IN THE SHADOW OF MY FATHER'S DEMENTED SELF

“I got to know more of him as there was less of him to know.” -- Carrie Fisher

A father is the male parent of a child. Besides the paternal bonds of a father to his children, the father may have a parental, legal and social relationship with the child that carries with it certain rights and obligations -- Wikipedia

1. Nowhere to go from here

           I hear my father's been plotting to flee the long-term care facility we put him into.  According to his wife Edie, he's been asking her for money -- fifteen hundred dollars, apparently -- so that, as he put it when she asked what he was going to do with the cash, he can “make good his escape.” Edie said that he'd been telling her how much he disliked the facility, and that there were other people talking about running away from the place as well. When Edie asked him who these other people were, he apparently became very vague and refused to answer. He said that he didn't want to give away their names or their plans.

           Even if my father had his escape money stuffed away in his back pocket, for example, there's little likelihood he'd ever make it out of the place on his own. At the main entrance he'd have to bluff his way past the security guard. And if it was the side entrance he had his eye on, he'd need a coded key card to swipe his way out. The main entrance plan could possibly work, although I think my father would look a bit suspicious as he hobbled his way towards the door using his walker. He'd be a dead giveaway to the security guard there, easily identifiable as a resident rather than as a visitor who was now perhaps on his or her way home. As for the coded key card, I suppose he could steal that from Edie's purse, which is where she keeps her access card for the building whenever she visits. But given my father's questionable mental condition, I doubt very much he'd be able to figure that one out, let alone know how to use the card even if he did manage to get his hands on it.

           In a conversation I had with my father during a recent visit with him at the facility, he more or less acknowledged that The Perley Home was basically the end of the road for him. Or at least, if it wasn't the end of the road, it was one whose eventual destination he knew all to well.

           “I guess this is it, eh?” he said in a rare moment of lucidity. “Nowhere to go from here.”

           “Yes,” I said. “I think this is it.”

           There was no use sugar coating it or trying to gloss over his new reality. My father was a very logical, rational man (well, that's what he prided himself on, although he may not have been quite as logical and rational as he liked to think he was), so that when the arguments were lined up to substantiate why he was put in the facility in the first place, he had to admit that it all made perfect sense.

           “Not that I like it,” he said.

           “No,” I said. “You're right. You don't have to like it. But I guess if this is it, as you say, then all you can really do is try to make the best of it.”

           Reluctantly, he agreed.

           “I mean, of all the facilities you could be in, the Perley is probably one of the best.”

           Indeed, the place was more like a small self-contained town than a long-term care facility. It seemed like the planners had thought of just about everything. On our way around the facility my wife Judy and I spotted a barber shop, an exercise room, a hairdressers, a music room, a wine store, church facilities, arts and craft workshops, a resident doctor, a dentist, a physiotherapist, and several small food service areas (kind of like intimate food courts where a dozen or so residents are encouraged to mingle as they dine.) There was even a pub where residents could sit and have a drink or two and watch sporting events on TV. In addition, lining the halls of pretty well everywhere we went, were a number of very impressive works of art – oils, acrylics, water colours, sculptures – all done by current and past residents.

           “Maybe you can get involved in the arts workshops they have here,” I said. “Judy and I went up to have a look at them and they're pretty impressive. There's some very accomplished artists in this place.”

           I mentioned this last bit as an encouragement to my father as he'd always appreciated the arts and was, in fact, quite accomplished at drawing and sketching. Unfortunately, however, although all of us children had inherited his obvious artistic talents and tried to do something with them, my father had never pursued or done anything with his. Granted, over the years a few of his sketches had turned up in the form of studies for a house he and I built up in the Lanark highlands, about an hour west of Ottawa, as well as a landscape he produced after we'd given him a water colour kit for one of his birthdays. He would never have displayed them for public viewing, however, as my father was somewhat of a perfectionist and would likely have felt embarrassed that the sketches weren't as good as they should be. Rather than looking at what he'd accomplished, in other words, he'd be far more focused on what he didn't like about what he'd done. His drawings would be just not good enough, and as a result not worth doing.

