• About

Legos and Lingerie

~ Stuff on a divorced man's floor

Legos and Lingerie

Tag Archives: #dad

The Things We Own, Part 6

01 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by fosterwp in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

#dad, #dementia, #divorce, #matchbox, #moving, #supernova

“The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Part 5

November 2009

I moved all of my father’s things into that storage unit as well. I couldn’t bear the thought of throwing anything of his away so soon after his death. I spent the long weekend going through the mountain of boxes in the basement, my mind on my own mortality, driven there by my father’s death and being surrounded by the things he’d collected over the years. Were they things that were important to him or just things he’d never gotten rid of?  I’d never know. He’d never told me.

I realized then that the things that mattered to me, that meant something to me, would also be lost one day. The box that clicked closed just so, that perfect stone found on a summer day, my favorite Matchbox car, the cherished book I’d read every other year. They would all be meaningless to anyone else, they wouldn’t stand out amidst all my other things.

dinky-triumph-tr7-leyland-rally-car

We don’t bury our dead with their things anymore, a custom that many ancient peoples practiced. They recognized the parts of a person’s personality that lived outside of their body, the parts of their soul reflected in their prized possessions, the minute bits of the universe that they came in contact with and recognized as parts of themselves. 

il_340x270-925229243_r4vc

Is nostalgia is the only reason I keep my favorite Matchbox car? Is it the vivid memory of afternoon races on bright orange plastic tracks or the incomprehensible connections between atoms that once burned together in the heart of a star? Does the rock feel good and right in my hand because nature has worn it smooth over a brief eon or two or because the atoms in my skin and muscles and bones resonate with their former brothers, now locked in an inflexible pattern? Is that what drove me to pick it up in the first place? Recognition?

140106_supernova_01

I spent the nights dreaming I was back in my parents house again, unable to finish the clean out job, always finding another thing to move or throw away. During the day, I mulled over the parallels of his forced move from Danbury and my departure from my home. Between the dreams and my anger at Talia’s boyfriend moving into the house where my sons lived, I almost missed the buzzing at the back of my head.

I felt it again in a quiet moment as I waited for the moving van, but I was still unable to make sense of it. The immediate need to finish the move pushed it away and when my life returned to it’s ongoing distractions of graduate courses, fatherhood, and the ups and downs of online dating, I forgot about it. Three and a half years later it came back.

Part 7

The Things We Own, Part 5

25 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by fosterwp in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

#dad, #dementia, #divorce, #halo 3, #marriage, #moving, #xbox

“The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Part 4

February 2008

I drove my father out to my sister’s place in Providence. I unloaded his things, thanked my sister, and climbed back in the car for the drive home. When I got home I unpacked the last of my father’s things, moving it all into the basement. It’s already crowded with dozens of boxes from their place and this latest batch changes the space from chaotic to unusable.

basement-boxes

The time and energy I needed to sort through all of those boxes went into visiting my father. I stopped buy at least one night a week and every weekend, often driving him back to our house to spend time with his grandsons. Finally in care, my father’s schedule allowed for a visit to McLean Hospital, which led to an MRI and, finally, a diagnosis – frontotemporal dementia. There was no cure and no treatment. Thankfully, my father was completely obliviousness to his situation. Over that summer, he became less and less aware of his disappearing mind and I became more and more aware of the problems in my marriage.

Talia and I had been under a lot of stress and the solutions that we usually arrived at in a reasonable manner were eluding us. By late summer, Talia insisted that I go to a therapist to address the issues I had that were negatively impacting our marriage. I spoke to someone weekly, but things worsened by the end of the year, with Talia retreating to our bedroom every evening after the boys were in bed.

And so, the new year found me retreating further and further into late nights playing Halo on my new Xbox. Her intolerance for that grew quickly and the Xbox and I were moved to the basement, where I sat amongst the boxes from my parent’s place, squeezed onto an entirely too small love seat, playing game after game of capture the flag, pondering what was going wrong in my marriage.

halo-3-flags

By February 2009 it was clear to me that she wasn’t working to resolve the issues in our marriage. A late night argument convinced me that things were over and after a sleepless night I suggested a divorce. It seemed like she was happier than when I had proposed 11 years earlier. I found myself following my father’s steps, moving out of a fractured home, uprooted, relocated, reduced, and confused.

As I packed I started to doubt our decision to divorce. I glanced at all of the things I needed for my apartment, but already owned: a vacuum cleaner, glasses, plates, silverware, a bed, pillows, sheets, blankets. All redundant. Expensively redundant.  I asked Talia if this was really what we wanted to do, second guessing what I was sure about just a few days earlier, motivated by the notion of how much it was going to cost to move and set up a new household. Talia didn’t budge. She was certain that we needed to split up. I thought back over the last eight months and those memories drowned out my fiscal complaints.

