The Lingering Goodbye.

My father survived his brush with death last month, and has now largely recovered physically, and even mentally. He’s capable of listening and engaging in conversations. He’s not slurring nearly so badly. And he doing less in the way of what I can only think of as “recent hallucinationing”. Meaning, he never seems to actively hallucinate, but he often would talk about conversations that he’d “recently had” with doctors or other people who he imagined told him things. Conversations that never happened.

He’s been moved to a secure wing of a nursing home in Tucson, because he keeps trying to hurt himself and escape. He’s completely unaware of how helpless he is. He thinks he can take care of himself, or that his partner or my sisters could take care of him. It’s delusional, in the extreme. But it makes him very depressed, because he doesn’t understand why he’s in the place he’s in.

And as long as he’s incapable of basic physical tasks like transferring from a bed to a chair, or a chair to a car, he can’t be moved. And he won’t try to do those things, because he thinks he can already do them. He won’t engage with physical therapy. Now that he’s not drunk all the time, he’s doing a bit better mentally, but it took a long time. The last month or two has to be a bewildering, Kafkaesque nightmare. I feel terrible for him.

Now, he’s become convinced that he is going to go live in a cabin in the woods at my little sister’s house. He’s further convinced that I am standing in the way of this. He wants to do this because he’s convinced that his partner is having orgies without him. My sisters are amenable (against my better judgment) to the idea of Dad moving to a nursing home nearer to where they live, but Dad can’t understand that they mean a nursing home and not this self-constructed cabin (it’s a nice cabin, but it’s in no way appropriate for anyone with any kind of special needs).

Dad is in a debilitatingly quixotic state of mind, and I’m convinced that within a month or two of moving to where my sisters live he’d be demanding to go home to Tucson again. I think my sisters are insane to entertain the idea, and I’ve told them so. I can’t in good conscience participate in that course of action, but I also won’t oppose it. I know they want what’s best for dad, and are doing what they think is right. They’re closer to it than I am. I’m allowed to disagree, but meddling or insisting would be inappropriate, and I won’t attempt to derail anything they choose.

So I’ve sort of come to a “on their heads be it” decision. Dad is in a place where he’s safe, well-cared for, and close to the woman who’s essentially been his wife for 25 years. He’s unhappy, but I doubt anything can be done about that at this point. Dad hasn’t been happy in years except in small and diminishing intervals. I feel terrible for him, and I kind of think the best thing would have been for the sepsis to kill him. He talks constantly of suicide.

This is all part of how we’ve turned dying into a long miserable slow cruel process. Half a century ago, my father would have died several years ago as a result of his stroke, and uncontrolled diabetes. But modern pills and treatment have kept him in a miserable limbo, existing in a state of semi-viability. The condition he’s in now could last a decade, with skilled nurses taking care of him. A decade of misery and depression, infirmity and rage.