Lionesses' Teeth

 

This 2nd round of the trumpanista government, while it often leaves me depressed, has also roused in me the sensation about how important my religious faith is to helping people remember they're worthy, they're strong, and they can help. Thus, I'm reposting a sermon from 2013 which is also a reworking of a message from 2 years before that that focuses on those attributes we uniquely have and why they are necessary. (This post is so old that the technology taking people to associated websites will ask if going there is really what you want to do. I have checked them, and yes, they are safe."

   

“Lionesses’ Teeth”

 

Homily presented to the

Dakota UU Church of

Burnsville, MN,

 

            Normally during my celebration of Flower Communion my contribution is a freshly-plucked dandelion.  Taraxacum officinale.  I use it because we all recognize it in its omnipresence, as indestructible as love. 

            We have yet to see them this year because of the incredibly late winter we’ve experienced—only a week ago my wife and I were stranded because our driveway had sixteen inches of snow unceremoniously dumped on it by whatever malevolent snow-god or whatever sleeping spring-god there might be —but I guarantee you they will be coming and they will be everywhere.  The dandelion is the cockroach of flora.  They existed long before our species rose up from the proverbial swamp and after we return to the dust they will continue to be here. 

The name “dandelion,” which I’d always assumed referred to the yellow mane of the flower and its seeming vanity, actually comes from the French dents de lion, “teeth of the lion,” and refers instead to the deeply serrated rosette of leaves that poke up from billions of lawns, in abandoned lots, between the cracks in concrete, in the clefts of mountain crags and skyscrapers, and sometimes tufting out of the useless chimneys of houses where no hearths have burned in decades.  They are perennial and rely on bees and flies to pollinate, and when they’re ready, the wind carries their seeds on tiny parachutes to new places.  Sometimes they fly as much as several hundred meters.  They do not need us at all.

            Dandelions are often used as a medicine, usually involved with blood, the liver, and gall bladder.  Its juices aids detoxification and bile flow, promotes lactation and the immune system, and helps reduce eczema and cough and asthma.  The root can be dried and ground up and added to coffee, like its close relative chicory, and the leaves are often delicious in salads (although I’ll admit I have to add a lot of butter to make them palatable).  And most of us are of an age when we have had dandelion wine.

            Had Jesus been born in, say, Kansas rather than in the Middle East, the Sermon on the Mount might have included the following: 

Consider the [dandelions,] how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 

             Now don’t mistake all this information for anything like love for the dandelion.  I relish nothing more this time of year than to walk barefoot among my lawns, swiping the heads off these parasites with a few well-aimed kung fu kicks.  There is a deep, satisfying, bottom-of-the-gut joy that comes with yanking a 3 foot long dandelion root from my gardens.  Few things are as pleasurable as watching the beasts disappear under the deck of my lawnmower.  I do not love the dandelion.  I tolerate the dandelion.

            Because, try as I might to eradicate it, the dandelion remains as much a part of my life as a part of my landscape.  I cannot escape its existence.  I mow and weed and even spray the lawns, and still they come back up.  That is their unique power. 

A story now, a contemporary one, about motherhood that serves to relate how people are like dandelions.  Our relationships with our mothers, with either parent actually, can be pleasant and problematic at best.  I had what I think was a pretty good relationship with my late mother and with my dad, secure at all times in the knowledge that, no matter what, they loved me and wanted nothing but the best for me.  Those among us who are mothers or parents likely have that same assurance that they, too, love their children no matter what. 

            This week we saw the end of a news story that adds a different, more complex concept to this topic.  I refer of course to the story of the three girls, now three women, in Cleveland, the first of them abducted nearly eleven years ago, the last of them nearly nine years ago, all three found alive and relatively healthy in the home of their presumed kidnapper. 

            We can have only the barest inkling what Melissa Knight, Amanda Barry, and Gina DeJesus experienced over the past decade.  We should be thankful for that.  Worse perhaps, we are even less capable of imagining what the six year old daughter of Amanda Barry and her captor, whose name has yet to be released, has experienced.  If she is fortunate she herself will retain little memory of what her life to now has been. 

[Note:  In illustrating this post I purposely chose a photo in which her daughter's face is blurred.  There are many images available where it is not but I think she should be allowed as much privacy as possible.]