The apartment I moved to was small and so I left most of my stuff behind. I enjoyed that forced Spartan existence, the lack of clutter appealed to me. The divorce mediation process moved slowly and the logistics of young twins meant I still visited my sons each morning to get them onto the school bus. Talia had purged all evidence of our marriage within hours of my departure. I found it stuffed into a box and moved to the basement, where it still managed to stand out in a room filled with boxes of my and my father’s things. All of which I continued to ignore as I tried to adjust to single life again.

Not unexpectedly, my father’s condition worsened. We’d last had him at the house the prior Christmas, where he sat happily on the couch stroking a new pair of fur lined slippers. His ability to communicate was lost and the dementia had started to immobilize him. It became too dangerous to remove him from the nursing home and more often than not when I visited I found him asleep.

By early July 2009 we began hospice care for him. Amy and I sat at my father’s bedside for three days as he died. The turmoil that his dementia had put us all through came to a close with no small measure of relief. I found myself reflecting on what I knew about him and, more relevantly, what I didn’t know about him. By the time we’d discovered that he was sick, the opportunity to ask him questions had passed. Those things I had wondered would remain unanswered.

The fall brought the revelation that Talia’s boyfriend Luke was moving in and so I defensively removed all of my possessions. I packed everything while they were off visiting her family for Thanksgiving. Luke was described to me as a handyman who’d recently built his own house. So I sold the slightly used riding mower to a friend. I took both shop vacs, unwilling to leave either mine or my father’s behind. I took tools I couldn’t use without a yard or house: a chainsaw, a wheelbarrow, rakes, shovels, a tree limb saw, the snowblower, and two sets of sawhorses. Mr. Handyman wouldn’t need them.  I went at that house like the Grinch visiting Whoville.

I took the furniture pads, the extra light bulbs, all the tape, the spool of twine, every box of nails and screws, and both stepladders. After packing up my shop, I doubled back and removed each and every bit of hardware off of the pegboard. The pegboard was liquid-nailed to the wall or I would have taken it as well. I took the 25 foot extension ladder and unscrewed the two ladder storage hooks from the garage wall. I left the garden hoses; I’m not a sociopath.

img_4220

I left the box of marriage stuff, I didn’t want it either. Talia was calling me for months afterwards trying to locate tools. “Luke must have one,” I repeated again and again. It was her turn to buy a second one of everything she’d once owned. Their inconvenience was a fringe benefit. My inconvenience was three years of $200 monthly storage rental fees.

Part 6

The Things We Own, Part 4

11 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by fosterwp in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

#dad, #dementia, #divorce, #marriage, #moving

“The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Part 3

January 2008

The new year brought with it a new set of patterns. I would call my father every day to check in and the visiting nurse would call me every other day to provide a status report. She made sure he was eating and that he had clean clothes. His executive functions were gone and it seemed he functioned on habit alone. He would shop, but would buy the same things each and every time. He continued to go to work, the notion of him driving a car every day terrified me.

Talia and I worked in concert to try and find a solution. We spoke to elder care attorneys and doctors. We learned that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would take him into an elder care center that neither we nor my mother could afford otherwise. We learned that what little resources my mother had would be protected as long as she remained married to my father. We worked to set up the doctor’s appointments that would be necessary to confirm our suspicions of dementia and take control of a life my father insisted was just fine, knowing we were running out of time.

I got the message from Danbury the Monday after the Super Bowl. I’d been out at a friend’s house and hadn’t seen the blinking message light that night or the next morning. I wasn’t expecting any news. My sister, Amy, and her husband had just visited my father that weekend and reported he was doing okay. He had an appointment that week to finally see a neurologist and I was driving to Danbury to ensure he went this time. I felt that we were finally ahead of the curve.

voicemail_header

The short message led to a longer call with the minister from my father’s church. As we talked the story came together. My father, tired from keeping up appearances for Amy’s visit, had fallen asleep after she left. Later that evening, waking up in the dark of early February in Connecticut, he’d mistaken 7pm for 7am, with the additional complication that his watch was running four hours slow. He rose and went to open the church for Sunday service, believing it to be 7am in the morning.

8469865008_615ffb4aa5_b
Another member found him as she was departing from the homeless shelter the church hosted. As luck would have it, Annie was a registered nurse and recognized that something was off with my father’s midnight activities. She got him home and back to bed and the next morning she raised the alarm with the minister. I drove there mid-week to take him to the neurologist and started the process that would, if not get him better, provide him with the oversight he needed to keep him safe.

