Category: Family

…that it was supposed to be better than 2013.

Two weeks ago the mother-in-law finally put money down on an apartment, for a scheduled move out today. She and Ben even went out and bought a bed and sofa (since she has no furniture of her own at this point).

But of course—like always happens when she's on the verge of finally getting her act together and out of our house—she blew it.

I'll spare you all the ugly details, but suffice to say she's back in the psych ward again after another failed suicide attempt yesterday afternoon.

While the future is anything but certain at this point, on Monday Ben is going to court to get custody, and once she's out of lockup, she's going into rehab. The one thing that is certain is that she's not coming back here. We're both done with this bullshit.

And all his noodly appendages!  She put money down on an apartment today and is moving out on the 28th 29th!

…when I can come home from work and not hear Judge Judy or Law&Order SVU blaring from that guest room.

It's the only explanation.

I don't remember the exact moment of our deaths. I don't know if it was shortly before we were scheduled to move to Denver, or if it happened en route, or if it was—most likely—February 2013, when she arrived; the Destroyer of Worlds.

As I lay wide awake at 4:15 am this morning—again—I started quietly sobbing because I realized that my friend Cindy was right a year ago when she learned that we were moving Ben's mom up "temporarily" and told me, "She's never going to leave."

After five trips to the ER in the last 30 days for uncontrolled neuralgia in spite of a steady diet of beer and morphine (yes, at the same time), she's now decided to go out on short term disability for the next six weeks. WHY? What is this going to accomplish? Are we going to see any real change—like seeing a doctor who will do anything other than rubber-stamp another scrip for pain meds or god forbid, checking herself into rehab to get off the stuff to begin with—or is it just going to be six weeks of more self-medicating and endless Judge Judy blaring from our guest room?

I asked Ben if this was going to affect her move out date since she will still be drawing her full salary and he said it wouldn't.  As much as I'd like to believe that I have no faith it's going to happen. She's already talking about returning the bedding she bought for her own place, so I'm sure  something is going to happen that will prevent her from moving out yet AGAIN.

At this point I fear the only way to get her out of here is for Ben and I to move back into a one bedroom apartment when our lease expires at the end of August.

When she's working, she's on an odd shift so she normally doesn't get home until around 7:30 pm, giving me a couple hours of alone time (Ben doesn't normally get home before 7 either) to unwind from work. But now I've even lost that brief respite from her crazy. For the next six weeks I'll be going directly from work to Starbucks until Ben gets home because I simply can no longer abide being around her if he's not there.

I never believed in a real, physical Hell, but I'm really starting to question it now.

I mean seriously…HOW?

And her move out has been delayed yet again. Apparently she has an eviction on her credit report (something she never bothered to tell anyone) that doesn't drop off it until next month, and because of that there isn't an apartment complex in a hundred miles that will even talk to her.

If hell were a real place, I now know what it would be like.

48 more fucking days! 7 more weeks!

7 more weeks of laundry being done as noisily as possible at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning. 7 more weeks of hearing doors that are apparently incapable of being closed quietly. 7 more weeks sticky door handles and coffee stains down the front of cabinets. 7 more weeks of arriving home to dog shit in the living room because she couldn't be bothered to take them out before she left for work. 7 more weeks of finding the dishwasher unemptied with dirty dishes sitting in the sink. 7 more weeks of living with someone who fancies herself an expert on everything. 7 more weeks of Judge Judy twenty four hours a day. 7 more weeks of that smell. 7 more weeks UNTIL WE GET OUR FUCKING HOME BACK TO OURSELVES AND THAT WOMAN IS GONE!

I told Ben the other night that if I never see his mother again after she moves out I'll live out my life a happy man. He said he was starting to feel the same way.

Worst. Houseguest. Ever.

It has been said that a boy doesn't fully grow up and enter adulthood until his father dies. If that is the case, I grew up two days ago.

My dad's passing did not come as a complete surprise. A month ago my sister called to tell me that he'd suffered a major heart attack and the attending physician told her that, "Anyone who needs to say goodbye needs to come sooner rather than later." The next day I got on a plane and flew down to Phoenix.

It was the first time I'd been to the group home where we'd moved him shortly after my last trip to Phoenix in December. All I can say is I hope that when the time comes and I find myself in a similar situation that I end up in such a warm, welcoming place.

