Approximately 12 years before Mom’s death, we — Mom, Dad, my sister, her husband, and I — were at a hospital in Indianapolis. My wife could not join us. Mom was having surgery to remove part of her genitals following a biopsy that showed she had cancer there.
In hindsight, months after Mom’s surgery, we learned that the surgery was completely unnecessary because the biopsy that showed cancer belonged to another patient. The mistake was not discovered until the other patient died. Mom’s biopsy had been clean, so the other patient got a clean bill of health when he was sick, and Mom had his surgery.
Mom was sitting in the waiting room with us before her surgery. She was wearing those ankle-high, hospital-issue, socks with pieces of rubber on the sole, designed to keep a patient from slipping and falling. When they called her to come back to the operating room, she walked carefully — shuffling her feet, and staring at the floor being careful to not slip and fall. Dad recognized her gait as being like his mother’s gait just before she died. Immediately he thought Mom was going to die and refused to eat for several days while she was in the hospital. He explained that if she died, he did not want to live, and eating would only make him live longer.
The brain requires a certain amount of nutrients daily for it to function properly. What he essentially did by not eating was to starve his brain of the nutrients that it needed to be healthy. When Mom returned home, he ate some, but not much. Over the next 12 years, he went from a strong, 6-foot-tall, man of nearly 170 lbs. to a 120 lb. weakling and he struggled to keep his weight above 120 lbs. — believing that he could eat 2 lbs. of food to get above 120 lbs., but getting mad the next morning when he was back down below 120 lbs. For the last year, he looked like a walking skeleton. His poor eating habits accelerated his dementia.
Mom had done a great job of hiding the extent of Dad’s dementia from my sister and me. Now, Mom was gone, and we were acutely aware of how bad his dementia was. Like the Dad that we knew for our entire lives, he still insisted he was right about everything. For years he tried to cure Mom’s ailments without success. Mom had lost her driver’s license a few years before Dad. So, she could not go to a doctor without Dad’s approval. No new doctors. No new treatments. No alternative treatments. Just more of the same that did not work. Until Mom could take no more.
As we prepared for Mom’s funeral, Dad started preparing to defend the house should the men, who murdered Mom, come for him. He got his guns out. He played with them. One night, he was trying to load his .22 caliber slide action, Smith & Wesson pistol in his bedroom. He asked me how to load it. I did not know, so I grabbed my brother-in-law and suggested that he help Dad. Dad was furious with me. But I did not know how. My sister and brother in law have guns of their own, so I thought they could probably help him. They could not figure out how to load it either. Turns out, the magazine ejection button is in a rather odd place on that gun. But my brother-in-law did manage to peer inside. He said that he did not think the gun was loaded, but we probably did not want to point it at somebody to find out.
I walked back into Dad’s bedroom after my brother-in-law went back to bed. Dad was swinging the gun around wildly. Then he cocked the gun. And when he pointed it at me, I gently pushed the barrel away from me. Dad got mad. He yelled at me that the gun was not loaded, and to prove it, he pointed it at my thigh and pulled the trigger 4 times.
Click! The gun dry-fired.
Thank God it was not loaded, or I might not have been here to write this. 85% of gun fatalities happen when a gun is “not loaded.”
When we could, we removed the guns from his home. If he figured out how to load them, somebody was going to get shot. But it was several more days that we had to live through him playing with the gun and then hiding it while we all slept nervously in the next room.
From the day that Mom passed and throughout the entire Summer of 2019, I traveled to Dad’s house nearly every weekend. On all those weekends, I would beg him to eat, take him to visit Mom at the cemetery, and talk about the three guys that, he claimed, killed her. Our daily adventures centered around getting some food into him, so he was not so tired all the time and visiting Mom at the cemetery. He would talk to her as if she could hear him. He would tell us that he wanted to go be with Mom. He wanted to go to sleep beside her. But he did not believe that was even possible. After all, it was just a fairy tale. And he would tell me so, every weekend. And then he would ask my sister if Mom was in Colorado with them. He would tell her that he was lonely, and he wants Mom to come home. We recognized the stages of grief. When he ate well, he was not so tired. When he was not tired, we could talk with him. But when he got tired, the stories about her murder would return.
He told us that he did not want us to move in with him. He told us, repeatedly, that he wanted to move out of Illinois because he hated being in such a liberal state. The Republicans told him that Illinois was socialist. But he could not live alone. He had never had to. We suggested a senior living facility. He would not hear of it. Mom had picked out a senior living facility for herself and Dad should their health deteriorate to the point that they needed more care. They even went and toured the facility. Dad had said “No”. And then he told me that the only people that lived there were old or crazy. I said, “Dad, you’re 89. And you’re just as crazy.” Nope. Nada. Not going anywhere.
So, we tried our best to make sure he was safe. A friend of Mom & Dad’s, who owned her own house cleaning business, who had cleaned their home for the last 30 years, checked on him two days a week and brought him food. I drove the 200-mile distance from my home to his home each weekend. My sister and her husband came in once over the summer and spent a week with him. We set up daily wellness calls with him. One of us would call every day at 8 pm. We took turns. That worked great for a couple of months. I would leave him with enough food that he could eat all week. But I would return a week later, and he had not touched anything.
