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Filing

I have a file in my Dad Drawer labeled PSYCH, a holdover from when I was sorting through the piles and piles of crap in his apartment, while freaking out about, among other things, the guardianship hearing turning into the trial of the century (in actuality: "Can I be The Guardian?" "Sure. Next?") If I were feeling whimsical, I could now retitle this folder REMEMBER or maybe CONTEXT.

It's not a fun file to look through. My dad has always been a dedicated note-writer - even before he had anything diagnosable, his memory was terrible, and his apartment walls, the kitchen table, the nightstand were always covered in slips of paper: "Don't be indolent - ride trike today!!!" "HHE [that's me; always a fan of the shorthand, was my dad] visiting Friday." Not exactly a diary, but a layered, constantly updated snapshot of what was on his mind. Even when things started to go downhill, when he must have started losing the routines and abilities that kept him afloat, he still kept on with the notes, and so sifting through this hastily assembled collection of the scribblings from the last six months or so he lived on his own is like holding his disease in your hands, an archeology of dementia.

Most of the slips of paper are stained with coffee from spills or sloppy settings-down - there was no surface in the apartment that wasn't covered in paper, so this was inevitable. You could easily organize the notes by theme, because they are sadly limited in their scope. There are notes about money: endless lists of numbers, credit card debt that we've never figured out the origin of; seethings over an inheritance from his mother that was left in trust to pay for end-of-life care he was sure he wouldn't need; frantic questions regarding charges drawn from his checking account, the product of a swarm of telemarketing schemes: we'll take care of your credit record for a one-time fee of $299, you've won a lottery but we just have to find a way to avoid the taxes, don't want those fat cats in government getting YOUR MONEY, just read us those little numbers off the bottom of the check and we'll take care of everything, small processing fee, etc. And round and round it goes: "$399 taken from checking acct on July 1 (2003?) - WHY?" "Spoke to Bonnie (nice, attractive woman) at bank. Will clear charges, but MUST NOT DO THIS ANYMORE! These 'nice' people (AmeriGold, Inc. - this same as that 'woman' from Texas who called yesterday??) have now STOLEN hundreds of $$ from you! DON'T BE STUPID!!"

There are notes about medication: my dad was taking Ativan, and probably taking it wrong, too much at once because he forgot he already had his pill that night, stopping suddenly because then, of course, he ran out unexpectedly. So there are the notes about where to get it, how much it cost, how to pay for it, how much he should be taking, how it wasn't working anymore, and, if I'm interpreting a couple of the notes correctly, how much you would need for an overdose, because in trying to get his hands on that trust money, my dad exposes a certain "I've got this all under control" attitude that makes me think he had no intention of letting his demise be decided slowly and vaguely in a nursing home, like it will be now.

Then there are the notes where my dad tells himself, over and over again, the story of his life: three wives and three divorces, two daughters, Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton, born in New Jersey, brother, mother, father. Sometimes the details get fuzzy: sometimes I become the older daughter, sometimes he met my mom in Chicago, sometimes my half sister grew up in New Hampshire. Sometimes his anxieties shine through: "Older daughter, Sarah - did she inform you that she no longer wants contact w/you? Check on this - IMPORTANT." Where did that come from? Lingering embarrassment over an incident where his birthday check to my half-sister bounced (thanks to a "subscription" to CheapMeds Inc. or the like, of course)? The misapplied memory of a fight I had with him, years ago, where I told him not to call me again until he stopped being an asshole in a particular way that my dad excels at?

Almost all these notes can be distilled as asking the same questions, reciting the same fears, over and over again, without ever finding a resolution. They make me see my dad chewing on a bone of worry and obsession like he couldn't get enough, even if it provided no comfort and no nourishment.

There is a small group of notes that stand out from the rest. The longest is about two pages long, and although as far as I can tell, it came from well into the Really Bad period of my dad's decline, the handwriting is almost up to his old snuff and the style is lucid. It is a deadly-eloquent description of his situation: the money problems, the health issues, his own memory loss, his girlfriend's (later to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's) inability to help him, her drinking problem, their lack of reliable meals, the mess in the apartment, their fear. And then he writes about how they might get help - call the police? A doctor? 911? He briefly mentions and then dismisses the idea of contacting his brother, because he thinks they "might not be speaking to each other anymore." He never mentions the possibility of calling either of his children.

I'm just guessing that the other notes belong with this one, because all my dad did here is rewrite the numbers for the police department, his physician, 911, over and over. The most striking of these is written in shaky letters three inches high, with an angry-seeming admonition at the bottom: "Beverly - DO NOT throw this out! This could SAVE OUR LIVES!!!!" Of course, to save your life you have to make the call, and as far as we know, neither of them ever once reached out; even when my mom finally cajoled her way into the apartment last year, neither of them (Dad on the floor, unable to get up; his girlfriend walking around barefoot, unsure of her apartment number) could figure out why she was making such a fuss. So maybe these notes aren't so different from the others after all - just more impulse with no follow-through, and none of it did any good.

It's hard to resist the urge to put the notes in order - not by date, because few of them are dated and of those that are, the number is usually accompanied by a shaky question mark. The temptation is to sift the notes into a narrative: here, Dad's loopy penmanship and legendary, pretentious writing style are still intact. Here's where the handwriting starts to go. Here's where the financial obsession changes from regular Dad canoodling to something both frightened-seeming and ominous. Here's where he gets the name of his older daughter wrong. Here is normal and here is bad and here is worse. But it's an exercise in futility to try to draw a line of progression. I have no doubt that the chronology I want to build here is all wrong; even now, under care and with three squares and the right pills every day, Dad's improvements are spotty and inconsistent at best; why would his decline have made any more sense?

This file doesn't have any practical purpose anymore, and it's painful to read, and I should probably throw it all out. But I'm reluctant to do that. I think I want to hang onto it because it's easy to forget just how bad things were last February, just how grim the picture of my dad's final months of independent life really is. And I need to remember it, because shepherding his life is such a complex and murky job, the victories so tiny and so frustrating to win, that it's easy to fall into my own version of the trap in Dad's notes, asking, again and again, did I really do the right thing? Can things be this sad and still be better?

The PSYCH folder reminds me that yes, unfortunate as it seems, they can: that there are measurable differences between malnourished, and not; between falling every day, and using a wheelchair; between making it to the bathroom almost none of the time, and most of the time. Small victories, yeah - but even though it is important to strive for the best, some days the striving has gone right out of you, and you need to be able to fall back on "the best you can do right now" instead. So here it is, for the record: things are tangibly better now, however far from good they might be. And I will try to believe that, and we will see if I can subsist on writing it down just this once.

Posted by hilatron at February 22, 2005 02:11 PM | TrackBack