Notes from Maine - 2023/04/16
Dad’s house is almost done. My brother got the floors refinished and we’re working on putting in the counters. When we’re there, we always joke that Dad would have hated what we did to the place. Everything is clean, bright, and uncluttered. It’s hardly resembles the house that he inhabited.
I keep thinking about the days before he moved back home. He had been living here, at my house, while he recovered from his rehabilitation. During his time here, as his strength returned slowly but surely, he became convinced that he couldn’t live at home anymore. I couldn’t tell if those declarations were rooted in pessimism, fear, dementia, or loneliness. It may have been all of the above. Dad took comfort in pessimism. It’s hard to be disappointed if you always believe the worst is going to happen. And it would be perfectly natural for him to be afraid. Before going into the hospital, he spent a painful night on the floor after a fall.
The idea that really bugged me was that maybe he had been lonely for years. Maybe he had wanted to come live with me (or one of my siblings), but had been too proud to ask. At my house for a few months, with people around all the time, maybe he just didn’t want to be alone again.
So, almost three years ago, we started taking short trips up to his house so he could test drive the place again. We slowly adjusted furniture and moved things around to make the house more accommodating. Then, he got to the point where he was physically ready and he moved home. There were times when he seemed genuinely happy to have a measure of independence back. He also complained a lot, too, but that was his nature.
That’s what I’m remembering as my brother and I dismantle his house and fix it up for sale. All of the grab bars are gone from the bathrooms. The stair climber has been removed. His big wooden kitchen table is down here at my house now. We used to call that table his “office,” and the big window next to it was the “Mount Vernon TV.” With the radio on behind him and a forgotten crossword in front of him, he would sit for hours, watching the traffic on the road. Traffic in his neighborhood amounted to about one car per hour and maybe a pedestrian or two each day. He knew a fair number of the people he saw.
My father moved to Maine right after his father died. It took him about a year to find a suitable house. The place was up the road from my grandmother’s, and Dad was able to buy the house and the camp across the road at roughly the same time. Dad bought property around his house as he could to buffer his house from neighbors. It didn’t work. There was already a house pretty close to the south. The person who bought that eventually became his friend.
We will be splitting that property back up and selling it independently of the house lot, unless someone comes along and wants to make an offer on everything. I can’t be completely sure, but I think Dad would be fine with all these plans. He was never sentimental about property or houses. My sister has the violins. He loved those violins. My brother has the Polaris—that was Dad’s lifeline to independence when he had no other safe way to get down to his boat. I took the TV. When it got too dark to see anything through the window (or when football was on), Dad was in front of the TV.
I didn’t intend to write another post about my father. I’ve written all this stuff before in different ways. One thing I learned from my grandmother is that stories evolve as you tell them. The important details find their way to the surface, sometimes morphing until their connection with the truth is tenuous. But what is truth? When we review, we rewrite. I think I remember reading that! (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/02/04/271527934/our-brains-rewrite-our-memories-putting-present-in-the-past)
