Word: dad
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...died almost exactly a year later, on Labor Day weekend, 1996. During that year, I loathed my dad at times, and I'm sure he felt the same way about me. As some men do, he just withered away after she died. He wouldn't let anyone into the house to clean except me. He ran off anyone who tried to help, then complained about loneliness. He picked up women on the bus, talked about getting remarried (always to someone in her 30s or 40s, I noticed), confided details of his marital life that I really didn't want...
...doctor was adamant: Dad couldn't live alone anymore...
Pipher says that moves cannot be avoided, that being near family is what's important for the elderly when they live alone in a distant city. But I still wonder whether my dad's move wasn't the worst thing I could have done to him. I ripped him away from his foundations: from the pub he went to three times a week, the bus route he knew even blind, the house he could navigate in the dark, the newspaper that chronicled men he knew in the Jaycees, the people he had built houses and warehouses...
...Dad and I visited all of them together. I was cheered by the activity in some; at others the rows of zombie-like elderly folk in wheelchairs lined up at the front door depressed me. There is no formula for choosing one. You have to inspect them thoroughly, check into state-agency reports--and ask, ask, ask questions. What's the ratio between staff and residents? Is there a doctor? What's the food like? (Eat there!) What kind of entertainment is available? (Go sample it!) What happens if my parent develops dementia? Will he be kicked out or moved...
...dad chose a nice assisted-care facility with a spacious one-room apartment overlooking a courtyard in the Los Angeles suburb of Tarzana. But after just a month there, Round Two of elder-care hell began. While taking a walk around the block, he fell. I was out of town on assignment. By the time I got back to the city, 12 hours later, the local emergency-room doctors had doped him to keep him calm. He had gone crazy, they said, when they strapped him to the hospital bed. (I'd fight too!) He'd had three beers, they...