Visiting Dad, Day 3

I like Anne Lamott books. The first I read was Bird by Bird, which is an excellent book about writing and one I really enjoyed. Her books I read most, and find most enjoyable, are her religious books. Traveling Mercies, Plan B, Grace (Eventually). These have not only given me comfort but have resonated with what Mary Oliver has called "the soft animal" in me.

This interests me from a separate perspective, because Lamott professes to a Christianity I'm not entirely comfortable with. It is, to be sure, a liberal Christianity but focuses too much on a personal interaction with God as well as an insistence on Jesus' divinity and, frankly, on her own history of drug and alcohol overuse as both the way she came to religion and the reason she continues, as if a missed daily prayer might be replaced by a shot of vodka.

But that's my issue and not hers. So I have been reading Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace while sitting with Dad since he spends most of the hours I'm with him sleeping. Today, I sat with him while he slept for an hour and then joined my cousin for a care conference about him. There wasn't much of anything new to be learned. He continues to decline, has gained and lost about ten pounds since I saw him last, and is continuing to lose his recognition of people close to him (although he also regains it, at least with me, by being with him). He has at least two urinary tract infections each year, which according to the RN, may be caused by his having been colonized by UTI bacteria, so that infection is more his regular state than noninfection.

No one, least of all my dad, thinks he will "improve" or "get better." We are all aware, at least intellectually, that we will reach his same state. Dad, so far as I'm aware, has never been unaware of this. My cousin recounted how he will sometimes cry, saying he wishes he had a gun and could be done with it all, and he said the same to me at one point this afternoon. It's not a sentiment I'm unfamiliar with, not having felt it myself (not yet, anyway), but something I've heard from slowly dying patients. But as I read in Small Victories, "Redefinition is a nightmare--we think we've arrived...and that this or that is true. Then something happens that totally sucks...and it is like changing into clothes that don't fit, that we hate. Yet the essence remains. Essence is malleable, fluid. Everything we lose is Buddhist truth--one more thing that you don't have to grab with your death grip, and protect from theft or decay. It's gone. We can mourn it, but we don't have to get down in the grave with it."