Notes from Maine - 2020/05/23

People came over yesterday and gathered in the yard.

That sounds ominous. I can imagine them out there, shuffling around, muttering to themselves. Maybe one of them spots movement through the window. I duck down, but it’s too late. They start pounding on the glass relentlessly until they break inside.

No, what I should have said was, I had some friends over last evening and we sat in the yard. I set up outside chairs in a circle, nearly ten feet apart from each other. There were four of us altogether. One brought takeout from a local Thai place.

Life is going to change again soon.

I talked to my dad’s doctor yesterday. He’s not making improvement in rehab. He’s in his eighties and he has been in a hospital bed for two months. It’s no wonder that his body is wrecked. Unfortunately, there’s some question as to whether his mind is wrecked as well. I can go to his doctor’s appointment next week, so I’ll get a better idea when I can talk to him in person. Meanwhile, it’s time to prepare for the next step.

He has always said that he wants to go to a “nursing home.” Just last year, he said that he was going to look into assisted living because he said he wasn’t ”using” his house.

“I’m not using this place. It’s a waste,” he said.

“A waste of what? Who cares? Live where you want to live,” I said. His house is paid for (I’m almost certain, but regardless it’s cheap), he was comfortable there, and he hates interacting with other people, so I couldn’t figure out his motivation for wanting to move.

That’s about as far as the conversation went. I don’t think he did any real research into the matter.

But here we are.

My brother lives right down the road from Dad’s house, but the doctor was clear that in his condition Dad will never live independently again. She also said that, “assisted living” was not an option. He’ll need more care than that. Honestly, I thought the terms were somewhat interchangeable. Google says that nursing homes provide medical and personal care in a clinical setting. I guess it’s more hospital like and assisted living is more home like?

There are so many questions.

My next question is, how much would it cost to get care for Dad here, at my house?

I’m not really very sentimental about my father. I have this idea about reverence for elders, but somehow it just doesn’t seem to apply to him. He has lived here (at my house) in the past as he was rehabilitating from other surgeries. My house used to be a small nursing home, so it wasn’t difficult to have him.

My ethics say that elders should be cared for at home by their families, but I guess I always figured I was off the hook with my father because he didn’t want that. He kept insisting that he didn’t want to be a burden and he would “turn himself in” (his words) before he became incapacitated.

So, then the question becomes, “Why not honor his wishes and start researching nursing homes?”

I will, but there is a cognitive problem with Dad. Recently, he has been claiming that he’s perfectly capable of walking and taking care of himself. They can’t legally keep him in that place and he’s going to go home. I’ve seen videos of him and read the reports—he’s either lying or he’s seriously delusional. He can’t stand or walk on his own. So he’s no longer happy with the idea of a nursing home. He thinks he should be allowed to go home. There, he would need twenty-four hour support. I’ll have to see if that’s something that he can afford.

Sorry for the big, serious message. I figure that this is something that many of us have dealt with or will in the future. Last year I interviewed my father over the course of a few months and wrote down everything he wanted to say about his life so far. He doesn’t share a lot usually, so it took a while to get much out of him. Here’s one of the stories I enjoyed:

In 1944, we moved to 586 North Hanover Street. We moved there because Dad was working at Grenier Field Air Base. The war ended while we were living there. It was a rented house with three bedrooms. I still shared a room with David. One bedroom was a den. The house belonged to a doctor. I don’t remember his name.

We lived there a couple of years, I think. Maybe it was just a year.

We rented the whole house.

I went to grade school, probably third and fourth grades.

There were a couple of kids in the neighborhood, but I forget their names. One maybe was named David Hand, who had four or five brothers and sisters. His father was a doctor, but not the doctor that owned the house we rented.

Bobby Gagne was another kid.

I guess I did okay in school. I don’t remember the name of the school. We weren’t there for more than two years, I’m sure. I’m not sure we had a car. Back in the war years, not many people had cars. There wasn’t much gas.

During the war years, they used to paint the top half of the headlights black because of air raids. It was a big deal after the war when they started to come out with new cars.

During the war they had air raids where you would have to turn off the lights and draw your shades whenever there was a drill. The sirens would go off and you had to run around and turn off all the lights and hunker down. They had air raid wardens who had a helmet, flashlight, and armband to make sure your lights were turned off.

There was another kid we used to call Horseshit. Us kids would never knock on anyone’s door, we would stand on the sidewalk and yell their name until the kid came out. Two of us stood out on the sidewalk in front of his house, yelling, “Horseshit!” His mom came out and yelled, “You kids stop calling him that.” She was so mad.