The Immortal Parent - Summer 2010

My dad is 85.

What does that mean? It means he’s old and I’m trying to come to terms with it. While he has some health concerns, he’s not sick at all. He’s one of the healthiest 85 year olds you’ll meet. He is starting to ACT old.

My dad has always been a very young-at-heart man. He was 42 when I was born (yes, that means I’m 43 … or at least almost) but you’d never guess it. One of my most vivid memories of my dad acting young was when I was around 7. He had an ice fight with me and my cousins at our family picnic. I can still see him running around like it was one of us kids, putting ice down our backs.

He’s never been one to sit down for too long. When I was little, he worked full-time at his electrical engineering job, worked part-time as an apartment maintenance man and completed his degree all at the same time. He didn’t have his rebooting moments but he was mostly moving. And when he had his back problems, he would lie on the floor to watch TV or read his paper.

Woodworking was his hobby. He didn’t get to do it as much as he wanted when I was younger but he’d do a couple projects a year. He built my sister and I a pantry cabinet and refrigerator for us to play with when we were smaller. He built our toybox, which was big enough for us to hide in. He built tables and bookshelves for our bedroom and even built in a dresser with a desk in between the two sides on one side of our room. He inserted our microwave into the wall to get it off the counter. He used part of the closet in the spare room to built a utility closet in the hallway for mom’s vacuum cleaner and cleaning supplies. He made a picnic table for my mom. He finished our basement, including a bedroom for me. After us kids moved out, he stepped it up. He used an out-of-the-way corner of their family room that was probably originally designed to stack firewood for the fireplace to build a TV stand. He extended the small, stone mantel of their fireplace by building a wooden mantel that just slipped right over the stone one. And these are just the things I can remember!

When I moved out, he looked at my apartment and decided I needed tall bookshelves because I didn’t have much floor space. He built a microwave shelf for me. He built a pantry cabinet for my sister.

After he retired, he first finished his family tree that he had printed into a book and sold all of the copies of the two printings he did. Once he was done with that, he started his woodworking hobby again. He worked with my sister to build a wine cabinet as a gift for her husband. He built a dresser for my niece and nephew. He built curio cabinets for my sister and I. He built a CD cabinet for me.

When the projects were done, he took another maintenance job for a retirement community. But maintenance was not like it had been 20 years earlier. He was now on pager all the time. He grew tired of being on pager and having to plan his life around the pager so he retired again and became an ‘M.D.’ – Maintenance Doctor. He got one client that he helped with projects around the house and she passed his name on to friends and so on. It kept him busy but he could have a life too.

The last year has been hard for my dad.

• In May 2009, his sister-in-law passed away. His brother had already passed away a few years back.
• In June 2009, his oldest brother passed away.
• In July 2009, a mentally-retarded (is that still the politically correct term???) cousin he visited passed away.
• In September 2009, his aunt died at 103.
• In October 2009, his youngest brother passed away.
• In February 2010, he faced his own mortality with the news that he has an aortic aneurysm but the doctors were not concerned about it because he is in such fantastic health. They told him to come back in 5 years.
• In March 2010, Mom fell and dislocated her shoulder. She was very dependent on him for the next month.
• And, just as he was getting over all of that, in June 2010, his only sister passed away. She was buried exactly one year to the day that their oldest brother died.

He is the last living member of his family and he feels like he is a ticking time bomb.

Since I moved out of the house, he has talked about getting my mom moved near one of the family before he dies so that she would have someone if she needed help. This kept getting put off because of the proximity to the airport for my sister and family to come in or for them to hop on a plane, for the proximity to the highway for me to come up and for the size of their house to accommodate the grandkids. After the aneurysm was discovered and Mom injured her shoulder, the plans were kicked into high gear … from dad’s perspective. Mom’s not so sure about it. She says she’s not ready to move.

He’s had more than one realtor walk through the house and give opinions of what should be done. He’s been downsizing everything … burning VHS tapes to DVDs because they take up less room, giving things away, and throwing things away.

The true measure of what Dad is feeling was the fact that he sold the bulk of his tools at the garage sale they had this past weekend. Mom said it was very sad to see the tools go because it really was a major indicator that dad was getting older and slowing down and that they were actually going to be moving. He told her that his heart was still in the hobby he’s always escaped to in the past but his body wasn’t up to the challenge anymore. That makes me sad too.

It’s so easy and so nice to live in the oblivion of the immortal parent or the immortal spouse or the immortal child. But, we, they, are not immortal so why do we do that? I have decided that we do it as self-preservation. If we did nothing but worry about the end, we’d get depressed and never enjoy the ‘during’.

Then reality comes around, slaps you in the face and makes you face the truth that everyone is mortal.

Reality … you’re a bitch. I hate you.