Dad in Gloucester Day 2

8/20/09

Vacationing with Dad is pretty exhausting. Not only is he waking up a lot at night to pee, but he has lost the ability to realize that he’s keeping me awake, so after he gets back from the bathroom, we have these nonsensical, half-awake discussions until he falls asleep. It doesn’t help that Marie packed the pills for his knees, but left out the ones for his prostate. Last night, he asked me three times in a row why we couldn’t go to bed together. He was so discombobulated that neither the word “family” or the word “relatives” registered with him, so I just said, sternly, “because I’m your daughter.” Even if the meaning of the words wasn’t clear to him, the tone must have been, because he backed off and went to sleep, though I heard him mumble the word “limp” as he was falling asleep.

Being in new surroundings is definitely disorienting him. At 1:30am, he decided to rehearse the route to the bathroom, so we traipsed back and forth several times. Then he lay in bed, tracing the route in the air with his hand until he fell asleep. Even so, today we heard a “how do I get out of here?” from the bathroom. Kate S. went to fetch him and found him in the bathtub – despite the sizable step over the side of the tub, he had stumbled in.

Today, we took Dad to the beach. He needed appropriate footwear, so we bought him a pair of orange crocs (the only color available in his size at the end-of-season sale). He looked adorable in them. It was too far for him to walk to the water, but we set him up in his folding chair in the sand. I peeled him down to just a t-shirt and he sat there in the salty breeze and said, “this is good.” Brianna sat with him while Kate S. and I frolicked in the water.