            There are so many things to be said about this situation, about the Castro Brothers’ activities and what they hoped to accomplish [update]; about the women’s years in captivity and in physical, emotional and sexual abuse; about how this situation happened in a neighborhood of a major American city and not in some Hills Have Eyes outback; about the unwillingness of police, despite what are supposed to have been multiple reports by neighbors, to investigate beyond the front door of Castro’s home; and most especially, there are things yet to say about Charles Ramsay and his willingness to expose his own past—because in this brave new networked world there are no past sins that can’t be found—in order to do the right thing. 

            But what I’d like to talk about is Amanda Berry and her daughter.  And how what little we know might suggest about motherhood and resilience.  The story as it’s come to us is that a week ago today Ariel Castro left his home to eat at a local McDonald’s.  If he did this on a regular basis we don’t know, and if he didn’t why he chose this day to do it, no one apparently knows, but when he did Amanda Berry took the opportunity to scream as near the door as she could until someone responded.  Charles Ramsay did, and it’s a testament to his heroism that this man, who partied with Castro, eaten BBQ with him, played music with him, didn’t say “It’s a domestic matter” and turn around, and after listening to her story that she was being held against her will kicked the bottom panel out of the door.  Berry, carrying her child, squeezed through the broken panel, hugged Ramsay, begged him to take her to his house to use his phone, and then called police.

            Some of us might routinely play a mental game with ourselves in which, if we were caught in a disaster and could save only one thing, what would it be.  To make it more interesting we often presume that there are no people or animals involved, to make it a specifically material question.  What thing would we save?  Amanda Berry did not have the luxury of pretending or of there being no person involved.  The material object she left with was her daughter.

             To put this decision in perspective, consider what myriad complications must have been involved over the past six years.  Berry was just under seventeen when she was abducted.  After years of sex with her abductor and probably his brothers—we presume the middle brother, Ariel, is the abductor because it’s his house the women were found in but the abductor could be any of the brothers[see update above] or, worse yet, someone we’re not even aware of—she is pregnant at twenty and delivers a daughter into the dark, airless, sunless existence she’s come to figure will be her future.  We don’t know if she wanted this girl or feared for her existence, born into the same situation she’d been held captive in, and it’s likely it was a combination of both sensations and any number of others.  She may have wanted to abort the fetus, although we have heard suggestions from one of the the other women that Castro beat her when she was pregnant to spontaneously miscarry.  So what we are left to guess at is that either Amanda fought vigorously to have this child or that Ariel, who DNA tests have proved to be the father, had a change of heart over this pregnancy and decided to allow it to be brought to term. 

            This girl, born into a situation her mother was abducted into, and raised only in the company of the other two abducted women and the Castro brothers—what can be going through her head?  She is six years old, she has known only these six people in her life.  Two of them are her parents.  One of them carried her out of her world into the unknown, into what she can’t possibly know.  So while we can’t know what Michelle, Gina or Amanda has gone through we can, with some certainty, know what Amanda’s daughter is experiencing now:  Absolute, unqualified, quaking fear.

              It seems to me, as an outsider looking in on parenthood, that this is one extreme part of what it means to be a mother:  To deliver your child into great uncertainty and, when the time comes, to help her escape into greater uncertainty.  But that is what you must do. 

            It’s well known that among lions it’s the female, the lioness, who hunts and who is really the fiercer of the species so it may be that the distinctive feature about dandelions—their serrated leaves, the dents de lion—may more accurately be termed the dents de lioness.  Perhaps the natural reaction as mothers, as parents, even as proponents of religious liberalism, is to emulate the dandelion—stubbornly resistive to any attempt to root us out, to burn us out, and even to the natural tendency of entropy to crumble us from within. 

            Our message, the message of religious liberalism, the message of people who see great complexity to parenthood—that it is better to be alive than to be dead, that to treat anyone as less than the glorious being that he or she is is itself an evil, that children and the people we’re responsible for need safe food and safe water and safe places to live, and that these are not starry-eyed ideals but necessities—must be heard.  We must endure for these messages to be heard.  We must become ubiquitous and obnoxious, unwilling to be pressed from our perch.  We must be willing to grow quietly beside the more beautiful and cozened strawberry and rose and lily so to suck up some of their excess nutrient and water until we can elbow those more popular petals aside to take the place we’ve earned.  To endure as a faith and as a people we need to be as tough, as resilient, and as uncompromising as the common dandelion. 

My Life Has Become a Less Freaky Memento

 

For several years I have had issues with short term memory--recent conversations, for instance, plans I've made with others--as well as  with dizziness and, sometimes, fainting. Since moving south I've attended a memory clinic suggested by my doctor, and have taken tests.

