Sept. 13th: a line and a piece of ass

9/13/09

I made Dad French toast with vanilla and cinnamon and he is delighted. “I’ve never had anything like this before,” he says “but it’s delicious.”

Later, trying to compliment me, he says “you’re the number one contact capital wow wow.” More and more lately, his sentences are getting contaminated with extraneous words. Other times, he’ll say, “How do you say it?” as though he’s speaking a foreign language, but it’s hard to guess what “it” is, so a lot of time we can’t help him.

He’s not too mixed up today, so I can actually talk to him about my work a little. I tell him we’re serving inner for 50 homeless youth, and he says “you can’t have too much trouble with 50 kids. If you did, you’d fly out the window.” Going out the window seems to be a theme today. Later, imagining himself trying to do my job, he says “I, I wouldn’t know what to do, I’d run screaming out the window, probably.”

Dad keeps asking for more light, though all the lights in his house are on. Shuffling across the room, he complains, “all I can see is a line and a piece of ass,” making a curving gesture with his hand. He doesn’t understand that it’s not about the light – the darkness is in his eyes.

“I feel much better when you’re here than when you’re not here,” says Dad, causing me major guilt because I have to leave early to get to work. Sundays are our worst day I terms of Dad coverage – Kate S. and Brianna are unavailable and Michael can come but has to leave by 6pm to get to church in Brooklyn.

The last couple of days, Dad has been talking about death, more than I’ve ever heard from him before. “One of these days, I’ll wake up dead,” he says. “Dad, if you’re dead, you won’t wake up,” I tell him. We just keep reassuring him that there’s no reason for him to die anytime soon – his overall health is quite good. It’s actually quite a quandary for me – of course I want him to live as long as possible, but then, on the other hand, I worry about what shape he’s going to be in and the idea of him lingering on in a severely demented state is at least as bad as the idea of his death. Typing that made me cry.