When I arrived, Dad was weak, but in good spirits. Surprisingly, he actually looked better than the last time I'd seen him. And despite the fact his chart read "actively dying," he was eating like a horse. I called my friend Cindy—a lifetime nurse—and told her about this and she said that was pretty common; that the body was rallying for one last hurrah. She had seen this many times before and said it could be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks until he passed on.

My sister and I mended the rift that had opened since my previous trip, and—since apparently no one had actually told Dad how serious his heart attack had been—had "the talk" with him. We told him that if he wanted to go, he could. We would both be all right, that he raised two great kids, and that we loved him. In typical Arthur fashion, he looked at us and said, "What if I don't want to go?" We laughed.

My dad worked as chief architect and designer for Hallcraft Homes during the peak of their business in the 1970s. His residential designs changed the face of Phoenix—if only through the ubiquitous presence of the homebuilder in the valley. Today you cannot drive anywhere in Phoenix without seeing his work, even if his name is totally unknown by the people living those homes. (Ben's grandparents actually live in one of his designs.)

On my second—and last—day in Phoenix, on the way to the group home I took a detour through what I consider to be the high point of Hallcraft's reign; a subdivision called Biltmore Highlands. Our family had even considered moving there—going to far as to actually pick out one of the homes—as I was about to start high school, but for one reason or another it never came to fruition. I don't know if it was overall cost of the house, or the school district we'd be moving into, or the fact we could get a bigger home for the same amount of money elsewhere, but ultimately we ended up moving to a new place (in another Hallcraft development) on the west side about a mile south of where we were currently living.

I'd driven through the Highlands back in 1998 and was surprised at the changes, but for the most part the homes were still instantly recognizable to me and my heart swelled with pride knowing that my dad had designed them. But driving through the streets that morning was more of a shock. Major remodelings since 1998 seemed to be the norm, and in fact, entire homes had been razed and replaced with horribly ugly McMansions. What surprised me the most, however, was that the house we'd initially chosen to move into remained virtually unchanged. Yeah, it had been painted, front doors replaced and a small wall had been erected out front, but otherwise it looked the same as it did back in 1972:

Alternate timelines, bitches. The mind reels at how different my adult life might've been if we'd moved there instead of where we ended up.

I got to the group home before my sister that morning, so I had some quality one-on-one time with Dad. We reminisced about everything from his days in the Navy during World War II and the Korean War to those days at Hallcraft to his brief stint in San Francisco. I said everything I needed to, and it seemed he did the same. Tears welled in both our eyes as we said goodbye several hours later, knowing that this was probably going to be the last time we would see each other.

I flew back to Denver that afternoon, knowing that the next time the phone rang and my sister's name appeared on the display it would be that call.

Several days passed, so I called her and she said that Dad had made an amazing comeback; he was even out of bed and sitting out on the home's front veranda. I called him a few minutes later and he said he was tired but feeling good.

And that has been the situation until last Tuesday. I realized it had been a week since I'd last spoken to him, so I called that night. He again reported feeling a bit tired, but my god, he sounded amazing; stronger and more vibrant than I'd heard in months.

So it was a bit of a shock when I got the call from my sister at 8:30 the next morning. She never calls me at work, so even before I answered I knew what what had happened.

She said he was fine before breakfast, but when they returned to get his dishes he was gone, laying there peacefully with his eyes closed.

I'm not flying down this time; Dad had the foresight about ten years ago to get everything set up beforehand with the Neptune Society (something, ironically I'm going to do for myself with some of his life insurance money) so neither my sister or I would have to deal the actual disposition of his body. My sister will keep the cremains at her house until next fall, when we'll all gather to scatter the ashes in southern Arizona as he'd requested.

My dad had always been an excellent father. Though I know over the course of my life I caused him untold financial and emotional distress, he never stopped loving me. When one of my cars blew up, he was there with credit card in hand. When I lost my job in San Francisco in 2002, he opened his doors to me. I don't know if that was strictly the father in him speaking, or if it was because—some thirty years earlier—he'd found a kindred spirit in his son.

