PEOPLE: Personal Understanding

Perhaps it is because Mondays are getting more and more depressing as my visits with my dad become harbingers of a future without him. He is not quite as mentally sharp as he was just a year and a half ago, when he needed to take care of my mother. He tires more easily, and forgets some things that he normally wouldn’t. My sister and I laugh in exasperation at the errands he sends us on; I get the mechanical things to fix or get fixed, she gets the routine bills and paperwork to go through (not that easy to do since the man saves every piece of junk mail for her to go over).

Two weeks ago I got him a super battery charger/starter/reconditioner because he seems to wander into the garage daily in search of things to do and promptly starts up the car, the mowers, and anything else he can find to make sure they’ll run when he needs them. He was starting the lawn tractor by jumping it off the car battery, and this scared me even though he assured me it was fine and it worked. After a miserable hour and a half of unsuccessful use of the new battery charger, I gave up, helped him hook up the jumper cables to the car, stood back and crossed my fingers and shut my eyes. In two seconds he had the tractor started.

Last week I bought my father a wheeled leaf blower, and this week I picked it up to bring it back to where I bought it because the rope pull is jammed. Last week I took the jack from his ’72 Olds Cutlass to fix because he pulled the top part off and we couldn’t get it back on. Neither could my husband. The guy at the garage got it back together by banging it a few times with a mallet but then pointed out that a piece was missing and that it wouldn’t work. I had asked my dad last week if that was the only jack he had because I remembered trying to replace a broken one for him years ago. When I gave him the sad news today that this jack was broken, he opened the trunk of the Olds and showed me another jack. One that worked.

I am not angry–as we go inside for lunch and a piece of chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting he has made especially for my visit. This is a man who up until a couple years ago always remembered to buy me a pomegranate as an extra special gift for all my birthdays. He hasn’t forgotten, he just doesn’t get to the supermarket any more and my husband has since taken over the pomegranate tradition.

I do not enter this post to cry over my frustrated attempts to help, nor my father’s needs. It is simply that I am being forced to face something I dread in the gradual loss of my dad. It’s hard to watch him slowly give up his independence to us, an independence fiercely held and taught to us as well. And, I must face something else. I have counseled others who did not have the benefit of a loving, sharing, spend-as-much-time-as-you-can-with-your-kids-even-if-it’s-burning-the-lawn-or-painting-the-house kind of father as I had, to accept the fact of their fathers not being their ideal, and forget about trying to make him into that ideal for the rest of their lives. Now, I must face that even my dad, who was as close to the ideal father that any kid could have, is changing and relying more on me. It is childish and selfish, but that is the irony of it. My father can bring out the child in me because of my respect for him and his wisdom. But this child that I am being now, is not the same child either. I must follow my own advice and accept that fact. It hurts. Maybe now I can better understand the pain of others.