           “Yes, I've seen some of it,” my father said, referring, I assumed, to the artwork I'd mentioned. It was obvious, however, that he wasn't all that interested in pursuing my lead. Instead, he turned to look out the window of his room and fell silent. I waited, wondering: Has he gone off somewhere again? Where does he go when he does that? Is he talking to himself inside his head, or is there indeed anything there at all? What's he thinking? Is he thinking? Will he remember me being here? Does he even know who I am?

           Suddenly, my father turned to look at me, a bit of a glare in his eye as though it was somehow my fault he was there. “I don't want to be here,” he said.

           “Yes, I know you don't want to be here,” I said, looking him straight in the eyes. “But there was no other choice. Edie just couldn't handle it anymore. It'd gone well past the point of her being able to take care of you. Your knees are totally shot. And you've been having more and more falls. They were having to come out and offer emergency assistance to you guys at least once a week, if not more. So finally when a space came up here...”

           My father nodded. He clearly understood, but it was obvious that understanding and accepting were still worlds apart as far as he was concerned. The resentment was written all over his face as he narrowed his gaze at me, stuck his chin in the air and crossed his arms. This was a familiar sign to me that said: Not interested. Don't want to talk about it anymore. Fuck off!

           I remembered how when we were kids he'd do the same thing by using his evening newspaper to hide behind. This was his message to us to bugger off and leave him alone. Slowly he'd make his way through the paper from front to back, enjoying the isolation it afforded him by dragging out his reading for as long as he could. Interestingly, for a man who was a real news hound -- especially a political one -- he'd only ever subscribe to the Ottawa Citizen. At one point, probably when I was working as a Parliamentary Correspondent on Parliament Hill, I gave my father a subscription to the Toronto Globe & Mail as it claimed to be Canada's national newspaper, and was far less parochial in its coverage of the day's news. Eventually, though, he let the subscription lapse, much preferring to keep his nose stuck in the pages of the Citizen instead.

           In his later years when my father's buggered knees made it almost impossible for him to walk, he'd spend his entire mornings and much of his afternoons religiously reading not only every little news items he'd come across, but each and every advertisement, want ad, death notice, flyer, and so on. More recently, however, Edie had reported that he seemed to have lost interest in reading the paper and all the junk mail flyers he'd go through. Instead, she said that most days he'd park himself in his favourite chair (my father always had a favourite chair) down in their sunken living-room and stare off into space for what she described as hours on end. “That is,” she added, “if he wasn't in bed sleeping, which he'd been doing a lot of.” In fact, Edie said that it had reached the point where she'd been getting into bed alongside my father so that she could spend some kind of quality time with him, given that his capacity for wit and conversation – some of the things Edie enjoyed the most about my father -- seemed to have been disappearing quite rapidly, threatening her sense of connection with him.

           “I don't have to like it though, do I?” my father said after a lengthy silence.

           “No, you don't,” I said. “But it'd probably help if you tried to make the most of it. Otherwise, you're just going to descend into misery, and that's not going to do you or anyone else much good. Especially Edie, who's already feeling guilty enough as it is.”

           “So then there was no choice, me being here?”

           Initially, I experienced a brief sense of optimism at hearing that my father just might go along with the idea that there really had been no other choice than to admit him into the Perley.  I doubted, though, that he genuinely meant it. Instead, knowing how adept my father could be at manipulating to get what he wants, I suspected that his next move would be to work on Edie for having broken their solemn promise to one another that no matter how bad things got, they'd never put the other into a home. And now here she was, betraying that solemn promise. As Edie tended to wear her emotions on her sleeve, you could see how easy it would be for my father to prey on her guilty feelings, hoping that eventually she'd relent and agree to spring him from his prison so that he could return home. Given my father's fluctuating state of mind, however, I wasn't so sure how well he'd be able to carry it off. Some days he could be very much there, wit and all, while on others he seemed to be off on an all-expense-paid holiday in La La Land.