The neurologist’s visit was typical, in that there was a specific medical process that had to be followed and thus no way for them to help in the short term. What I desperately needed was a doctor’s note I could use to trigger long term disability with his employer. We needed more time to find him a room in the Massachusetts care system and some way to cover the costs before his benefits kicked in.

My father, seemingly oblivious to the frank conversation about his mental health I’d just had with the neurologist, took himself to work despite my insistence that he should stay home. I called his employer and they refused to discuss the situation, citing some statute about employee confidentiality, clearly over their heads when it came to dementia and durable power of attorney. I called his primary care doctor and brought him up to speed on the weeks events.

He agreed to write a letter stating my father had a dire medical emergency and needed to be on long term disability. Feeling grateful for the lone medical professional who recognized that leaving my father driving around was a greater ethical failure than short-circuiting state medical process, I called my sister. She agreed to take him for a couple of weeks and I went to pick up the letter from the doctor’s office. He’d dropped everything to write it.

HR still refused to meet with me and sent my father out to the lobby upon my arrival. I gave him his doctor’s letter and asked him to bring that to HR. Without question he took the letter and walked back inside. I sat and pondered the strangeness of the situation. He’d just carried his own termination notice into the HR department of a large medical device company that was employing him to do quality checks. The entire thing was a Venn Diagram nightmare of public relations, health care confidentiality, and regulatory law. He returned 20 minutes later with another letter and a grin on his face. “They’re giving me some time off!” he said. “That’s great Dad, now you can go and visit Amy for a couple of weeks.” I replied.

Print


And so, that afternoon, just two months after moving my father into this apartment, I’m repeating the scavenge and abandon process, taking only the stuff he needed to get by at my sister’s for a few weeks. I took the glider rocker and hassock that he enjoyed sitting in, the small color TV he got from AT&T as a twenty year bonus back in 1987, and the last of the tools I couldn’t fit into my car on the prior trip. I left everything else.

The neurons in the back of my head were quiet this time. I didn’t have any ties to that place.

Part 5

Thanks to Kate for the Venn Diagram!

The Things We Own, Part 3

04 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by fosterwp in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

#dad, #dementia, #divorce, #marriage, #moving

“The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Part 2

December 2007

I stepped back and over to open the door to the adjacent room. I reached in and turned the light on. My father’s workshop, a shared space with the furnace, once covered with tools and electronics and piles of stuff that had been interesting or promising or in need of repair, is now only a bare workbench overseen by yards of empty pegboard. I remembered the remote controlled Jeep I’d tossed away this summer, powered not by the required D-cells, but by empty Polaroid instant film packs. My father had figured out that the batteries they contained would power the toy and for whatever reason, he’d kept dozens of empty film packs.

post-pegboard

 

He eased past me with his find, the empty plastic package for the new thermostat he installed four years ago. He put it back on the peg it had occupied before I tossed it into the trash pile that morning. He seemed satisfied at having completed that task. He had no reaction to his empty shop. At least no reaction that he shared, his natural stoicism and silence were a factor in how far his dementia progressed before anyone noticed. I thought about telling him the packaging didn’t need to be saved, but realized that nothing inside the house mattered at that point.

“Let’s get some dinner dad.” I didn’t bother to ask him if he wanted dinner, his default answer to everything at that point was yes. Another strategy he used to conceal the disease. I turned the light off and checked the garage to ensure it had been closed up. The neurons at the back of my head continued to crackle as we left the house. I chalked it up to last goodbyes and the haunting sensation that comes with knowing it is the last time I will be in my childhood home.

We ate at a nice place in Danbury. It was expensive, but I was sitting across from a demonstration of just how suddenly life can be shortened, so I had no qualms about treating myself. I thought about that word as I sat across from my silent father. Myself. It’s a concept that might hold no meaning to me in the near future. I wondered if frontotemporal dementia was hereditary. I did the math in my head.

Seven to ten years for the disease to progress to the state he’d reached. He was sixty three. I’d just turned thirty eight. I might have seventeen years before the slow moving disease began erasing me. My sons were only five and seventeen years was significantly less time than I had expected to spend with them. Would I be on my way out just as they finished college?

