While rummaging through the mail atop my dad’s desk earlier this week I found confirmation of a poetry class on Emily Dickinson in which he had enrolled at the University of Kansas through its continuing education program. “I KEEP expecting to wake up, dead,” he said Thursday morning, half joking. “To be honest, I’m almost half disappointed I’m not dead.” DAD MAY RALLY.
The class, Wrestling Emily Dickinson, was for three consecutive Monday nights beginning next week.
My dad, 88, has fallen ill and will not be able to attend the class. He and his “committed partner,” Edith, of Topeka, were to take the class together.
She now is at his bedside most of each day at a facility in Topeka.
This is not a eulogy; just thoughts of what it is to have a seriously ill parent.
That’s the pain talking.
“I think about the pain too much. I need something else to occupy my thoughts.”
This is from a man who up until this very minute has spent a lifetime critically thinking and writing about this world that he loves so much, and who less than a month ago bragged about walking two miles on the treadmill, “3.2 miles an hour!”
He has one drawer that has nothing but sweatbands in it.
In a tumultuous two weeks, Dad has been diagnosed with an aggressive small cell cancer originating in the prostate. For several years he’s managed the slow-growing prostate cancer with hormones. His most recent PSA testing of three weeks ago showed no unusual activity.
But then his legs gave out. The cause, a tumor wrapped around his spinal column high up between his shoulders.
The neurosurgeon greeted dad with surprise. “When I first saw your chart, I thought we should let the old man die in peace. But I can see you’re not the average 88-year-old.”
Dad basked in his words.
The surgery was a success in as far as removing the growth. The outcome is still to be determined.
Truth is, Dad is showing his age.
What once seemed as a no-brainer for someone so determined, the physical and occupational therapy is now a monumental ordeal. Sleep comes easier.
“I’m having the craziest dreams,” he said. “Your mother is everywhere. Not necessarily talking, just there, in the background.”
Dad used to marvel at my mother’s dreams. “They were always our morning’s conversation,” he said.
When mother died in 2009, I feared it would be the death of him, too. That another love has come into his life has brought us all immeasurable joy.
Two things keep pulling him into this world.
For the past five years he’s been working on a second installment of the “Annals of Allen County,” this time from 1945 to 2000. We’re in the final stages of its editing, with photos and an index to go.
Every visit I tell him what year I’m up to. Six more to go.
He also very much wants to see a fountain being built in memory of mother in front of the Bowlus Fine Arts Center completed.
That’s within reach.
Thursday’s mental status exam didn’t go so well. He got the day mom died off by one day — but that’s consistent. He got his parents’ deaths and their ages mixed up. He said it was Monday.
Of course, before the evaluation, we were discussing the U.S. Postal Services’ decision to stop Saturday delivery and how that would impact delivery of the newspaper. “The real question that needs to be asked is what it would cost to keep delivery at six days a week and then price it accordingly,” he said.
Dad is a newsman to the core. He relies on facts to base his decisions.
When the social worker glibly said “We’re going to get you home in no time,” Dad held his tongue, turning to me with raised eyebrows, as if to say she must be confused.
“I don’t want fairy tales,” Dad said later. “Just the truth.”
When fairy tales fall short