In 1976, when I came out to my family, several days later, my dad took me aside and came out to me. Like so many men in the 1950s, he had become—as Bette Midler might say—"trapped in an act, not of his own design." While there was no doubt that he loved my mother, he was still a gay man living a double life, and my coming out allowed him to finally let someone—family—know who he really was. I can't even begin to imagine the weight that fell from his shoulders that summer, but I know from that point onward our whole relationship changed. He was no longer simply the authoritative father figure I'd grown up with; he was also rapidly becoming my friend.

And maybe that's the reason I'm finding that his death is hitting me much harder than when my mom passed several years ago. I don't know if it's because Alzheimer's robbed us of much of who Mom was long before her passing, or if in addition to losing my dad, through his death I also lost a really good friend.

Arthur
March 23, 1926-February 20, 2013

"Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future." – David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Ben and I are about to have a long-term house guest. We are moving his mom up from Phoenix to stay with us until she can get resettled in Denver.

Having gone through enough familial drama of my own during the last two months to last the rest of my life, I was well aware of what Ben was facing. While not exactly the same situation, much like we'd reached the point with my dad that we realized he could no longer live on his own, leaving Ben's mom on her own right now also wasn't an option.

Julie is family, and I love her to death, but to be honest I had some strong misgivings about this happening until Ben and I had a long talk and he assured me this wasn't going to be a repeat of her moving into his old apartment several years ago.

After Ben (who is in Phoenix this week putting all this in motion) reported the condition of her place there (a pipe broke in an adjacent apartment some time ago that was never properly addressed and mold is growing through the shared wall) to me yesterday, it's more clear than ever that we made the right decision and getting her out of there and into someplace safe and healthy is essential.

Plus, the quote above keeps resonating with me. Am I paying Julie back for a past kindness, or paying her forward? I don't know, but it feels like the right thing to do either way.

It's strange where your mind wanders when you find yourself wide awake at 3:30 in the morning. Fuckin' insomnia.

Until they relocated to Arizona in 1972, every other year my maternal grandparents would fly my mother, sister, and I back east to spend the summer with them on their 22 acre property in western Massachusetts.

And by "the summer," I mean about two and a half months—a period of time that as an adult passes in the blink of an eye: ten weeks, five paychecks. But to a child, two and a half months was a lifetime.

Those summers were idyllic times for me, starting with the incredible excitement of flying across country. This was obviously long before you had to submit to a rectal probe to be allowed past the gate; when people actually dressed up to get on an airplane. Hell, the first couple times we flew jetways weren't even used in Phoenix.

My grandparents lived in what felt like the middle of nowhere. Their closest neighbor literally lived a mile away, it was a 45 minute drive to the nearest hospital, and "going into town" to pick up mail at the post office, or buy groceries, or take the week's trash to the dump always seemed an adventure in itself. In addition to the 230-year old house and rambling barn that seemed to go on forever, the property had a running stream and pond, two enormous fields (that were leased out for cultivation), and several acres of completely undisturbed forest.

Many nights were spent on the home's screened porch; a magical place where I learned to play Solitaire with my grandmother, built plastic models, put puzzles together, and drew and wrote stories.

Every night my grandmother would read to us. Children's classics like Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh and The Jungle Book were all on tap.

It was there that I discovered the joys of Pepperidge Farm cookies (at the time only available on the east coast), my love of seafood—especially lobster—and the practice of using half-and-half on my cereal instead of milk. To this day, in my mind there's no more comforting breakfast than a bowl of corn flakes with fresh peach slices drenched in half-and-half. Toward the end of the summer (always marking our sad, eventual departure and the return to the reality of school and Phoenix) we would gather fresh wild blueberries and enjoy homemade blueberry muffins and blueberry pie.

My grandfather was an accomplished woodworker, and in my mind, he could build anything. I still have a "work table" he built for me one one of our first trips back east:

The last summer we visited before they moved to Arizona, I was obsessed with Lost in Space, and enlisted Grandad's help in building a "life-size" model of the LIS robot. He was very accommodating, but while I initially started off actively engaged in the construction, being a kid I eventually grew bored and spent more and more time wandering off, exploring the rest of the barn. The place was  chock-full of all manner of intriguing things, leading to me eventually being called out in no uncertain terms by my grandmother; the one time in memory I can ever remember seeing her genuinely angry.  From that point forward, I stayed in the workshop—assisting where I could—until the project was completed.