One such test was an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), a nonsurgical procedure that produces a detailed image of an organ, in my case my brain. This was intended to see if I was suffering from traumatic or other brain injury. In the results I was given before my diagnosis, it was noted I had a ganglia on my left hemisphere. I knew this already, having been given the information from a previous MRI from a few years ago. I had even mentioned its existence to the technicians in relation to their questions about anything I might know was already there (e.g., lesions, metal plate). 

Now, my big fear was that I was experiencing the first symptoms of the sort of dementia from which my father died (in fact, when I had been told about the ganglia's location, my wife and I understood it was in the same place as one found in my dad's MRI). I was somewhat comfortable with this possibility, assuming that my dementia, like his, would be fast-acting but otherwise peaceful. My father was one of those people for whom the dementia made him more himself, in his case, more patient and calm most of the time. 

My appointment for my diagnosis was postponed for a day because the Nurse Practitioner in charge of my results was ill. As a result, my anxiety, already heightened, became nearly unmanageable for 24 hours. I woke early, did some stretching and tai chi to ground myself as best I could, but went in with a blood pressure reading almost off the charts. The NP and medical social worker, once they found out why I was anxious, told me right off that dementia was actually off the table. I had done much, much better than I expected on the memory test: the top score was a 30 and I had reached 27 (I never found out what those were points of), a score reached by people who had, at worst, "some" memory issues. "Where have I left my keys?" "Why did I come to the kitchen?" that sort of thing.

This is not my brain or MRI

So I was relieved until the NP turned back to her notes and said, "But now, tell me about your stroke." 

I don't recall saying anything although I might have because my ears were stopped up by the sound of blood pumping through my veins. When I did answer, I gurgled something along the lines of "Stroke? I had a stroke?'

The ganglia on my brain, she explained, was a holdover from an "old stroke" that I might have had decades ago. (It was later explained to me an "old stroke" is any over two years, and isn't to worry about because whatever damage done had happened long before.) Had I ever had periods of weakness on one side, or face-drooping, or long loss of consciousness?

No, never, I said. At least not that I remembered. 

I was the only one who thought that was funny. 

Over the course of the next hour and change, and over the next couple weeks, I would find that a) it is not unusual for someone to be unaware he or she has had a stroke; there are about 11M of us. And b) unless doctors have a pre-stroke MRI to compare it with, unless symptoms occur, there's no telling when the stroke happened. I do not have a pre-stroke MRI handy, so I'm left with racking my brain for memories of stroke behavior. I find none. 

And c} the fact that I had no indication I had a stroke means that the brain area affected was not "important", it wasn't responsible for motor skills or balance or speech; the duties of whatever was affected were easily taken on by another area. Something like a full professor falling ill and a teaching assistant filling in for a class.. 

However, my doctor pointed out to me that I had suffered a loss; the effected area was in charge of short term memories. Like recent conversations or plans. 

When I was teaching writing, I used to show the movie Memento to classes. Because it's filmed "backwards", it's a perfect way to teach cause and effect by stopping it at different points and asking "Why did that happen?", letting them guess before running the "previous" scene that explained why Leonard, the protagonist, reacted the way he did. My life is currently a less extreme version of Memento. I don't need Leonard's "freaky tattoo" directions on me, but I do have to make notes about where I go in the future and why. 

Aging as my father did

THE SMALL SIGNS I’M GROWING OLDER EXACTLY AS MY FATHER DID

Liver spots on the backs of my hands. Loss of
Interest in watching television, greater interest
In listening to other people. Occasional random
Missed strips of white whiskers from shaving, standing
Out because they’re whiter than my hair. Driving onto
And then back off the pavement. Forgetting keys,
Glasses, addresses, names, my own age, children. A large open spot
On the top of my head anyone looking down would
Understandably mistake for a UFO crop circle.

the world tree and my dad

In sorting through boxes of photos last Wednesday searching for pictures of my dad I realized I have hundreds of photos of the outdoors and dozens of crooked, gnarled trees. I guess I have an affinity for them, which makes my walk up to this one outside Coudersport a pilgrimage. The invention of camera phones has made it unusual, I think, to look at old photos as usual process except, as in this case, when we sort through them for pictures of someone to illustrate one of those posterboard collections to put on stands at someone's funeral. 

