A few days ago, my aunt (call her Aunt J) e-mailed me to ask after Father’s health. Father hasn’t been well for some time, and just in the last couple of years he seems to have aged by a decade. On the other hand, I haven’t seen him since Christmas. (More or less on purpose, although it’s also true he lives three hours away from here.) So I e-mailed my brother to ask him how Father is doing, and he replied as follows:
Yeah, I was going to write you actually. He's been pretty weak for a while now. You saw the beginnings of it last time you were out there, I'm sure. He's just not his old hearty self. He's had the enlarged heart and various issues for a while now, but of late, he seems to have kind of given up. [My girlfriend] went out there a few days in a row to try to get him moving, do some stretching and move his legs. He just won't do anything! Which is fine if you're 16 and sitting on the couch, but he is wasting away. And he has myriad drugs and pieces of advice he's trying to follow, and he can't eat like used to, so I think it's all too confusing for him.
I have no idea where he's at with Uncle and Aunt J, and whether he wants you to share his health woes with them. Are they not still estranged? Is this too personal? Or do such things matter, if you love him and want him to be happy and better?
The last couple times we were there, he mentioned that you seem to have shut him out, that you can't seem to stand being in the same room with him. Not sure what you can do with that information, as I know it's a bit heavy. Maybe he was just prying into your private life and you didn't like that, or maybe there's something else. I do think you should consider making some sort of peace with it and with him, though. He could still hang on for a long time—I'm not predicting anything—but you never know.
We're going out there on Saturday for Mother's Day, and because they have some tickets to the symphony on Sunday that they can't use ... because Dad's not feeling up to it.
I answered back:
Thanks for the update.
Yes, the last time I saw him was Christmas, and he was weak then. In general he’s been getting older and weaker the last few years (as opposed to years or even decades before that when he seemed to be holding onto a plateau), but this was really accelerated. And it sounds like things are just continuing to accelerate.
Confusion, for example, sounds like a bad sign. For years it might have been iffy whether he was willing to comply with a doctor’s orders, but he generally knew what it was that he was refusing to do. If he is now losing track even of that, … well, it’s like the physical weakness but in some ways even more worrying.
As for Uncle and Aunt J, … when I asked them about this “estrangement” they said they didn’t understand it. Father just stopped returning calls and they got a call from Mother saying that she had to side with Father … but so far as I can tell they never really knew what it was about. And they have all talked together since then, perfectly amiably – or at least that’s what I hear. So maybe it is a thing of the past.
My HYPOTHESIS (I emphasize that word a few more times for good measure) is that it stemmed from a visit several years ago when the In-Laws collectively seemed to stage what AA calls an “intervention” related to Father’s frequent sexual innuendo around women. I’ve heard the story only from him, but apparently they tried to sit him down and explain the kinds of behaviors (both words and deeds) which have made people (especially women) uncomfortable around him for 50 years. Well, I don’t think he understood the point; in his telling of the story he felt that they were picking on him for no good reason, simply out of malice. I deduce that he must have felt acutely embarrassed. So I HYPOTHESIZE that this is what prompted him to stop speaking to them. As noted, I think it has worn off over the ensuing years because I have heard of them all meeting pleasantly in coffee shops since that time. And in fact my hypothesis might even have the time sequence wrong, so don’t take it too seriously.
As for myself, I think he may be overstating things somewhat. Somewhere along the line I realized that I don’t really have a lot to talk about with him, and I got tired of having to make up things to say just to be sprightly and entertaining. So I stopped. At one point he e-mailed me to ask why, and I explained that I just didn’t have a lot to say. He tried to talk me out of this (“You do too have a lot to say!”), but not very successfully. The business about visiting … hell, I don’t know. For years it has felt like he’s hunting me whenever I’m there, so he can lure me privately into a back room and … what? Talk … entertain … be sprightly … something like that. (It always feels a lot more predatory than that, but really there’s nothing else it could be.) And again, I just got tired of it. So I started declining invitations to hustle off into private rooms, and I spent more time hanging out with everybody else at the party. It’s not quite the same thing as being unable to tolerate being in the same room with him, but it probably looks like it from his perspective.
I understand that he might die soon … certainly the rapid decline doesn’t look good. I’m not sure what “making peace” would look like, since I don’t really believe he will spend eternity hovering over his gravesite bitter that things didn’t turn out better. I wish him no ill. Truly. But what I wish for him most of all is that he be able to look back on his years with contentment, and forward into the unknown with interest or curiosity; and I have no idea how to give that to him. Or to anybody, really … I think you have to give it to yourself. Am I wrong? Maybe so … tell me what you think.
I have to run, because Son 1’s plane lands in a few minutes. But I should be able to pick up the discussion tomorrow.
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