While the final product actually ended up bearing only a passing resemblece the original (I'm not posting photos; they're on a hard drive in the other room and I'm not waking Ben up to get it.) and because of an initial miscommunication it slid sideways instead of front to back, I was quite amazed that we managed to pull it off at all. It's amazing what a loving grandfather can do with a bit of wood, plaster, and several feet of chicken wire. When my grandparents moved to Arizona, they actually brought the thing with them, but by that time I was "all grown up" and in high school—totally embarrassed at the way it looked—so it lived at the back of our garage until I finally disposed of it a couple years later.

The only real downside to these northeastern getaways was my grandparents' dog: a feisty gray poodle they'd acquired shortly after my family got ours. The disposition of the two animals could not have been more different. Our poodle was affectionate; theirs was an aggressive hellhound. I still have the scars on my right hand where the little beast attacked me one evening as I kissed my grandmother goodnight. When the little monster died years later, I did not shed a single tear.

My sister and I have often talked about flying back east to see how the place has changed; I have found it on Google Maps, and while there's no street view yet available I've seen enough to know that memories are best left in the past. The property has apparently been subdivided with two new houses built in the aforementioned fields. The barn has been torn down and rebuilt, and a second garage seems to have been added onto the house. So yeah, as much as I might like to make the pilgrimage, the fact is I think I'd much rather just keep my memories intact of the place that left such an indelible impression on my young life.

I'm en route to Phoenix.

Several weeks ago my dad checked himself into the ER complaining of heartburn and vomiting.

Turns out he had a huge hiatal hernia and the majority of his stomach was sitting on top of his diaphragm. And oh yeah, his surgeon described his esophagus as "looking like raw hamburger."

So they got him put back together and he spent about another week in the hospital convalescing.

Because my dad lives alone and would be unable to care for himself immediately following this surgery, his doctor placed him in a short term managed care facility with scheduled physical therapy because apparently he couldn't sit up in bed without assistance.

That's where he's been for the past few weeks, and it turns out he's not cooperating with the staff, refusing therapy and generally making life a living hell for everyone.  In fact, it's come down to him either doing his PT as prescribed, or they're going to discharge him on Saturday.

My sister called last night and said, "I need you here NOW."

For a variety of reasons, it's been agreed that it's time for Dad go to into long-term managed care. Several months ago I was discussing my dad's health issues and his living conditions with a nurse friend of mine and I asked her how we were going to get this to happen. "It's going to take an incident," she said, "that will unequivocally show everyone involved that he can no longer live on his own." Said incident has occurred, and to quote my sister, "He's not interested in going home. He wants someone to feed him and change his diaper, and that's about it."

Did I also mention the onset of dementia? "They're waking me up at 4 am to do physical therapy and everyone here is out to get me!"

So yeah. Christmas has been cancelled so I can go to Phoenix two weeks early and help my sister get him placed and attempt to go through the hoarder's paradise that is his mobile home. I'm there until Sunday. Whatever doesn't get done will either have to wait for another time or she'll have to hire someone to do it.

I'm not upset at having to go down there; I'm upset at her attitude about it.

Thankfully, it will be easier this time since we had to go through a lot of this with Mom five years ago.

I woke up at 4:45 this morning and could not get back to sleep. I kept thinking about something my dad said to me the other day and try as I might I could not get it out of my head.

I asked how he'd been doing since my last call a week earlier. "Oh, not so good. Going downhill fast." I asked what he meant by that and he said, "It's these damn sinuses."

My dad's had sinus problems for the last couple years, and despite trying numerous prescription medications, nothing seems to clear it up.

As I lay there in the dark this morning, listening to (and quite envious of) Ben's blissful, rhythmic breathing as he traversed the astral, it hit me.  The root cause of Dad's sinus problems is the fact his place hasn't gotten a proper, thorough cleaning in at least five years—and probably closer to ten. In addition, he never opens his windows to air the place out, so it's not just dust, but probably mold and god knows what else. (He blames "the cats that come over and shit in his yard." I find that as a source of nasal irritation highly unlikely; my dad just hates cats.)

Anyway…

The man is 86 years old. And while he's still sharp mentally, he doesn't have the dexterity or physical stamina he used to, so he admits that while domestic maintenance may get started, it's never finished. He's also become a borderline hoarder, and attempts over the years by my sister and I to get his place decluttered so that we can clean have been met with extreme resistance.

