Full Reversal, Part 2

Big sister Barb had greeted me as I walked into the assisted living/nursing home facility. She had been there nearly a week already, watching Dad slip between lucidity and la-la land. It had taken a toll on her. “It’s just so hard,” she had confessed. “I’m worn out.”

Part of the problem was CAT scans had revealed that Dad had had a series of mini-strokes over the last several years. Taken individually, these strokes were barely noticeable, easily dismissed as the effects of aging on a man in his 80s. But cumulatively, they had sapped Dad of physical and emotional energy and dulled his sharp mind.

Add that to his episode of dizziness and nausea nearly two weeks earlier, and the result is an 84-year-old man getting up in the middle of the night, wandering the hospital halls in his birthday suit, trying to tell the nurses that people were stealing things from the hospital and putting them in their cars; or that he was seeing whales swim by his bed; or that he was in Minneapolis, when actually he was in Nashville.

Still, he had improved enough in those first few days to be transferred from the hospital to the assisted living/nursing home facility. After seeing Dad in his room, Barb and I took him outside to enjoy the beautiful autumn afternoon in middle Tennessee. Dad’s conversation with us was clear and funny as we reminisced about the past.

But then he looked at me and said, in a very serious tone, “Mark, I’ve got to find a new job. I lost my job last week, and I need to find work.” Dad had retired 15 years ago, but he was worried about his dear wife, Sally, having to sleep on the street.

My sister and I exchanged glances as if to say, “Here we go again.” We let him ramble for a while, then changed the subject. It’s odd how a past anxiety can mix with current stress and uncertainty to produce a very real, but ungrounded, fear.

That anxiety crept up again the next day, when my step-sister, Anne, was visiting. God bless her because Anne listened to that for a minute, then told Dad, “You’re going down one of those little bunny trails again.” It was a perfect response, and I followed that by telling Dad that he had been retired for quite a while, and he had a nice home and plenty of money.

“But what about that house in Little Rock that has all that furniture? We need to get that out of there,” Dad said. Anne and I patiently explained to him that he didn’t have a house in Little Rock, that he and Sally had moved from another city in Arkansas six years ago. Any extra furniture had been sold, so everything was fine. “Really?” he said. “Sure enough,” I answered.

Once again, the children became the parents and the parent the child.