At Midnight...

I was dead asleep on the couch a little while ago, when my husband awakened me to go to bed. So I went to brush my teeth and, as such things often do, a working-mystery my mind has been chewing on seemed to be suddenly solved.

My parents recently moved to my town. For a decade, I'd hoped they would and had actually given up hope when my central Florida family had a change of heart and decided to make this rather arduous, strenuous move.

I'm glad they're here, but it's too late now for anything but a family-provided nursing-home sort of care. My children are grown now, and I'm at that stage of life -- that little wedge -- between raising one's children and one's own decline into old age and all that that implies.

Several of my friends have already lost a parent or two, and one has lost her husband. And so I am not among the first to have the experience of seeing parents advance to late stages of life, even in my group of close intimates.

My father was always a dynamo. I speak of this in the past tense because that man has already gone. My father survives right now, physically. He is not bedridden and he is conscious; he is not in dementia. In fact, his once vibrant intellect still hangs onto pragmatic information, which he communicates to me each time I see him.

But he is so back in there, as to be utterly transformed. Several years before my 26-year-old son was born, Dad suffered a mysterious ailment in his kidneys which resulted in a form of rhumatoid arthritis that attacked his right knee and almost destroyed it. Long story short: nothing worked shy of a too-late total knee replacement. Painful physical therapy was avoided and so his leg never recovered its former movement. But his life recovered and his professional career continued for many years, until he retired.

Even in retirement, he was a dynamo. He spent a decade exploring all of his creative talents. He dug out old manuscripts of novels he'd attempted in youth and finished them. He wrote and published a fictionalized account of a moment in his family's history. He explored the skill of colored pencil drawing and produced copious portraits and landscapes. He went with my mother to England. He attended an Episcopal men's Bible study group for more than a decade, rising early every Thursday morning, and studied most of the Bible and all of the scriptures. He decided to not call himself "Christian," but instead "a follower of Christ." He also attended a Friday morning men's breakfast group in Ybor City, driving himself there until he moved to me. His condo benefitted from his friendly personality and his construction expertise, even when it sometimes reeled from my mother's intense energies and intrigues.

He taught my son, his only biological grandchild, to fight and to shoot a rifle -- skills I would have left out of his boyhood; but which Dad felt all men should know. And this actually added to my son's amazing humanity and taught me a lot about the confidence men get from knowing how to protect their families.

He taught me to: love people, exercise my intellect, sail competitively, draw, trust myself, and to be a confident woman.

As I sat across his dining table from him earlier today, I looked into his eyes. Suffering from multiple health issues now, his eyes are no longer his eyes. I couldn't even see the blue. I encouraged him to take on the disipline I've had to learn, of washing my eyes each morning and night, so his eyes would become clear again, maybe.

When we saw his new doctor two weeks ago, his kidney infection had returned. His former doctor had provided one more Rx for a med to combat the infection. But the new doctor may be sharper than the old. An unannounced referral slip arrived in the mail, sending him to a urologist. I think she'll look deeper than the former doctor, who did nothing but write scripts and avoid diagnosis.

I don't know... maybe he was seeing something and didn't want to rock the boat. Maybe he didn't see anything. All I know is that Dad suffered two unusual incidents in the past months, both putting him on the floor and helpless. Neither event sent him to the hospital, but similar events in the future surely will.

His former perky personality is sleeping now. It's hard for him to form words. He has little energy for communicating. After years of studying everything, I believe that his mind is simply in a zen state. He stares into the middle distance; not even at the TV or out the window. I ask him if he has pain, and his answer is always no. When I ask him how he's doing, his answer is always, "pretty good." He sleeps away his days. He fears leaving his familiar surroundings, his bathroom, his bed. But he'll go out several times a week for Mom's sake.

She has a certain kind of denial in all of this. I have to pop her balloon occasionally, to make her come back to reality because she strays easily. But I try to not pop it too often because it may be getting her through this. What 82 yr old wants to be a major caregiver?

But when I looked into Dad's eyes earlier tonight, it added to the mystery I'm walking around questioning: What's happening to you? And where have you gone? Will we find out something terrible that has been missed, and cost you your survival?

Brushing my teeth and not thinking about anything, I was suddenly hit with the knowing that it's bad; he's very sick. Those were not merely unwell, old eyes. They were the eyes I've seen at life's end; in cancer wards. Pupils open so widely that I almost see the retina; the vacancy. I pray he's telling me the truth when he says there's no pain and he's doing "pretty good."

When he was much younger, I think he worked on the concept of dying. He took a spiritual journey through Christian theology and arrived at peace. Now that he no longer has much intellectual curiosity, our lifelong conversations are over. He doesn't look at email much. He's gentle, but not dynamic. I think his gaze is in the next world.

These realizations tonight awakened fear and sadness. I don't know what's ahead. I have a lot on my plate. It's awhile before my sister arrives here to live. I'm doing the best I can to keep all boats afloat. Trying to parse out the real needs and see that they're met. Trying to keep my own livelihood afloat.

With my father gone from his old ways and with his future so uncertain, I begin to enter that new land where one outlives one's parents. My father has always been a bit of a life raft. He warned me this day would come and I thought we all had more time. I don't know why. I'm not so young and he's very old. Mom is actually a younger 82 than he is. And I realized tonight that the reason for that is that he's very sick and is sailing away from us.

Such a father he has been. Not so much a nurturing parent. And certainly no saint. But a person who took big bites in life, dared big, achieved much, and showed me how to do the same. His chi was phenomenal.

I've often said that when Mom goes, the world will lose a great catalog of what's going on with politicians and celebrities. But when Dad goes, a bountiful little loving man will simply leave us. Leaving behind a legacy of mid-Century buildings in the Tampa Bay area, a legacy of a man who tried many things, and a legacy of a man who took the stuff of his DNA and family history and wrote the next chapter.

A pre-feminist man who knew, nevertheless, to set his daughters free to discover their own power. Who hired early female architects in his architectural firms. Who was the coyote, the trickster, the one with the sparkle in his eyes.

That's what the world has lost in this new phase: a man who had fun and worked hard in life, and exercised his creativity in all respects. I shall miss him. I miss him already.
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