More not being able to go home again…. Tuesday, Oct 6 2009

I got so caught up writing about my dad yesterday that I didn’t fully explore the topic of not being able to “go home again.”

While my dad is “alive” (not that it’s much of a life at the moment), my mom is stuck in a holding pattern in her life. While this sucks for her on so many levels, there is one way that it is good for me. (More of the selfish thoughts, here!)

While my dad is still alive, my childhood home remains mostly the same. Small changes will happen, as is normal in a house, but it is still very recognizably the home in which I grew up. And I love being able to go back to it: the bookshelves stuffed with books whose spines I have perused all my life – histories, scientific studies, histories, philosophical works, histories, biographies, histories, more histories – and my mom’s vase collection, my dad’s Japanese statues, the bust of Plato … and that’s just the room I’m in now! All over the house are the things that made up “home.”

After my dad dies, my mom can’t keep this rambling old house by herself. She is going to have my older brother, his wife, and their three kids move in. She will take the small apartment on the second floor where my grandfather used to live, and the house will be theirs to redecorate as they choose. The physical building will remain in the family, which is nice, but the home of my childhood will be gone forever.

Coming back here can be hard. Sometimes I can feel scared that I never left – never moved across the country and started my own life. But even though I needed to leave this nest, and was so happy to at the time, the fact that it has been still here for me to return to, to take little sips of memory, to take comfort in the fixed center that waited for me.

Soon that unchanging anchor will be gone. Each time I come back to it could be the last time. As I walk around the house, I try to drink in the images, the feel, the memory-seeped atmosphere. It will break my heart to loose this – and since that change will come when my father dies, it will be one heart break added to an even deeper one.

So this may be my last time “home.” I am hoping that my dad will keep on through one last family Christmas together, but that is really a selfish hope, because he doesn’t enjoy life day-to-day, and to hope that he’ll suffer through three more months just so I can have a good Christmas is really pretty inconsiderate and insensitive of me. But even if he can’t really enjoy it, it would be wonderful (for me) if when we opened our gifts under the tree, he was sitting in his chair and watching, like he always has been for my whole life.

But what gift do you buy for a dying man (who doesn’t even enjoy his beloved dark chocolate anymore)?

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Back where I started … but you can’t go home again. Tuesday, Oct 6 2009

He saw now that you can’t go home again — not ever. There was no road back. Ended for him, with the sharp and clean finality of the closing of a door, was the time of his dark roots, like those of a pot-bound plant, could not be left to feed upon their own substance and nourish their own little self-absorbed designs. Henceforth, they must be spread outward — away from the hidden, secret, and unfathomed past that holds man’s spirit prisoner — outward, outward toward the rich and life-giving soil of a new freedom in the wide world of all humanity. — Thomas C. Wolfe

I’m at my parent’s house right now, and my dad is snoozing in the chair beside me.

But “snoozing” is a comfortable word, something any one of us might do. Looking at my father, I am not comfortable, and I don’t think he is particularly, either.

His sleep right now is not a disco-nap, getting ready for a night on the town. It’s not from an exhausting day of hiking, either. It is an exhaustion caused by his tired heart not pumping enough blood through his body – it is neither restful nor healthy. It is only marginally better than being awake, because at least he is not aware of how badly his mind is decayed, how weak his body is – and how trapped he is in both.

His breath is not even, and his jaw hangs open. His swollen, weak hands rest uselessly on his lap. He used to be such a proud, vibrant man, and to see him thus reduced breaks my heart constantly. I’m only here for two weeks, but it will take everything out of me. My mother is continuously around the man who used to be her husband, but is now just a shell of the man she loved, who cannot do anything around the house to help her (just takes up all her time in caring for his physical problems), and doesn’t even remember vast chunks of their life together. She is still alive, still a part of the world. He is mostly gone – all that is left of him is pain and difficulty, anger and frailty … and an occasional flash in his eyes of the man she once loved. Those flashes make it all the worse – sometimes his eyes lift of their clouds, and he smiles that mischievous and irresistible smile, and that brief glimpse of him makes the pain all the more intense, knowing there is still something of him trapped in a failing mind and body, and unable to give him a final goodbye, since he has not entirely gone.

It’s so terrible to wish that someone was really gone, to hope not to see that spark of them again in this life. Of course, of course you do want, selfishly, to have them back, to have one more lucid meeting. But also of course, you selfishly want the pain to end – your own suffering, that is, and even wanting their suffering to end still smacks of a selfish craving because their suffering causes your own. So nothing you feel is not suspect, not tainted by guilt.

And my guilt is all the worse because I don’t like my mother, and while I know it is my duty as a daughter to support her (and that’s why I’m out here right now) it’s something I must force myself to do, and the real reason that I do it is so that I won’t have regrets later. If I didn’t come out to see my dad while there was still time and he still could recognize me, I’d regret it that opportunity was lost. And if I didn’t support my mom and help her in these hardest of times, she wouldn’t be the only person I didn’t like.

So all my thoughts are selfish, and even while I hate that fact, I still can’t help but feel the way I do. My sister pointed out to me a few days ago that what I needed to do, once I have gone back home across the country, is call my mom often and provide a strong shoulder and understanding ear. “But,” I thought in a panic, “I’ll hate that! I don’t want to do that! I don’t want to talk to her all the time!” And of course, I felt as horrible as I should feel, for indulging in my dislike of my mother at a time when what you need to do is buckle down and put your personal shit aside. But the sad fact is that I won’t be just calling my mom up out of the blue to check on her because she is in my thoughts. I will be calling because it’s been X number of days since I spoke with her last, and I have to check in and give her support, and I need to get it over with.

Heh. Well, at least I’m not pretending to any false virtue! Yay, that’s one personality flaw that I’m not exemplifying!

The fact of the matter is that I am needed here, yet I am still going home at the end of this week. My mom could seriously use the help keeping the house running, and having someone to talk to who isn’t deaf and in the early-to-middle stages of dementia. And my poor father has responded so well to my being home, and has shown some real signs of improvement when I talk with him: if I were to stay here and spend a couple hours talking with him every day, it might have a significant effect on slowing his mental disintegration. I know all this, and still I look forward to this week being over, and my husband coming to take me away for a weekend of hanging out with friends, and then back home to our comfortable life. I know all this and still I’m not changing my plane ticket and just staying out here until the bitter end. And my dad is very bitter indeed, and I don’t anticipate he will “go gentle into that goodnight” in the slightest – it will be hard for him and everyone around him, just as these past few years have been….

More depressing thoughts to come!

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