The First Class Experience
When I hug him all I feel are his shoulder blades, emphasis on blades. His body is hard and sharp and he doesn't reciprocate hugs anymore - too strenuous a task. There isn't a single ounce of fat on his entire body. He takes 6 inch steps and still talks shit if an elderly person walks by him hunched over. He's healthy because he doesn't hunch over. He barely eats, but his fridge is full of cake and cookies. He says he has been feeling "weak" the last few weeks since he started to fall. His legs will give out now and he'll go down and have to stay down until they work again. He is not going to go to the doctor or accepting any help with this, of course. Some days he’ll say he is going to get help, let the doctors test him, maybe even go live in a care facility with his sister in Coeur d'Alene and my stepmom and I have shared an elated, “FINALLY!!” over this. But we've quickly learned that acknowledgment of vulnerability means he's in a dementia spell and when he snaps out of it, he goes back to, “Oh no, no no, I'm just fine.” For his legs giving out, he has started taking creatine. He thinks that will do it. He did have to go to the VA to get stitches from the last fall and they told him they want to run some tests but last weekend he explained to me why he is not going to allow that, as if I needed the explanation again after all this time. The current one he’s using is that "the last time he was in the hospital, he was there for three days." In his mind, this is an absurd amount of time and evidence that the medical field doesn’t respect him or his time - the time he would rather be spending alone, sitting in a chair pulled up to his sliding glass door, staring at the desert in silence for days, weeks.
His voice is shaky and breathy now, speaking seems like a workout for him. When I visited we ate at Sizzler, obviously, and as I drove us away he said, "Boy oh boy, that was the first class experience."
On the drive home he asked if I knew The Bee Gees and I said "of course" and pulled them up on Apple Music. He was shocked that I could play any music he wanted at any time with an app. We listened to their top songs and he started to sob with his hand over his heart, moved so deeply by their voices. He has always cried when he listens to music he loves, overwhelmed by the beauty of it. Elvis, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Chicago - tears will stream down his face as he shushes everyone so they can experience what he’s experiencing. As I drove, he passionately exclaimed, "Gosh. Ugh. WOW. There's just no one like them." This particular display of vulnerability does not scare him and I’m thrilled about it.
Over lunch, I asked him what the meaning of life is and he said "Thankfulness." And I know gratitude is both getting him through and justifying his resistance to care. No matter what horrible ailment he suffers through, he tells himself that a lot of people have it worse and moves forward in gratitude. When you ask him about any big difficult event in his life, he'll talk about gratitude. Being given up for adoption into a house with a father, who hated him, being drafted, going through two divorces and a separation, losing jobs, losing loved ones. He finds the sliver of good and is grateful for it.
Gratitude is how he can truly feel, to the core of his being, that eating at Sizzler is the first class experience. What more could you ask for than a bevy of choices waiting for you to gobble them up? He loves the freedom of the salad bar. He loves that we can go back as many times as we want, even though neither of us ever do. His relationship with gratitude is what enables him to tell me so earnestly that if I ever "need a vacation" I am more than welcome to come to his house where I have a room, a bathroom, and where I don't have to cook because "meals are covered." You should hear his passionate pitch, if I didn't know what his house was like, I'd believe that it must be amazing. His gratitude is a survival tactic and it will also be the death of him. I mean, he's 79 years old, so it's probably more fair to say that life will be the death of him.
I inherited his ~gratitude in all circumstances~ survival tactic and it has helped and harmed me in equal measure. Through trial and error + error + error + error, I've finally learned that a balance of gratitude, discernment, acceptance of reality and proactive action is the formula that works for me.
As I leave, I take some photos for the collection of memories I’ve been intentionally building. I text them to him but he’s on his third phone in a month’s time because he can’t operate any of them and he can’t work this one either, so he won't see them. I have helped but the help doesn’t help. I cheerfully tell him to call me in a few days like nothing's wrong, because that’s the reality he’s built for himself and the one we’ve learned to live in so as not to be the target of his terrifying wrath. I can handle him much better when he’s in a soft mood, talking about gratitude and crying to The Bee Gees. So I do what I can to keep him there. It's his world and I'm just biting my tongue in it.