Then he stopped answering the telephone for our daily wellness calls and we would panic. He was fearful that the people that killed Mom were coming for him and would not answer the phone for fear that they would know he was home alone. Further, he could not find his guns.
Publishers Clearing House
Starting a few years before Mom’s death, Mom and Dad got serious about “winning” the Publishers Clearing House (PCH) prize, $5000 or $10,000 a week for life. At first, it was just something to do.
Mom let her driver’s license expire without attempting to renew it about 5 years before her death. She stopped driving a couple of years before that. She was scared to be away from help should a medical crisis arise. Those fears started about the time she got her first pacemaker and Dad played on those fears every chance he got. He liked that she was dependent on him. It gave him a sense of purpose and a sense of power.
PCH had product catalogs that came to the house. Mom ordered things from the catalogs and together they filled out every sweepstakes entry. That was fine so long as they did it for entertainment.
When Mom died, Dad was able to continue to fill out the sweepstakes forms, for a while. I was at his house on Sunday, August 11th. We had a nice visit, but as usual, he did not eat anything. 2 hard-boiled eggs were missing from when the housekeeper was there on Wednesday, an indication that he ate them, but all the rest of the food that we left for him had not been touched. And I could not get him to eat. I did the best I could. I left food that he could eat and recited our favorite phrase “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.” Then I left and went home. He assured me that he would eat later.
He did not.
The Beginning of the End
Monday, August 12th, 2019
With the Monday morning mail, Dad received a Publishers Clearing House (PCH) sweepstakes entry in the mail. He could not fill it out. He had difficulty even understanding what it wanted. He called my sister and demanded that she come to help him. She said “No”. She and her husband were up in the mountains on a camping trip and it would take 8 hours to get home and another 17 hours to get to Dad’s home. Dad was adamant. She had to come immediately. It was an emergency! She said “No”. And then he delivered an ultimatum. He told her that he would call me, but he would give her an hour to come to her senses and rush to his aid. My sister called me. She told me what was going on and that I could expect a call from Dad in about an hour.
We chatted for a bit, then hung up, and sent text messages back and forth for a few more minutes.
To the minute, Dad called me exactly 1 hour later.
First words out of his mouth: “Have you talked to your sister lately?”
“Yes, Dad, I have”.
Dad: “Recently?”
“Yes, Dad”
Dad: “Within the last hour?”
“Yes, Dad”
Dad: “Well, I just got off the phone with her. She said to tell you that you are to come to help me fill out my PCH sweepstakes entry.”
“No, she didn’t, Dad.”
Dad: “Are you calling me a liar?”
“Well, yes, I am, Dad. I just got off the phone with her. We both agreed that this is not an emergency. I am not coming back for this.”
“I’ll be there on the weekend, Dad.”
Dad: “that’s not good enough”.
Dad started yelling at me. And then he just said: “Well, if you are not going to help me in an emergency, then you don’t need to ever call me again or ever come back here again. I never want to talk to you again.” And he hung up. And called my sister back.
It is not like he lives down the street. I live in Missouri and he lives, damn near, in Indiana. It is a 400-mile round-trip. I was not going to make that trip to help him fill out a PCH sweepstakes entry form. It was not going to happen.
I called my sister. I was really upset. My sister took over the daily calls for the rest of the week. Dementia will rob him of that memory soon enough. But I was happy because I did not need to visit him the next weekend. I was getting a weekend off.
Saturday, August 17th, 2019
My sister called Dad at the appointed time. Dad asked her where I was. He noticed that my name was on the calendar for that weekend, but I did not show up. She reminded him that he told me that he never wanted to see me again; that I was not welcome at his house anymore. Dad got very angry. He started sputtering and yelling at her on the phone. Then he just hung up. No goodbyes. No warning. Just click, and he was gone.
Oh well, we know he is safe and alive, which is all the calls were about anyway.
Sunday, August 18th, 2019
Dad did not answer the phone. We sent the housekeeper to the house to check on him. He was just sleeping.
Monday.
No answer.
Tuesday
He was fussing and sputtering about the PCH entry again. He filled it out with the housekeeper’s help. But he is mad because he thinks he did not do it soon enough and that would affect his chances of winning. It never mattered anyway. He put it on his desk and never mailed it.
Wednesday, August 21st, 2019
My sister talked to him. His voice was different. He was calm. He was quiet. PCH was a memory that had now left him. He was not belligerent. He was not angry. Something had changed.
Then he declared, in a belligerent tone: “I hate food. I am not going to eat anymore. I will only drink my milk.”
Then he hung up.
Thursday, August 22nd, 2019
I called Dad. Miraculously he answered. We talked for no more than 3 minutes. PCH never came up. There was no anger. There was no belligerence. There was no talk of Mom or her murder.
I asked him questions about his day, I got brief one-word answers and then silence. Finally, he said he had to go. No goodbyes. Nothing. He just hung up. It would be the last time I talked to him on the phone, ever.
Friday
He did not answer the phone. Every time we did not reach him by phone, we would panic, and the housekeeper would find him asleep. This time, we were not going to worry about it. I would be there tomorrow anyway.