Dad died a week ago this afternoon. It was, as I understood it, a peaceful death. I'm told by the caregivers at his nursing facility, who were taking turns watching over him, that one minute he was breathing and the next he was not. I was with him the week before, having driven out with my wife. The weekend before that he had experienced a seizure of some sort that, after tests came back negative for all sorts of guesses, they determined was yet another stroke, maybe strokes. He lost his gag reflex, at least for a while, and hadn't eaten or drank in several days. We knew this would be our last opportunity to see him. 

It was a good week. Dad had always been a nervous, anxious kind of man, but now he was relaxed, calm, at peace. He looked out at the world with the soft eyes I associate with someone in meditation. We spent hours daily with him. His ability to swallow returned, so when he asked for something to eat he could have a few small spoontips of applesauce followed by a few sips of orange juice thickened with nectar. We placed him on hospice, knowing that this wouldn't be enough to sustain him long. He recognized me by name the afternoon we arrived, and my wife by name (although he hadn't seen her in 6 years) the next morning. My sister was there and he sometimes recognized her, sometimes didn't. That was usual, this sometimes-knowing, sometimes-not. He could only croak out a couple words at a time, usually "good" when asked how he felt, "I should get up" when he was tired of lying in bed and wanted to sit at the nurses' station or one of the visitors' lounges to see people. We left him on a Thursday morning, knowing it was the last time we'd see him alive. 

After the phone call, I began planning my drive out for his funeral. Fortunately, we had already made arrangements for that and dad himself had already written his obituary. Dealing as I do with death on a more or less daily basis, I can attest to the help that planning out one's service is to one's survivors. It's not so much that we don't have the time or inclination to plan these things after a loved one's death, but we are experiencing grief and that can suck up so much brainpan activity that, if it's possible to do so, planning everything out in advance not only is easier but ensures what someone would like is going to happen. 

The events of my return to The Thick, dad's memorial and interment, my time spent with my sister and her family as well as cousins, some of whom I hadn't seen in nearly 4 decades, the drive there and then the drive home, and the reconnection with my wife and animals, all that is personal and banal at best. If you haven't experienced something similar, you will. 

I'd rather talk about this tree. It sits on a hill outside the town where dad spent his last years, about a half hour's walk from the motel I frequented all these years, and something of a fixture of the many walks I took while visiting him. A couple decades ago I wrote, in relation to hiking, how for many wanderers in the woods there is a tree that he or she feels drawn to, a touchstone maybe, or a companion they can feel comforted by seeing. Sharing one's tree with others is like sharing one's personal name for God with them. In my very romantic view of my own death, I will somehow peacefully expire laid out beneath one of my trees, looking up into their old, gnarled branches and seeing something like eternity or redemption. In reality, of course, that's unlikely. But just in case, I choose a tree everywhere I go. Just in case. 

The ancient Norse had their concept of Yddrasil, the World Tree, and there isn't much I have adopted from them but I do like this idea. It's reminiscent of the interconnectedness of everything, the reliance on everything else that each individual has. In this view, old and gnarled trees are to my father as they are to my own sense of my mortality (as well as my wish for how my mortality plays itself out). At one time in my life, I cherished the notion that my ultimate reincarnation would be as a tree on a cliff. In reality, it's nice to think of, and it's nice to think my dad may have had such a profound life that he's earned a turn as a sequoia or a fir. But it's as unlikely as anything else, or as likely as anything else, and I suppose what's important is that, if I think of my dad or myself as a tree, it only means I think that being one is better than being a person. 

Visiting Dad, Coda

I left Pennsylvania this morning after seeing Dad one more time. He surprised me by waiting for me  at the end of the hallway furthest from his room. He was concerned, he said, about my traveling in the snow (it had snowed a few inches in the night and morning) and he wanted me to get an early start. So I told him I loved him, kissed him goodbye, and took off after gassing up and getting a large coffee for the road.

It used to be that I would go a year or more between visits to my parents, months between phone calls. Before she died, I used to call my mother a couple times a week. Now I call Dad once a week and drive out to visit him at least twice a year. I can't say this change in visitation is in response to a greater realization of their mortality, because I've always been aware of mortality, theirs, others, and my own. I have a relationship with death and dying that is visceral and I am, in most cases, comfortable with it. I didn't cry when my mother died, not because I didn't love her, because I certainly did, but because I always knew she would die. This doesn't, of course, stop my tears in the case of some others.

When my father dies, I'll feel, as with my mom, a sense of loss, but not a sense of missed opportunity. I'm glad to have the chance to see him, and glad that my relationship with him has changed for the better. I'm unsure what to ascribe this change to, maybe it's a change brought about by change itself. But I'm thankful for the change.