           “No, there wasn't, there was no choice,” I said. “It was getting to be too much for the both of you. From the sounds of it, I don't think Edie could've held on much longer.”

           I should note, however, that up until the day Edie finally arranged for my father to be transported to his new digs, he'd been managing to do a pretty good job of working on her to let him stay at home. Indeed, over the past year we could see how Edie had become more and more accommodating to my father's wishes as he convinced her that it was possible for them to handle his fairly rapidly deteriorating condition on their own, thank you very much. Although both she and my father had been urged by their respective families, their GP, and various health care workers attending to their needs each day to apply for admission to a seniors home in the area ASAP, my father had been able to make good use of Edie's guilt to persuade her to ignore their pleas.

           Meanwhile, it had become obvious to everyone except Edie, or so it seemed, that she simply couldn't handle it all any longer, and that it might be the death of her if she kept trying. We'd always known Edie to be a fairly nervous and anxious woman, but over the last several months it'd become evident that the worry had been causing her to lose weight. Unfortunately, as a fairly thinnish woman to begin with, this was weight Edie couldn't really afford to lose. Then we heard that my father's name had been submitted to the Perley, a long-term care facility for veterans in the east end of the city, and that he'd subsequently been placed on their active list until a room became available for him. Needless to say, this was music to our ears. As it turned out, however, the music was short lived. Under what I strongly believe was my father's influence, and in an act of what could only be described as self-delusion, Edie called the Perley one afternoon to report that things were going well, and to ask that my father's name be taken off their list and returned to the inactive one.

           My father shifted in his wheelchair. The vacant look in his eyes suggested there might be no one home, and that he'd drifted off again. I studied him for a brief moment and thought that perhaps death had entered the room. His face was quite pale, as though something had drained all the colour out of it. His look was one of fear. Then suddenly, like some kind of nervous shorebird cautiously surveying its surroundings, he craned his neck, his gaze darting back and forth around the room.

           “Where is she?” my father said. His voice wavered. “She was just here. Where'd she go?” He tried swinging around in the wheelchair, but I'd set the brakes on it on and there was no way he was going to get it to budge. As far as I knew, I was the only person who'd visited my father that morning, so I had no idea what he was talking about when he asked where she was. Maybe one of the care aides or nurses, I thought.

           “Who, Dad?” I asked. “Who's gone?”

           “Your Mom,” he said. “She left. Is she coming back?”

           I wasn't sure how to respond, concerned that telling him our mother had been dead for more than two decades might be too upsetting for him. That was a risk I didn't want to take. On the other hand, there was the possibility that he wouldn't understand what I was saying anyway. I also wondered if maybe he was confusing Edie with our mother, although I'm fairly sure he was aware that we'd never considered Edie to be our mother -- except, that is, for our sister Janet, who was in the habit of calling her Mom and telling Edie how much she loved her. That had always rubbed my brother Craig and me the wrong way. But then she told us about the ugly confrontation she had with Edie and our father one afternoon, following which she admitted that she'd only addressed Edie as Mom and professed her love for her because that was the way, as Janet explained, she “got information out of her.”

           I found my sister's blatant hypocrisy disconcerting.

           Given the panic my father seemed to be experiencing, I decided to plead ignorance and just go along with the fantasy, if I can call it that.

           “I think Mom went out to the car,” I said. This seemed to calm him down.

           “Is she coming back?” he said, sinking back into his wheelchair.

           “I think she said she had an appointment,” I said, hoping my father would find this reassuring. As a added security, I also mentioned that Edie would be coming in to see him later that afternoon, although I knew I couldn't be certain that in his current state he was even aware who Edie was. I still wasn't even sure if he knew who the fuck I was, but again was afraid to ask.

           “Oh, good,” he said.

           I wanted to ask him if he was aware that Edie was actually his wife now, as I considered he might just think she was one of the care aides or nurses who routinely came into his room to look after him. However, as it was just about time to wheel him over to an exercise room where they were apparently working on his bum knees, I thought it best to just let it go.