It’s been over a month since my dad’s brush with pneumonia. We were all lucky, I suppose. He survived, despite the bad reaction to antibiotics, and has been been on a long, slow recovery trajectory.
For several weeks, he was just exhausted. Slept a lot. I admit to visiting less.
In the past couple of weeks, his physical health and mental condition have been on separate tracks. Sometimes they are running parallel, sometimes there’s a big divergence. And things seem to change quickly. I think of that image of the wobbling track of a hurricane, like a bottle in a current. It’s on a general track in one direction, but it wobbles along that track in a way that can create significant differences.
When I stopped to see him early last week, he was in bed, but agitated and very upset. He wanted to know if I had heard anything about “what’s happening.”
“No,” I replied cautiously, not knowing what he was talking about.
Then it came right out.
“When I got home last night,” he said, serious, making eye contact with me. “I didn’t have a wife. She was gone. She moved out on me. I think she moved in with Bonnie.”
“Home” is in Kahala, the house where my parents lived since somewhere around the beginning of WWII. He hasn’t been home, at least not physically, since a couple of days before Thanksgiving in 2008. Bonnie is my sister. She’s been living with my mom in Kahala to assist since before my dad ended up in this nursing home.
He was very worried about the situation and my mother’s absence.
“I don’t understand why she didn’t call,” he said.
Okay, I can understand that, at some level, he’s worried she hasn’t been here to visit very often. She’s at home dealing with her own mobility and health issues, and getting to his bed on the third floor of the nursing home becomes a major expedition.
Then it got worse.
“There was a Japanese guy in the kitchen, and he looked like he had been invited.”
All this took me by surprise, and I really didn’t know how to respond. I think I told him that one of her club meetings probably just ran a little long, but that I would check it out.
He closed his eyes again for a minute or so, then looked up at me.
“I pulled out a couple of chafing dishes, just in case,” he said, then launched into an explanation of how these can be used for warming, or for steaming, like a double boiler.
This is something he would have done back when he ran his own restaurant supply company. He would pull stuff out of their inventory for various needs. Last minute Christmas gifts? Head for the stockroom. Birthday? Pull out a frying pan. Today he spoke as if he really had just opened a few boxes and dug out their contents. Just in case.
Meanwhile, I was trying to guess the source of the brain short-circuit leading to the sighting of a Japanese man “in the kitchen.”
Did he catch sight of the man in the next bed, which he continually forgets is there? Did a new nursing assistant deliver his meal? I never did quite figure that one out.
Despite floating in the fantasy zone, he surprised me with a couple of other mental jumps that showed his brain can make connections. When I mentioned that one of Meda’s sisters is moving to a home in Menlo Park, California, he quickly pointed out his cousin, Bill Fairley, had lived in Menlo Park. And then he remembered the name of one of the people in an old photo I showed him on my previous visit. In the picture with my dad were Duke Kahanamoku, Dad Center, and several other unidentified men.
“Ward Brewster.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Ward Brewster, I think he was the short guy in the picture. He was around the beach a lot.”
He remembered the photo, and added another name to it.
Then Bob, the 3rd floor nursing supervisor, stopped in.
My dad called out cheerfully, “Hello, Paul!”
He thinks that he’s talking to Paul, who apparently welcomed people to the old Commercial Club in downtown Honolulu. The business club was upstairs from the Dohrmann Hotel Supply Company, where my dad worked from the time he arrived in Honolulu in 1939.
Bob knows the story, and doesn’t mind at all being “Paul”.
Another day, another visit. On this afternoon, I found him in bed, but his voice was clear and strong. His mind, though, was someplace else.
He greeted me by name, but that was the high point.
He closed his eyes.
Opened them.
Asked me if my friend was still visiting.
I didn’t know what he was talking about, but didn’t want to argue.
So I said, no, they’re gone.
He asked: “Did she leave yesterday?”
She? Again, I was winging it.
“No, earlier in the week,” I sputtered.
He asks: “When does your wife get back?”
Oh, oh. I tell the truth.
“She wasn’t gone. She’s been here.”
He looked at me.
Closed his eyes.
Opened his eyes.
“Who’s the guy having all that fun?”
I ask, puzzled, “which guy?”
“The one on the golf course,” pointing across the room towards the hall.
I had to just say that I didn’t know.
Then, trying to say something more, he managed only a few slurred words. I couldn’t tell whether this was the sleep, vague state of mind, or another micro stroke, of which he apparently has had many.
He had lunch in front of him and, when he next opened his eyes, was surprised to see it.
He asked: “How long has that been here?”
Then: “Was I here when it came in?”
It took several seconds, then he understood that he must have been there, since he was in the bed and apparently hadn’t been anywhere in a while.
He looked at the food, but didn’t eat anything.
Then he closed his eyes again and was asleep.
And so we continue on this winding path.
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