I pushed that scary thought away and drove us back to his apartment. It’s packed with those things I couldn’t bear to throw away. Odds and ends better suited to a garage, all stuffed into corners under the sharp angles of the Victorian roof line. I felt bad about leaving him alone, but it’s after eight and there was still a three hour drive in front of me, plus unpacking the car the next morning, the young kids I hadn’t seen, and the mounting tension between Talia and I as our basement, already in a state of post-dead-water-heater-flood disarray, continued to fill up with the salvage from Danbury. I reminded myself that the visiting nurse would be stopping by tomorrow.

vintage-1983-tandy-radio-shack-jeep-renegade-rc-car-complete-w-remote-control-17ee933bed793a7f3bdf488a746ec5de

I cleared off a chair and my father sank into it. I’m shocked by how exhausted and old he suddenly appears. My father had been a young man my entire life. He was 26 when I was born and I can remember him being laid up only from the rare sinus headache and one wisdom tooth removal. He was otherwise indefatigable, up when I went to bed and somehow up before I woke up every day. In the space of an afternoon, he’d become an old man. The disease that was destroying his brain had finally started to manifest itself physically.

The guilt I’d felt in tossing out all those touchstones from the house paled in comparison to what I’d felt that evening. I was going to have to leave him there. Between his stubbornness that everything was fine and my lack of preparation for his sudden incapacity, I had no idea of what to do next. I ignored the larger problem and dealt with the immediate one.  

I spent another hour rummaging through unmarked boxes to make sure that my father had the necessities: plates, cups, bowls, and silverware; his lunchbox; toothbrush, floss, soap, a washcloth and a towel; socks, underwear, pants, and shirts. I found myself once again astonished that he was going to drive to work on Monday, more so that he was still working. I hugged him goodbye and started the long drive home with another carload of stuff. I was certain that I wasn’t doing the right thing and equally certain that there was nothing else I could do.

The Things We Own, Part 2

03 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by fosterwp in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

#dad, #dementia, #divorce, #marriage, #moving

Part 1

“The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

December 2007

By the end of the summer I’d finished the heavy purging. My mom held a few tag sales, donated a bunch of stuff, and then moved out herself. My father remained in the now mostly empty house as it sat on the market through the fall.

We hired a visiting nurse to stop in every other day and check on my father. He continued to work, somehow running quality checks on digital mammography machines and driving himself to and from work. Terrifying notions on both a global and local level. The house sold in October, but my father hadn’t done anything to find a new place to live. Luckily, the visiting nurse quickly located a nearby apartment and so I drove back to Connecticut to help my father move.

We spent the day moving the last of my dad’s possessions to his new place, a tiny, third floor attic apartment in an old Victorian, whose winding, cramped staircase forced me to cut his new bed frame in half and then Frankenstein’s monster it back together with steel plates and screws. It was late in the evening when we finish moving all the important stuff to the apartment and I returned to my childhood home for the last time. Even after filling those three dumpsters, my mother taking her stuff, and moving my father’s remaining things out, the house somehow still has stuff in it.

The large radio cabinet had been the centerpiece of the living room and served as a TV stand my entire life. It was probably worth something as an antique, especially with the tube-based radio still embedded in its interior. But I had no way to move it. I removed the radio and left the cabinet behind, with the scratch-built amplifier my father had assembled in his twenties abandoned on the bottom shelf. I stowed the radio in the car and walked through the top floor, empty now save for the cabinet.

I paused for a long time in the kitchen, staring out the window at a familiar view I wouldn’t ever see again. I paused for even longer in my childhood bedroom, it’s walls now bare of the full page black and white movie ads I’d cut out from the Sunday New York Times, the giant poster of the Manhattan skyline at sunset, and the Carol Alt poster hidden on the back of the door. I stared at the tree in the backyard whose wind-blown leaves had always provided the background soundtrack to the neighborhood kids playing in the late summer light as I laid in bed thanks to my parents’ ultra-conservative approach to bedtimes. I left my bedroom and walked downstairs.

raiders-of-the-lost-ark-1807662556

The basement, my childhood retreat and playroom, felt small. I didn’t know why. Was it because I was bigger? Because it’s empty? How could it feel smaller when it’s empty? Was I feeling guilty at having thrown away nearly everything that had been in that room? Was it because I was judging my parents? Nearly empty, the house had revealed its many needed repairs, delayed improvements, and decades of neglected spring cleanings, all put off until time ran out. The neurons at the back of my head crackled, there’s the notion of an idea there, but it won’t reveal itself.

octopussy-poster

There’s a large pile of trash on the floor near the sliding doors, the large glass planes reflected back my image. I’d thrown the green, insulated drapes away and the cold December night was pushing its way into the basement through the glass. I skirted the pile and walked to the laundry room. Everything was as familiar to me as my own hands.