(If you watch an episode of Hoarders and see how the folks react when their stuff is being hauled off is exactly what we've gone through with Dad.)

A little backstory to his current housing situation is necessary: In 1994, after breaking up with a woman he'd been living with in the Bay Area for several years, he moved back to Phoenix and bought a nice mobile home across the street from his sister in what was, at the time, a decent little park.

A couple years later my aunt moved up north and in the years since the park has steadily gone downhill.

About two years ago, after a wind storm severely damaged his carport and patio covers, he said he'd had enough, and there was a brief window when he was open to the idea of moving into a proper apartment. Wrapped up in our own lives, my sister and I could never coordinate a time for the three of us to start looking for places and eventually our window of opportunity closed.

After Ben and I moved to Denver, there was even some positive discussion about Dad going into an assisted living household, but as of today, nothing more about it has been discussed.

I've thought about hiring a cleaning service to come in once a week to at least dust, vacuum, and clean the kitchen and bathrooms, but I can't do that until the place is de-cluttered. Apparently the VA also has a program available to him where someone comes in and does basic housekeeping. That sounds like an even better solution since it's free, but again—before that can happen, the place needs to be de-cluttered so that cleaning is even possible.

At this point I would be willing to go down to Phoenix and get the place in order myself—Dad's protestations about "touching his stuff" be damned—but I don't have enough accumulated time off yet to do that. I can't ask my sister to undertake the project herself; not only because it's unfair to her, but we aren't exactly on the best terms these days. (She seems to be carrying around a whole lot of anger at the world, and resentment at me in particular for moving to Denver and "leaving Dad in her care.")

So I don't know what to do. It's unhealthy for him to remain in his current situation as it stands, but I have no immediate solution to rectify that.

Any suggestions?  Certainly I'm not the only one to have ever been in this situation.

Insomnia: just one of several unpleasant symptoms associated with the declining levels of a specific hormone in men of a certain age. Yeah, that hormone.

Being able to sleep in on the weekends is one of the things I miss most about not being 25 (or 35, for that matter) any more. These days I'm lucky if I can pull off anything over 8 hours on a good night.

And those times when insomnia strikes at 3:30 or 4 am, I often find my thoughts drifting back to the last few weeks of my mom's life. Prior to the fall that led to her eventual passing, she had told me on several occasions she had been ready to go.  She wasn't happy.  She had always been a very independent, active, self-sufficient woman, and the fact that Alzheimer's had robbed her of all that and forced her into assisted living with a set routine had no doubt made life unbearable.

Mom adored Dennis, my first partner. She was heartbroken when we split up, and after he passed from AIDS in the early 90s, she refused to remove his photo from her nightstand, always referring to him as her second son.

The same could not be said of my second partner, Bernie. They were at odds almost from the moment they met. I think that was because Bernie was as independent as she was, and  she knew our relationship would end in heartbreak. She didn't hate him, but she also didn't shed a tear when we eventually went our separate ways.

On the other hand, although she was outwardly pleasant toward him on her visits to San Francisco, Mom loathed Rory. Moms know; that's all I have to say regarding number three.

But with Ben it was different.  She loved him from the moment they met and I think that despite her diminished mental acuity at the time, she sensed that he was the man in whom she could finally entrust her son to happily live out his life.

And that is why I still find the timing of her fall—for lack of a better word—suspicious. It happened very shortly she and Ben met, and at the risk of making this all about me, I now believe that since she felt I was safe and she was ready to go, she set the wheels of her departure in motion—if perhaps only unconsciously.

The fall in assisted living (which led to an initially undiscovered fracture in one of the vertebrae in her spine—thank you very much Abrazo Fucking Healthcare—and forced her into a nursing home and a wheelchair) was only the first. I mean, how many times can you "accidentally" fall out of bed or from a parked wheelchair?

(My brother-in-law immediately suspected negligence on the part of the nursing home which may in fact have a ring of truth to it, but I think the repeated falls were far more likely her desperate attempt to get the hell out of this life.)

I feel no guilt about any of  the decisions my sister and I made during her final weeks on this earth, but I regret that she went through so much suffering—both physical and emotional—during that time. I also regret that I didn't spend more time with her during her final weeks—even if, for all intents after the final fall she wasn't really here any more.

And perhaps selfishly, I find myself missing her even more these days, not being able to pass on all my adventures and tribulations in Denver…