Photo: EssjayNZ is back in NZ
Per boyfriend legend, Glenn was a nutty one. Meeting up with him 10 years post breakup was chance. I was then married, he, still single. Our destination: Ohio, where neither of us lived. I was on a story assignment, he, on a business trip. And, he was still nutty. I never forgot from that brief meeting how he described his "aging" father. Glenn and I were just barely 30. His father, 60. Mine was nearly 70. Sixty, I knew, was spring chick material. I remembered Glenn's father handsome and robust. Like father, like son. But, Glenn insisted how infantile-like his father was and shared the things he had to help his father with -- like assisting a little child.
Nutty Glenn came to mind during the recent Father's Day weekend. Not because I was back in one of the locations of our brief college courtship. Instead, I recalled Glenn because of how he described his father during our last meeting. However inaccurate I judged Glenn's assessment of his father -- it had become my view of my father. And how ironic and surreal it all felt.
Father's Day weekend, my father's Parkinson's shuffle made his commute from our dinner table to sofa painstakingly long, with at least two siblings on either side of him, insuring his safety so he would not fall -- like a toddler learning to walk. However, unlike a toddler, there would be no running to follow. This was life being lived in reverse. Later, my sister and I took him "home," to his assisted living facility. I turned my head and stared at the wall as my sister helped him toilet and dressed him in his pajamas. This was not a toddler learning essential independent self-help skills. This was a grown man, losing his essential skills.
And, like a child, we pulled the covers up to his chin. A child that sprouted beard stubble. We kissed him goodnight, not knowing what he'd be like in mind and body the next time we would see him. Reverse was a direction we'd come to expect in him since my mother's death a mere six months ago. Before we finished saying our last goodnight and I love you's, his eyes had already closed. Briefly, they fluttered opened long enough for his weak, tremble-ly voice to pathetically echo our goodbyes.
My head is trying to wrap itself around this cycle of life....A cycle that begins in infancy and, in this and many other cases, returns to an infantile state. And, of course, there's the irony that this is the same parent who once performed all of these tasks with my own self and my siblings. The roles. Have reversed.
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