Visiting Dad, Day 7

This was my last day on this trip visiting Dad. It was a good day, although we didn't do much talking. Like the last couple days, he dropped off and on asleep for the length of my time there, which is an average of four hours each day. I read my book, I do my crosswords, sometimes I fall asleep myself for a little while. What stood out today was that he didn't have a sun-downing episode at three or at any time I was there. He woke the longest about four until I took him to dinner, and during it he knew who I was. And while he didn't seem to know how long I'd been visiting him, he knew I was returning home soon.

This is a photo I took today while he was alternately sleeping and watching out the window. He is relaxed and meditative. This is a relatively recent situation. I'm a child of the late 60s and 70s, a generation that focused on its feelings and ethics, looking at ways we should get in touch with what and who we are. I fear, however, that the epithet that we were the Me Generation is accurate, because it was our own feelings, and sometimes those of our peers, that we were interested in. Had someone asked me then what feelings he was in touch with, "relaxation" and "meditation" are not words I would have used. I know that in my own case I have become more relaxed, at least most of the time, than I was when younger and learning meditative techniques. My dad of course would not know asana from prana (and would skew up his face at the words, saying "What's that?"), and yet here, in his 80s, I would say he's more poised and relaxed than I can pretend to be.

Visiting Dad, Day 6

The reason I never give up hope is that everything is so basically hopeless. Hopelessness underscores everything--the deep sadness and fear at the center of life, the holes in the hearts of our families, the animal confusion within us; the madness of King George. But when you do give up hope, a lot can happen. When it's not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community: with family, related by blood or chosen; at church for me; and at peace marches.

--Anne Lamott, Small Victories

Seeing dad today was good and different. Good because he was in a very good mood, different because I realized his desire to sleep most of the day has become central to his life. This wasn't a new realization, as I recognized the importance of sleep to him last week. No, I think the important thing was my discovery that this is primarily his life. It's not a bad life, I think he's as content as he's ever been. But I think too that I'm finding that I need to not only to accept it but to live with it as well as he has. I must be as all right with his life and the way he lives it as he is. Can I be? Yes, I will have to be.

Visiting Dad, Day 5

Well, it's not really the fifth day of seeing my father. Actually, it's the ninth day in real time, but the fifth in terms of arriving, then leaving for several days to visit my sister in New York, and then returning to see dad. I arrived back in his part of Pennsylvania around four o'clock this afternoon, checked into the motel where I often stay because of both its cheapness and its proximity to dad's nursing facility. Then I walked over to see him. I was surprised because he was awake and alert and sitting in the hallway. He recognized me immediately and had even remembered I was returning to see him (although he'd forgotten the day). I sat with him and we talked for a bit about small things: the weather, his sweater, how he felt. I walked him to the dining room and then we discussed when I'd come back tomorrow, and then returned to my motel room to watch nerdy TV.

What I did while I was away: I spent Friday until this morning with my sister and her family, eating, drinking, watching pro wrestling with my niece and nephew, going out to dinner, napping. During the time I spent a day visiting an old friend back where I grew up who had a stroke a year ago and remains in a rehab facility. On my way there, I wandered along the Red Trail at James Baird State Park.

I spent another day in my old haunts in New Paltz where I ran into several old friends while walking on the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail, hung out in one of the places I most enjoyed as someone with a lot of time to kill, then visited the wife of another friend who is in Italy. It was wonderful, one of those days which, if it's true heaven is where you spend eternity reliving the most pleasurable day of your life, would be among the top twenty.

In addition, I operated a little Grammar Nazi monkeywrenching on a not-so-innocent sandwich board along the road.
 

But, because I think when people who live the type of life we live get together to catch up there is always the stories about the lost and the dead, I also learned of the sad end of a friend of mine from so long ago. This is the story the locals managed to cobble together.

Visiting Dad, Day 4

Today went well but didn't have much going on. Dad was in bed napping when I arrived and woke after about a half hour. He spoke for a while, and then drifted to sleep off and on. Much of the time when he wasn't sleeping he lay on his back watching the birds, mostly nuthatches and chickadees, eat from the feeder outside his window. When I'd filled it I'd also strewn seed along the window sill. He'd grin and say, Oh!, when a dark head popped up and seemed to peek in at us.

About 330 he woke up again, this time saying, Did you tell me my brother Georgie died? Yes, Dad, I said. So that means there's only two of us left? Two out of six? It's just me and Carroll. Yes, Dad, you and Carroll are the only two left. He laid back again and said, Oh, Carroll, I don't know. It's so hard.

