Most of my dedicated fans know that my 93-year-old father finally decided that he couldn't hack it any longer, living alone in a three story house on the side of a mountain. He came to live with us on my 64th birthday, January 12th, 2017. Carmen gave up her office; it's now my dad's room. He says it's the finest private nursing home he's ever seen.
He has a laundry list of health issues: celiac disease, emphysema, extreme difficulty swallowing and abysmal balance. He has fallen several times since coming here. Thankfully, we have caught him most of the time. He has bad dentures that don't help him chew, so his food is nearly always soft or blenderized, and his allergy to wheat and gluten narrows the choices of foods quite a bit. He's 5'10" and 95 pounds, and losing weight.
For the most part, his spirits are good, and he loves to talk. He likes to tell his stories of his childhood on the farm during the 1930s, his WWII Navy experiences, his working life at the Baltimore City Planning Dept., the Maryland State Roads Commission, Westinghouse Armaments Division and The National Geographic Society. He was an illustrator at heart when he was eight years old, and continued to draw and paint for a living - or at least a supplement - until his stroke in 2013. He didn't lose much, as strokes go, but he forgot how to draw and paint. He also lost the ability to read and make sense of sentences and paragraphs. He can read the words, but not tie them together into complex thoughts. And his hearing is very bad. Lucky for him, I dealt with a very hard of hearing mother for fifty years or more, so I know how to make myself heard.
It's now pretty much up to Carmen and me - mostly me - to keep his life together, make sure he has food he can eat, keep his bills and accounts up to date, get him to appointments on time and with the proper paperwork, wash his clothes and his dishes, and be his ears and his memory. Basically, I'm his daddy now. But that's okay. He was my daddy for a very long time.
Sunday, February 12, 2017
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