Depressing Reading Ahead

(You’re warned… just sayin’)

I haven’t posted lately because it’s another round of Dad-not-doing-well mixed in with the usual nuttiness of Boy’s schedule; throw in a ninja cold that knocked all three of us on our asses, plus one funeral of a family friend, and right now I’m a candidate for a silent retreat at a monastery/nunnery/mountain retreat. It’s been so crazy my personal journal is stuck at around December 16 (now a month behind again, dammit) and I still have most of the Christmas stuff up… but the tree did come down this weekend before it went FOOM if we turned on the lights.

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It’s really disconcerting to see Dad deteriorate after a “routine” surgery, such as his stent surgery last month. He’s still disoriented, time-wise. He’s having short term memory issues (he asked me three times where the taco sauce was on Christmas night… three times in a row). And for someone who hated his wife’s shunning of all medical stuff, who himself was particular about getting in for his quarterly blood draws and all that stuff, almost has to be nagged if not dragged in to do it.

Very disconcerting.

Not helpful either is Brother #2, who means well, but in his inimitable style, fucks things up in the end. Take Dad’s meds for example – to help, he volunteered to load up Dad’s weekly medication tray. Wonderful! Great! Makes life easy for me, especially after I untangled that unholy mess that had been on the vanity last month. So I check the trays at his request on Monday, and not only are the pills across the week inconsistent, but there are pills that we had set aside when we weeded some out with the doctor. It’s obvious he’s just guessing.

What in the hell, dude? Does he not understand that we’re messing with blood thinners here? Too little of these meds, and the blood gets too thick, risking another heart attack and possibly stroke; too much, and Dad will bleed like the proverbial stuck pig doing something as simple as brushing his teeth. He said he understood that when that whole mess happened last month, but B2 has ever been a little dull in the brains department, and obviously something didn’t stick… making a bigger job for me.

I can’t be there to oversee Dad’s stuff and Boy’s, too – if Boy didn’t have his issues, then yeah. But he does and I can’t deal with two people heavily dependent on me in two different houses. I can’t run two houses right now – I can barely keep tabs on my own, even with help.

I’m almost at the point of pinging his doctor’s office about perhaps a nurse coming in weekly to check on these things. One thing I am doing when I have a minute to breathe is insisting on a pow-wow with the doc and airing the deep concerns that have arisen this past week.

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Yesterday was the funeral of a family friend. “Aunt P” was the wife of one of my dad’s two childhood friends from Tucson who all went to college, went in the military, married and moved to the area I grew up in, all around the same time. Aunt P and her husband, Uncle B, were the godparents of my third brother, but I wound up closer to them than he ever was, more because of time and place rather than anything else. Aunt P was a hoot (her ashes were in a brightly decorated, child’s cookie jar, for God’s sake!), but she was also the type to nag the pastor at church and tell him how to run things. She was a constant in our lives. My parents would run into her at the store, at restaurants, at wherever. She and Uncle B, along with Uncle J (the second childhood friend) and his wife Aunt J, who were my fourth brother’s godparents, were at the yearly Christmas party and major family events without fail.

Aunt P, who was strong and stoic and pretty much had seen it all, came to my mother’s funeral drenched in tears – they’d been close for years, and Aunt P had helped and comforted my mother through a miscarriage in the early years of friendship which had sealed their connection, as Aunt P had gone through many miscarriages. By the time my mother died, the friendship had thrived almost fifty years. In the five years that had followed Mom’s death, Dad saw Aunt P here and there. It seemed she would probably outlive Dad, as she seemed eternal, despite being five years older (therefore 87 when she did die last week).

Her death ended a circle of Dad’s friends – my parents, Uncle B and Aunt P, Uncle J and Aunt J, and the later addition in the early 1950s of my godparents Aunt N and Uncle R - were inseparable despite miles and time. My godmother died of breast cancer in 1992, then, heartbroken and lonely, Uncle R drank himself to death four years later;  Aunt J died of cancer a few years later, then Uncle J of myriad health problems two years after that: Uncle B was the shocker – he had just gotten a clean bill of health and had gone up to his cabin to close it for the season, when on the way home on the highway he had a massive heart attack – he was dead by the time the car rolled to a stop at the side of the road… that was the fall before my mom died in 2006. Since then it’s been Aunt P and Dad left. Now, days after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, Aunt P died.

Dad initially didn’t want to go; I offered to take him and he accepted. But by the time I got him home, he was upset. Not mad-upset, but emotionally upset and he basically grunted as he got out of my truck and into the house. It is upsetting. He’s the last, the only survivor. It’s ironic in that he was the one with the worst habits and smokes like a chimney, yet he survives all of them, even Mom.

It is the end of a family era.

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However, worse has crossed my mind, if my suspicions and fears have foundation after talking to the doc when he can spare 20 minutes: it might be quite the “race” to see who survives the last circle in his life, almost 83 year old Dad or his 97 year old sister who once said to him, “You can’t die and leave me alone! I can’t bear to be the last!”

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So yeah, I’m not a lot of fun. Sorry.

But the Boy is truly a joy and is working oh so hard to improve. Sweet little pie guy. Such a joy. I gotta go… I’ll write more later.