iecb36zzefjgsi6nvii6ge2tiwr

The number of steps through the basement to the laundry room, the smells, the angled turn through the already narrow doorway, made smaller by the large set of shelves crowding the opening, pushed closer to the door by the enormous 1950s freezer sitting next to them, the distance I reached to grasp the butcher’s string stretched across the room to the light fixture, the tension in the string as I pulled it, the sudden brightness of the naked 100 watt bulb on the far wall. The room it illuminated had changed.

pull string light fixture home depot

All of the familiar things were gone, even the shadows were wrong. I stood still for a moment. My father was quietly pacing in the basement, unsure of what he is supposed to be doing. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t ask questions anymore. In a few months an active MRI will show the part of his brain that should have been a riot of thoughtful color as an empty blackness. So profound is the damage that the doctors are able to make their diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia solely on the images. They make note of that rarity in a report that is, given the images, both too late and pointlessly long. It confirms the suspicions of the last year, but it can offer no treatment, no recovery, no hope.

I stood still for a moment longer, knowing he can’t tell how long I’ve been there, knowing that this man who had been my father will wait and follow me like the happy toddler he’s become, and I tried to make sense of the crackling in the back of my head. I heard him rummaging in the large pile of trash in the middle of the basement. I pulled the string again and the empty room went dark.

Derailed

22 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by fosterwp in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

#dad, #death, #dementia, #divorce, #Living with the Devil, #replacement mode, #resolutions, #simplify, #thinking

Originally posted on Facebook on January 17th, 2012. A friend of mine then questioned why I would be so interested in the self-help books. My response followed.

I have my resolutions in place for 2012.

Be a better father
Be a better friend
Be a better boss
Exercise more
Lose weight
Swear less
Floss
Get up when I wake up – I hear this is good for you.
Eat better & cook more
Travel out of the country
Try something completely new, in this case I’ll be trying posing naked for a local artist
Read every book on this list and try to learn a few new things: http://liveboldandbloom.com/01/self-improvement/the-20-most-life-altering-concepts-ive-ever-embraced

No, I’m not so messed up that I need to read each of those self-help books. As I mentioned in a comment a few days ago (said comment: Yes, I am much more spontaneous since my divorce. Such a large change invited the opportunity to examine everything in my life and I’m trying to capitalize on that.), my divorce provided a catalyst to examine everything in my life.

More accurately, dealing with my father’s dementia, decline, and death started the derailment of my train off the neatly laid tracks that it had glided along all its life and the divorce was the thing that finished the job.

Looking back now, I can see that my initial response was to deny anything was going wrong, to do everything I could to keep the train on the track, especially when it came to my marriage. Once the divorce became inevitable, I then spent a lot of time looking to replace what I had lost.

I thought I could easily switch to a new set of tracks and continue on my mostly unmolested way. I assumed that everything in my life would continue to run smoothly. After a few years I realized that trying to replicate something that didn’t end up working, that failed for reasons I didn’t entirely understand, and that maybe wasn’t what I actually wanted might not be the best idea.

Even more humbling – I might not be able to do it. There might be no getting the engine out of the ditch. With that insight came the idea that maybe walking is better, or driving, or sailing, or whatever preferred travel metaphor the reader would like to substitute here.

And so I find myself exploring how I think about things, how I think about thinking about things, about how important the illusion of having control over the things around me is to the way I move through my life, and how I want to live and love and exist and parent as I move through my forties.

I don’t view those books as self-help as much as I view them as offering a toolkit for how to view the world differently. I’m not trying to lift the engine back onto the tracks now. I’m sitting down on the furrow it has gouged in the earth and I’m observing. I’m looking back at where I came from at the breakneck pace that derailed me in the first place. I’m looking ahead at where I want to go. I’m looking at the tracks and wondering if I want my path through life so precisely defined and regulated.

I’m looking at where I am and working to enjoy and accept that for what it is. Some of the concepts on that list are new ideas for me and I sense there is something to them that will allow me to move through the world in a different way, different being what I sense I need right now.

So, messed up? No. In *need* of those books? No. But I’m definitely re-examining everything and I feel like those books will offer perspectives I hadn’t considered. We’ll see how far I actually make it through that list.

 

Insights 2+ years later. I did okay with those resolutions, though I ended up reading only one book on the list – Simplify Your Life. It had a lot of good ideas that I’m still following up on. That year I also read Stephen Batchelor’s Living with the Devil, which dramatically changed the way I look at and move through the world.

http://www.amazon.com/Living-Devil-Stephen-Batchelor/dp/1594480877

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • June 2016
  • April 2015
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014

Categories

  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Legos and Lingerie
    • Join 30 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Legos and Lingerie
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...