This afternoon I was working on a short story in one of my notebooks. I don’t journal much at all, particularly in these last few years of the Megablog. However, back in 2006, while I was taking care of my dad, I wrote an entry in the first couple pages of this notebook. It’s almost overwhelmingly sad, but, oddly, I enjoyed reading it, remembering that this all really did happen, and that life really has continued for me, and that I miss him, but still have love. Here’s the entry, unaltered:
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
“Where are we going?” He said this at 8:30 this morning, standing at his dresser and fishing through the sock drawer with slow insistence. Mom and I had just switched the cars so that I could keep the borrowed Camry with the “Brucker” plates in the garage. I had arrived the night before to begin my shift, and I wouldn’t be going anywhere until Saturday. I think it was the car swap which set him off. A couple weeks ago he was still getting ready in the mornings, still being driven out to his radiation. A week or so before that he was driving himself. So the short, sudden period during which his cognition became disconnected from his mind was riddled with treatments and office visits. It makes sense that our vehicular focus would set the gotta-get-ready gears grinding into his weak sense of morning routine. A few weeks ago we assumed that his “trouble with numbers” had sprouted from the triple-dilapidation of chemotherapy, severely waning appetite, and the growing menagerie of under the counter pain killers. It was easy to imagine, or at least approximate, that woozy discombobulation which could set in after days or weeks of starvation, exacerbated by months of destructive chemotherapy, red and white blood cells punished and diminished, all topped with narcotics – layers of narcotics. The chemo ended, though. We tried to make him eat. Coffee cake, orange juice, devil’s food cookies, steak soup – anything. The pain killers remained. As if they selectively kill pain and nothing else. His confusion rapidly evolved into dementia. It has to be in the brain by this point. I can’t think of any other explanation. His entire condition, the enormity of it, is impossible to explain. I think of the worst physical pains and conditions I’ve ever experienced and they all add up to a simplified facet of his being. Terrible pains and the destruction of viscera are so persistent that they must be the low hum against which his other layers and peaks of pain stand out. I can’t imagine. And I wonder who is being insulted by the dementia. Is it an insult to him if he can hardly perceive it? Should I take the insult as my own? We’re waiting for him to weaken. Hoping for it. If he’s weak enough, and far enough out of his mind, then maybe he won’t be aware of this final kick. The rest of us will always remember, but my grieving is currently relegated to profoundly sad moments – this morning he said that he wanted to know what we’re going to do . . . I said that he’ll take his pills, eat, go to the bathroom, change his arm bandage and pain patch. He said, “then I guess I’ll get dressed and do nothing.” That was the moment of insult. The old John Brucker, the real one, was frustrated as all hell that he was forced to do nothing. He’s been a worker his entire life, so to deny him the ability to work, on even the smallest level, is to deny the very definition of who he is. That made me very sad, and then, mercifully (to me), I became wrapped up in helping him do the things I had just outlined. And now, moments ago, I looked at his hand as he held his five evening pills. Open palm, fingers gently twitching, the tattoo bracelet around his wrist, five tiny pills again and again. The sadness is intense, and if it persisted it would be overwhelming. It would destroy me. But it doesn’t persist. It burns through me until all that’s left is love.
Tags: Dad