I could see he was losing his ability to walk, which happens with some kinds of dementia of the Alzheimer's type. He's losing his motor skills. He's having trouble feeding himself.

Even with 24-hour care at home, we can't manage him if he can't walk. We would need two people 24-hours a day, and that's not even practical.

So I came back from the mountains relaxed and feeling better about things, but still aware that I would have to do something: that is, aware that somehow I would have to get my father into nursing care.

Nursing care is something no one in the family wants for Dad, least of all Mom who, upon hearing that we're going to do it, will go ballistic (which is why I haven't told her yet). Dad himself will be confused and upset by the change, and thus it will at first seem worse for him. And I will actually have more responsibilities, because I'll have to spend more time driving to see him, so I know he'll be okay, and driving my mother to see him, and helping to manage his care at the nursing center because you have to stay on top of things to ensure the one you love gets the best of care.

Then, yesterday morning, Dad couldn't walk at all and wanted to go back to bed after breakfast. I knew something was wrong and we took him to the hospital. He had a low grade infection and they didn't admit him, but that simple thing has wiped him out.

Thus I've visited a new skilled nursing center to see if they have room for Dad and to see if it is something he might like. Or might not hate as much as I imagine.

My sister and I have done this drill already once this fall, as you may recall, and the day we planned to move him, the Big Fancy Nursing Home on the Hill didn't have a bed for him, and my sister and I didn't really like the BFNH's attitude. So we backed down and let it go another month and now, here I am. Looking for another place.

I never thought I would say this, but I would rather go out and cover a 7-11 shooting, live, for the six o'clock news.

The place I've found, if they will take him, is smaller than the BFNH and closer to my house and my mother's house and is adjacent to the local hospital. It is sunny and bright. How they might treat him there, I can only discover once he is there.

But I must do this this week, because if I leave Dad at home, unable to walk, he or my Mom or one of the caregivers, or even myself, will get hurt trying to transfer him from bed to chair to bath, and then we will have another candidate for nursing care on our hands.

Come to think of it, perhaps I should just check into the place with my Dad so I can get a complete rest.

These are awful decisions we have to make, but there we are. Life, as my parents have known it at their home in Los Altos for more than half a century, will change and it will change forever. My parents had the option to make decisions about these things much earlier in their lives, when they were living in healthy retirement, and they chose not to do that.

So now they must rely on their children to make these choices for them. Just as we once had to rely on them.

We are in the midst of our first touch of autumn in Northern California now and the state is as achingly beautiful as ever. But, we are having a break from what P.G. Wodehouse once called our "relentless sunshine." It is somehow appropriate to the tasks I have at hand.

Autumn in California, as the leaves change on the maple tree just down the street ...

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