Capital Punishment

Since dad’s dementia started to accelerate, it’s like being on the freeway behind a car, watching it fall apart piece by piece, as it speeds down the road.  It’s a bumper here and a panel there; but you know that someday soon the wheels are going to come off and the engine is going to drop right out the bottom.

Eventually, he gets tricked into giving his credit card number over the phone to  some Indian guys from “Microsoft customer support” who tell him his computer was hacked. He begins falling from dehydration because he forgets to drink anything but coffee. He floods the condo because he neglects to turn off the bathroom sink after shaving one day. He is not safe to live alone anymore.

 Me: So dad, what do you think about the idea of moving into a care home?

Dad: What do I think?! Well I’ll tell you: Moving into a care home is a death sentence. If you make me move into one, you’re signing my death warrant.

 Another time I bring it up and he tells me the only way he’s leaving his condo is out the front door in a pine box.

 In the end, I have to ask my godfather to intervene. He lays down the law, and my father actually listens.

 ***

 It’s moving day.

 On the way over to the care home in the car, images cross the periphery of my mind like landscape whirring past a rain-streaked passenger train window: blurry, indistinct, fleeting.

 We are in the tiny camper crossing the Golden Gate Bridge after driving cross country from Boston. For six weeks we have been camping, checking out random roadside spectacles like the world’s largest gopher and the five-legged cow, and eating baloney and cheese sandwiches out of the shitty Styrofoam cooler. We sing giddily, loudly, amazed that we made it without killing each other, “SAN FRANCISCO HERE WE COME. RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM. SO OPEN UP THOSE GOLDEN GATES, SAN FRANCISCO HERE WE COME!” I am nine.

 It is dad’s weekend to have me. I am behind the bar of the downtown pub he runs, sitting on the grimy floor mixing crème de menthe and grenadine, trying to make a two-layered “Christmas cocktail,” but instead creating brown murk. I get pissed and throw the glass full of liqueur to the other side of the bar. “Sometimes things don’t work out the way we want them to,” he says. I am seven.

 We sit on each side of my Nana, holding her hands. She is 101 years old. She is in bed in the hospital, dying. We are singing You Are My Sunshine to her. Unexpectedly on the chorus, my dad takes the high harmony. I did not know he could do this. We finish the song and I burst into tears. I am 27.

 “Dad,” I tell him, breathless, over the locker room phone, “I medaled in all five of my events!” We had just had the league track and field championship meet. “That’s great—but if you could just add two more events, you could be a heptathlete,” he says. I punch myself as hard as I can in the quad. I am not enough. I am never enough. I am 13.

 I come down to his apartment to check on him. He is sitting on his recliner with the wrong glasses on. The ones for reading the computer; the ones that magnify his eyes like an owl’s. He is wearing only a Depends. He is trying to use his cell phone as a remote control for the TV.  He points it at the TV and presses the buttons. “This is all wrong. All wrong,” he says. I am 46.

 ***

 The day before we moved him into the care home, I came into his condo and sat with him at his breakfast table. Beside his plate, there was a napkin with fresh blood on it and some indistinguishable lump in the middle of it. “It’s my tooth,” he said. “It just fell out.”

 The next day, the girls and I drive him up to the home and unpack his things in his new room while he sits in a chair in the living room doing a 30-piece puzzle. When I go out to ask him a question he puts something in my hand.

“It’s my tooth,” he says.

“From yesterday?” I ask.

“No, from just now.”

“You lost another one?!”

He gives me a smile, which now has two gaps in it. “Yup.”

Once everything is done and settled, I come out to him in the living room surrounded by demented Bertram, deaf Robert, mute Ernest, and the three lovely muses of short-term memory loss Pamela, Sadako, and Aiko. I squat down in front of his chair.

 “Daddy, I have to go now,” my voice is thick. I take his hand.

“I know you do, Honey.  You are the love of my life. The best thing I’ve done,” he says. He pats my hand. “Never forget that.”

 I kiss his cheek and walk out the front door.