It has occurred to me more than once lately, as I've sat there in front of my father whose weakened heart has brought him to the edge of things, all the while consuming the Timmies double-doubles and apple fritters that I am being an asshole.
Now, "asshole" is not always my favourite word and I use it now solely to be journalistically accurate. It is the word that actually runs through my mind when describing myself. To myself.
Why I often feel this way is because I do very little to avoid someday being in the same boat as my father currently is. And at the rate I'm going it may be the same boat but on an even earlier cruise.
I do not take care of myself. I don't get enough exercise and my eating habits are atrocious, for the most part. It seems, as I sit there in his hospital room, that I am unable to view the pain his condition is causing to him and his loved ones and extrapolate to my own situation. I am just about to slip into my sixties and am not that far off from being the same age as a few of the other gentlemen I've seen lately, pacing up and down the cardiac floor's hallways, all hooked up to their monitors. And I'm not really doing anything to avoid being one of their roommates sometime in the near future.
My wife and I have talked about this in the past, as my weight has skyrocketed, plummeted and then skyrocketed all over again. Long before my Dad became ill, we talked about my general health occasionally and have agreed that it would be nice to be able to live as long a life together as we possibly could. My wife has upheld her part of the bargain, now I need to get my act in gear. Part of the dynamic here is that Doralyn is about 15 years younger and gorgeous (not the reason, by the way, that I married her) and it doesn't seem right that I should inflict my oldness on her any more than is necessary.
Having said all this, while I was writing this blog I reached over and had a Mars bar (for breakfast, no less!). I believe this takes me very close to the pinnacle of Assholedom. The look on her face, as I did so, rather confirmed this for me.
You may think I am being a little harsh on myself or, more than likely, you might be in total agreement. I often wonder, as I sit at my Dad's bedside, how much of my own future I'm being given a glimpse of. As I sip that double-double, munching on a dutchie, being an asshole.....
I had a bit of a watershed moment with my Dad in his hospital room this evening. We have been through much together over the last 4 years or so; many games of golf, the death of his wife, Jean, many stories from the 30's, 40's and 50's and all that has been involved in his slow decline with Alzheimer's Disease. This is not to mention the almost 59 years he has been my father and all that went on over those many years, all the games of catch, the summers in Gibson's B.C., the camping trips, the death of my mother and the "baching" that followed it, the table tennis games, and the trips through the mountains.
Tonight, he forgot who I was.
I am no stranger to his bouts of confusion. I have listened patiently to his many stories told many times. We have worked through forgotten appointments and lost forms. I have answered the same questions, over and over. Through all of this, though, there was a constant. The one easily retrievable memory through all of this was our father-son relationship.
Tonight, even this became tenuous.
I had already been sitting with him for awhile when all of the sudden he asked me how long ago it was that he had made that visit to see me. I asked him which visit he was referring to. At this point, he pointed to a small photo album he's had at his bedside, almost since the beginning of the hospital stay. It is an album his brother, Keith and sister-in-law, Barb, had given him almost four years ago to commemorate his visit with them in Comox, B.C. and is full of pictures of the three of them. This was the visit with me he had just referenced.
I had to explain to him that he had not been visiting me, he'd been visiting Keith and Barb. I went to one of the photographs and asked him to point to the one he thought was me and he pointed to a picture of Keith. He then referred to me as one of his brothers.
A short while later we had all this straightened out but I am fearful this will come up again.
In thinking about it, though, there are a couple of assuaging factors at play. Firstly, at least he had me mixed up with a loved one and not a total stranger. Secondly, Barb and Keith had just spent a week visiting with him and for much of that we had all been together. I remember that by the end of the visit we'd all passed into an area where there had been confusion as to our relationships with each other. This had resulted from us referring to one another occasionally by the name that others of used. As an example, after several days of hearing Barb and Keith refer to Dad as "Ken", I actually referred to him that way. A couple of times Keith referred to Dad as "Dad", likely because he'd heard me use the term so often.
So, in retrospect, perhaps it's not strange that Dad would be more confused than usual. What worries me, though, is that it was not a momentary slip or blooper, I actually had to explain to Dad who I was.
