[originally posted August 26 2011, 7:10 AM]

Some days it's a scarce commodity. Or misplaced. 

My 84 year-old father is confident he can drive just fine, thank you. He may be right. In the daytime, in good weather, on a familiar road shared by responsible, attentive, sober fellow drivers. 

But he has Alzheimer's Disease, and I don't feel confident about his safety or the public safety. 

Neither of us are confident that he will remember where he hid that last wad of cash he withdrew from the bank. 

He's generally a quite agreeable person, attuned to the comfort of others. I'm losing confidence that he will go along with his hired care-giver when they suggest that it may be too slick or icy this winter when he's hell-bent on taking a walk to "clear his head". 

I'm confident that today will be one of the most challenging days of my life. My brother and sister and I will spend the day with Dad, telling him about his fairly new diagnosis, what it means, how much we love him and care about his safety, and about the difficult decision we've been wrestling with for months. This will be the last day he will live in the house where He spent the last 60 years. It is moving day. He doesn't know yet. On the sage advice of geriatrician colleagues, we decided to have one difficult conversation, rather than repeat a series of misremembered painful ones. 

I'm not completely confident this is the right decision. It's permeated with ambiguity. 

Will this day be filled with tears, tenderness, integrity, and loving-kindness? I'm confident of that.

[originally posted July 17 2011, 10:58 AM]

I visited my father who has mild dementia. 

...oh, and hoarding.

My brain was swimming in war metaphors this weekend as I engaged the battlefield of safety hazards that is the upstairs of his house. Dad has been frugal, saving every empty detergent and juice bottle, every fast food receipt, every plastic shopping bag, and every broken scrap of industrialized society he encountered. There is only a solitary mouse living among this treasure trove, so he apparently is emptying the crumbs and rinsing the juice bottles.

So, in effort to reduce the clutter (there's a reason for that, more on that later...), I attacked the upstairs this weekend. It was daunting. My first strategy was to "take that hill", a throwback to the Korean War. I saw an unused electical outlet behind a 5 foot high stack of hoarded stuff. My goal: clear the tabletop, fix the outlet, so we could later get rid of the rat's nest of old extension cords criss-crossing the landscape like barbed wire from No-Man's-Land in The Great War.

I acheived my mission after hauling away numerous large trash bags, only to find an empty machine gun nest. The outlet was dead.

So, as our leaders did during the VietNam War, I shifted my measure of success to "body counts". In all, I hauled away 10 bags of trash. 

No, the enemy didn't surrender. We have no armistice. There is no change in the forward line or the DMZ. The air is still filled with electricity ... from the maze of old extension cords.

But I did not walk away defeated.

... or empty-handed.

[originally posted June 13 2011, 5:37 AM]

The rain is falling here in Columbia, Missouri. I have adjusted my plans. Life calls on us to adjust our plans often, and we labor under the illusion of control.

In St. Elmo, my father will wake up and adjust his plans. For the past 61 years, he'd check with Iris and make plans. In the last week, after her death, it was my brother and sister and I who were making plans with dad. Today, we've all gone home, and he's at the house with his new adopted daughter-sister, Stephanie. 

The rain is sometimes a disappointment, if your plans include picnics. It's a blessing when you've been needing it to water your growing things. And it happens on its own schedule. Flexibility is called for.

I heard my forgetful father talking about his flexibility, while acknowledging his sorrow. It's what we have to do. Adapt, adjust. But we don't have to forget.

I'm sorry, dear reader, but posts in early 2015 will be out of temporal sequence

So, I'll post the remaining old essays once a week in a proper chronological sequence until I'm caught up. 

I'll do better, I promise.