I said, I know it's hard, Dad. But I'm Bobby, not Carroll. He leaned up on one elbow. You're not Carroll? No, I'm Bobby. Your son, Bobby. You're Bobby? You're not Bobby. Yes, Dad, I'm your son, Bobby. You're sure? Yes, Dad, I'm sure.

That's when he laid back down again and said, Oh, Bobby, I don't know. For the rest of our afternoon he knew who I was.

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."

Visiting Dad, Day 2

Today I saw Dad at 10 this morning but he was asleep and stayed that way for the 20 or so minutes I remained with him. I left a note for him, saying I'd be back at 1:30. When I returned, he was awake and being wheeled to a bingo game. We sat in the little soda shop at the end of the hallway. In contrast to how he was yesterday, he wasn't sure either who I was, and as I realized a little later, who he was. He did ask whether I was his son, and I told him yes. He asked more questions about his brothers (I had told him yesterday his next eldest brother had died last year, which his daughter, my cousin, had told him shortly after the event but didn't think he'd understood), and finally asked, Are you Harold? I said, No, you're Harold. I'm Bobby, your son.

We were offered sherbet and he ate about half the cupful. It seemed to make a change in him; he had been itching and when I came back with lotion from his room, he called me Bobby and said he was tired and wanted to lie down. I agreed, but said first we should look at the bingo game. We did; he said he'd still like to lie down. On our way to his room, two RNs asked him to walk for a bit with his walker. Dad agreed, reluctantly. He stood with help and used the walker to walk, slowly and with some pain, about 15 or 20 yards down the hallway. I told him I was very proud of him and he said, My legs hurt. So I took him to his room, helped him into bed, and he sank into deep slumber. But before he did he reached out for my hand.

Visiting Dad, Day 1

He didn't recognize me last night when I arrived.

My dad has been in a nursing facility for nearly three years, since he had his first series of strokes a few years after my mother died. I get out here in the Thick a few times a year in order to visit him. In addition to his illness he also has a mass growing on his brain, which may or may not be cancerous. It's not in his best interest, at his advanced age and physical frailty, to have it surgically looked at or removed, so his dementia, which is advancing and may or may not be connected to the mass, takes from him small bits of memory and control daily.

I last visited him early last summer, before my detached retina limited my ability to travel, and planned to visit again in late November for two weeks. However, I've been covering two regions since September when another chaplain left, and so there was no one to cover my vacation. So I have waited until January to come here. I'm here for two weeks and may take note of each day or I may not. Like so much of life after a loved one is diagnosed with a terminal illness, I will take it all a day, even an hour, at a time.

To be fair, he had been asleep when I arrived, although per his aides, he had been talking with them about my visit all day. But he looked at me like he might look at any stranger who showed up in his room and it took at least fifteen minutes and several hints before he said my name himself. Even then, he seemed unable to accept or understand that I was there. But he let me help him back into bed and kiss him and tell him good night, and he said he loved me too.

I left a note beside his bed telling him when I would return today, a practice I learned helps lessen his anxiety and confusion as to whether I had been there or he was dreaming, whether I was returning, or if I had gone home yet. I went back there at one this afternoon. He was asleep again--as he's aged he spends a lot of time sleeping--and woke immediately when I touched his arm and said his name. This time he not only knew me, said my name at once, and struggled to sit up. I helped him sit up and then to make it into his wheelchair.

I asked if he wanted to go to the hallway to look out the window and talk, but he shook his head and said, Stay here. So for the next couple hours we sat in his room together, sometimes talking, more often just sitting quietly. Occasionally we both fell asleep for a bit, after which when he woke he asked me to help him into bed again. He lay there, falling asleep a few more times while I sat in the chair next to his bed reading.

Finally, we had the period I'd hoped for. He woke, looked at me, grinned like he used to, and hit my arm on that side, saying, You! Then he talked about growing older and getting sicker and how difficult it was. I'm tired, he said. I'm tired. I knew he meant more than just at the moment. It's the same "I'm tired" I've heard from dozens of hospice patients. "I'm tired of suffering indignities, I'm tired of pissing and shitting in my pants, I'm tired of living life a few waking hours at a time." I told him I figure I'll say the same when I'm his age and he grinned again, like he used to, and said, Yes, you will.

It was a good conversation for the little while it lasted, maybe ten minutes, and then he drifted off again. But before he did I told him I'd come back in the morning and spend time with him again.