Notes from Maine - 2021/06/20
Today is Father’s Day, but this morning I’m mostly dealing with Mom. She is visiting right now (2 weeks into a 3-week stay). It seems wrong to say “visiting”. She came up for my niece’s graduation and stayed for a bit because she ran out of things to do at her house. Mom is one of those people who has to be busy all the time. After thirty years in her current house, she ran out of things to paint.
That’s incorrect. She never runs out of things to paint, she just takes a break. Mom will start with the top floor of her house, start painting, and work her way down to the basement again. The county has come in twice to reassess the house because the square footage keeps getting lower. All those accumulated layers of paint are shrinking her rooms.
Painting (interior and exterior) is her main obsession, but she also does gardening, light carpentry, small engine repair, appliance repair, and whatever else she can find. One spring she kept telling me about going to the store to buy bags of dirt. I mentioned all the dirt purchases to my brother and he just said, “Adding dirt is how she ’paints’ her yard.”
At my house, she has built a new flagstone walkway to the side door, scraped the back wall of the house, pressure-washed the deck, stained the deck, and cleaned up all the flower beds. I’m probably forgetting five or ten things. Oh, right, she has also done a bunch of interior painting—closets and doors.
I’m not expected to participate in any of these projects unless she doesn’t finish before she has to return home. In that case, I’m expected to finish the project and have it critiqued the next time she’s in town. Her level of activity is in stark contrast with my father’s. Dad’s perfect day involves sitting at the kitchen table until it’s time to move to the TV room.
It’s amazing that they didn’t stay together.
I’ll be headed up to wish Dad a happy Father’s Day in a little while. Last year I visited him through his window as he struggled to stay sane in a rehab facility. He was in the hospital or rehab from March until July. It’s amazing he recovered enough to live on his own again. I hope we did the right thing. It’s impossible to know, so I guess I shouldn’t dwell on it. After living alone for twenty-five years, he said that his goal was to get strong enough to go home. But, after being in facilities for four months, then living at my house for three months, I believe he grew accustomed to having people around.
Every morning, he has a personal care assistant helping him shower and get breakfast. Then, he’s all alone except for a visit from my brother in the evening. In dark moments, he’ll say that he’s barely living and he wants to be put in a nursing home. But every time he has been in any kind of facility, he curses the place and fights to be set free.
At one point, Dad convinced my brother to take him to a veteran’s home. Having returned from the drop-off, my brother started to make himself a sandwich for lunch. Before my brother finished spreading the mayonnaise, my father called him and demanded to be rescued.
So, what he claims to want and what he can stand appear to be two different things. It’s up to us to interpret his wishes and then do what we feel is best. It’s a risk for Dad to be alone at home for periods of time, but we think that his freedom is worth the risk.
I just saw Mom walk by with a brush dripping with stain. She was followed closely by Albert (German Shepherd puppy). He loves helping Mom with her projects. She’s always busy, and he likes to keep busy too. I think he’s going to miss her quite a bit when she returns home. He has white paint in his fur that’s going to take a month to grow out, since he doesn’t enjoy brushing.