I have never had to do that.
The following is an open letter I am intending to send to a variety (and multitude) of charitable organizations, all of whom have appeared on my Dad's VISA statement and/or in his cheque book within the last two years or so.
Dear Director of Fundraising:
If you have received this letter it is because you are involved with a charitable organization that has been a recipient of a donation from my father, Kenneth Baker, within the last two years. It is also quite likely that you have received several donations from him over that same time frame. There is a smaller probability that you have benefited by receiving duplicate donations within less than a week.
Over that same time frame, you are one of approximately over 30 such agencies that he has donated to. He has either written you cheques or has given you his VISA card number. Out of this number of agencies, the chances are about 90% that he has never heard of you and has no idea what sort of charitable work your agency does. He is unaware that he may have given you his VISA # and that you may have used it multiple times and are continuing to do so.
My father is a man in his mid-eighties who has Alzheimer's. He also has a huge heart and wants to help people. Unfortunately, he has lost the ability to keep track of his donations and make appropriate decisions regarding them.
Chances are you represent a very worthy charity and are well-known. You have likely thanked him for the recent donation and then given him an opportunity to make yet another. Possibly, you have called him on the phone and been very polite and explained to him his payment options. Then you did all of these things all over again.
Over this time period, he has donated several thousand dollars to the group of charities of which you are a member. All because he has a big heart and a confused mind.
Because of the state of his heart and the state of his mind, I have become involved with his financial affairs, as he is no longer capable. This is how I discovered much of the above and why I now find myself needing to deal with it. If you had pre-authorized VISA withdrawals, they have been discontinued. Your letters now all go in the garbage and I now politely turn down all your phone requests.
At the moment, my father is gravely ill and not expected to recover. Due to your requests for his money and my father's inability to respond to them appropriately due to his Alzheimer's, his family is now unsure as to his funeral arrangements and whether there will be money to handle outstanding debts. What we are sure of is that there will be no financial legacy for his heirs, who loved (and were loved by) him.
Thankfully, his financial legacy is of little importance to us. The legacy he will leave for us--that of the devoted, caring, and wise father, brother, son, grandfather and friend--will far outweigh all else.
I understand your need to be able to continue your charitable works--they are of value. Singly, I suppose I have little problem with your activity. As a large group, though, you have endlessly bombarded my father in his last years with your constant requests, thank you's, and then more requests. You have done this in writing and over the phone. It is possible that you have shared his name with other agencies. In total, you have so completely inundated an elderly, confused man with your requests that he has responded in the only way that seems appropriate to him--by giving more.
I lay some of the blame at my own feet, for perhaps not being vigilant enough. As a family member, it is difficult to know sometimes when to step in to a loved one's financial affairs and take charge. In this case it took much persuasion and discussion on a regular basis to convince my father of the dire situation he was in. I have done this though and things are now different.
I shudder to think of how many other seniors there are out there who may now actively be in the same straits my father was in. It is also hard knowing where to exactly lay blame in all of this. I am really speaking to all of you here, I don't believe that any of you are totally unaware that situations like this exist. I'd be interested in knowing what allowance you make for it. I suspect you have insulated yourself from others' troubles and are simply and only interested in making money.
More than anything (especially as it is difficult to lay blame), I want you all to know what you have been a part of . You have all benefited from your constant and cajoling relationship with a well-intentioned man who had lost all capacity to to responsibly manage his finances. I only hope that whatever you have done with his money has done some good for someone somewhere. I would be happy to hear that this is the case. I am only sad that it came at the expense of a once-proud man.
For my part, at this point I feel determined to investigate what can be done to prevent this from happening to other elderly people. I am part of the baby boomer generation, a generation that is quickly becoming prey to those who believe they need our money more than we will. This can't go on.
I understand where you may espouse your innocence in this. However, what you have done has been systematic and calculated. All because, apparently, it works.
Please feel free to contact me if you are in bitter disagreement with what I've said. I would be happy to discuss options for avoiding having another person's financial independence jeopardized.
Sincerely,
Brian Baker
It has been two weeks since I last blogged. About anything, really, I have been so wrapped up in dealing with my Dad in the hospital and feeling that I wanted to be updating the people in his life as constantly as possible. So not a lot of energy for blogging, to say the least.
But I do have the desire for things to be a little more normal tonight so a-blogging we will go...
Life with Dad has been a roller coaster ride, on pretty well a daily basis. More than one of us has been at his bedside and, literally, thought we had just seen his last breath. Twenty seconds later he's wide awake, alert, and commenting on life around him. I have seen his breathing stop like this probably three different times. Each time I have resisted the urge to simply reach over and shake him awake, get the damned breathing started again. At this point, I have no real fear of him passing, right in front of me. I have a much bigger fear of him passing alone somewhere, in a dark sterile room.
What we have right at the moment is an inability to plan much more than the next day into the future. There was a day last week when for most of the afternoon he'd been more or less incoherent and disjointed in his thoughts and speech. He'd also been semi-comatose. Then, in the midst of all that, he sits right up, looks around, and says, "Do you think we're at the end of all this?" It was hard to reply, it was almost as if he'd been given a little bit of extra insight, perhaps a glimpse into the near-future. All I could reply to him was, "I don't know, Dad, just let us know when we are."
Given where he is at any moment on this roller coaster ride, it is possible to see him never leave the hospital and it is possible to envision him months or years from now, in some long-term care placement, keeping us guessing on a daily basis. I am quite prepared for either of these eventualities.
I am also prepared for the eventuality that he might outlive me. There have been deathbeds I have sat on the edge of and thought to myself this person might live longer than me. Such is the fleeting quality of life that one should never make presumptions about the nature, length or quality of their own.
So I have stopped making the presumption that my Dad will be alive the next time I see him. Because of this, each time we part, I tell him that I love him. I have not done this freely, or often, in the past. Perhaps it was the "man" thing happening. But I do it now and he replies in same. It really seems like the only way to say goodbye these days.
I had a bit of an anatomy lesson today. A cardiologist sat behind a desk in a hospital and explained to me how a heart works, how the valves open and close, form seals, push blood in the right directions at the right times.
He then explained how my Dad's heart wasn't working. Essentially, his heart has blown a gasket, there is a valve which is simply too weak to form a proper seal. It will push the blood out but then lets some of it leak back into the chamber, where it then mixes with the next tidal wave and is engulfed. The proper ebb and flow is destroyed this way and the heart labours, to make amends.
I'm not sure how much of this my Dad was able to take in. Just to sit there in an office was a struggle for him and you could tell that he was exhausted and not totally comprehending. Apparently there is medication that can assist the heart to beat regularly. Depending on Dad's physical condition, there is also the prospect of open-heart surgery to repair the valve. Watching him sitting there, slumped in his chair, it was hard to imagine him successfully undergoing a dental filling, let alone a major surgery.
What was supposed to have been a simple visit today to the clinic for an echo-cardiogram turned into a full-fledged hospital admission, as the doctor quickly became aware of Dad's deteriorating condition. So tonight Dad's hopefully resting comfortably, gaining strength for whatever tests they have in mind for him tomorrow. At this point they are talking about an angiogram, to get a better grasp of blood flow issues. At some point they will begin administering regulatory medication.
Many of the questions Dad and I were asked got put to us several different times by different doctors. After awhile it almost seemed as though they were tying to trip us up. We were having none of that! I'm sure though that the fact that often our answers conflicted with each other made them somewhat suspicious. Dad is at a point in his life when he really doesn't remember what happened five minutes ago, let alone what happened in emerg two and a half weeks ago and who said what. At one point the intern interviewing Dad felt compelled to ask him what his wishes were around heroic, life-saving measures being used to prolong his life, should it come to that. Dad's initial reaction was, "Pull the plug!" He then relented and said they could give it their best shot for two or three days, just to see what might happen. A surreal conversation to be having...
And there is a surreal feeling around all of this. This isn't golf and it's not hopping into a boat and it's not throwing a football around. It's reflection and preparation, struggle and acceptance, all in varying amounts and to different degrees. Some of it is just plumbing. In its simplest terms, it is one hard breath and then another.
