I love you, Dad
"I love you, too," he said. It was our only coherent exchange over three visits.
“Neal,” he said.
I walked over to my dad and knelt down next to where he sat in a circle of elderly people, mostly in wheelchairs, while an activity coordinator played patriotic music and tried to engage them.
He smiled, said my name again and then said some other things I don’t recall. I don’t recall them because it was salad talk. Words jumbled together nonsensically, half of them mumbled or slurred to the point of incoherence.
In August my dad’s wife sent me a message saying that she no longer felt safe traveling with him and was canceling their September trip to Indianapolis. She urged me to come see him while he still remembered me.
The next month was a horror show of post-operative psychosis following a planned surgery; physical trauma for him, emotional trauma for her. He bounced between the hospital, rehab facility, home, ER, a group residential facility that he escaped by climbing a six foot wall, and a geropsychiatric unit. Days before I was scheduled to leave I was told I’d likely only be able to see him one of the four days I’d be in Arizona and only for a few hours.
The day I landed he was transferred to this place. A second group residential facility for people with dementia. A place filled with the remnants of people and staffed by kind, patient folks who would stand and nod and not break eye contact with you when you sobbed over the fact that your dad is here, in this place, but not really.
Dad met us at Tarkington Park on race day, 2021. It had become a frequent meeting point between where they were living in Rocky Ripple and where we lived downtown. He and his wife moved to Arizona in summer 2008. I was newly married, had just bought a house and soon enough was working full-time and starting businesses with my wife. They came back a couple times a year.
He and his wife moved back to Indianapolis in early 2020 to help one of his friends work on her house. The pandemic altered their plan and I tried to take advantage of it by seeing him as frequently as I could manage.
He was recovering from having shoulder replacement surgery that spring and struggled a bit. There were memory lapses - he mentioned the race but got the winner wrong, which is not something he would do - but I shrugged it off. I’m in my early 40s and I call each my daughters by the other’s name on a regular basis. He’s in his 70s, recovering from surgery. Whatever.
I didn’t give it much thought until my sister came home from the UK late that summer and sent me a frantic message at the end of her first day with him.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH DAD?!
I dunno, Laura, what the fuck is wrong with Dad? She responded with a litany of behaviors, decisions, and reactions from their day together that pointed to a serious cognitive impairment. We met with his wife. She told us that months earlier he suffered post-operative psychosis after his shoulder replacement and wasn’t quite the same when he came out of it several days later.
At this point he was weeks away from his second replacement surgery and we were concerned that another round of general anesthesia would absolutely nuke his brain. My aunt had scheduled a visit to coincide with my sister’s and the four of us - my dad’s wife, his sister, and his kids - decided to have a come-to-Jesus with him about our concerns.
He was affable and joked about his memory lapses and agreed to undergo neurological tests if that’s what his wife wanted. He had his other shoulder replaced and returned to his new normal. He underwent testing and by winter the question had an answer — Lewy body dementia. The prognosis was six months to six years. They sold his truck, most of his tools, offloaded anything that wasn’t physically or emotionally essential and moved back to Arizona where the weather posed few risks and elder care is a focus.
My marriage ended a few weeks later.
I entered the code I’d been given and stepped into the hallway ringing the facility. Dad was sitting in a chair at the first turn. I sat down next him and said hello. He didn’t recognize or acknowledge me but he wasn’t agitated by my presence. Words tumbled out of him but nothing made sense. He tapped my leg firmly with the back of his right hand before gesturing to his left and said, “let’s go.”
That loss of language was what I struggled with the most that first day as I followed my dad down the hallway, around and around the building. My dad’s brilliance — his card-catalog brain full of interesting trivia, insights, perspectives, his amusement and adoration of people in all of their flawed glory — was shattered, leaving only glints of light reflecting on the scattered shards.
His feet dragged a bit as he walked a step ahead of me, quickly but unsteadily, upright but slumped. I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder and said, “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you, too,” he said without turning.
I wasn’t surprised that my dad agreed to come to therapy with me. After all, he’d spent a significant chunk of my childhood attending 12-Step meetings, volunteering on the suicide hotline and working on a Master’s in counseling that he almost finished.
He was in town for a visit and I thought it might give me the structure to talk to him about things I had never known how to. And it did. I told him how much I needed him when I was a kid. How much I needed him as an adult. How I accepted him for who he is and forgave him and myself for our respective mistakes. How much I appreciated what he did for me despite his limitations.
He sat there, mostly quiet until the therapist said, “Is there something you’d like to say to Neal?”
“He’s a better dad than I was,” he said.
Something in me broke. The tsunami of tears came on so fast and hard that I my breath was crushed and swept out to sea.
I hugged my Dad, kissed him on his head and told him that I’d be back to see him. I immediately felt guilty because I didn’t want to come back. I didn’t want him to be there to come back to. My dream was that his body would fail quickly, that I’d get a call that Stephen Lowry Taflinger passed peacefully in his sleep and I could mourn his body the way I’ve been mourning his mind.
He used to joke about wanting to be taken into a field and shot if he ever lost the plot. That he wanted us to put him on an ice floe and push him out to sea. He didn’t want this. I don’t want this.
I want my Dad. I fucking need him. I want to ask him how the fuck I’m supposed to do this on my own? How the fuck do I do this with someone else? I want him to see me happy. I want to figure out how to have a family.
But what does it fucking matter what any of us want? Steve’s left the building. I got more closure with him than a lot of people get with their parents and I am thankful for that. All I can do now is throw him a bigger party than he’d ever allow himself to feel deserving of. And make sure that one day I can look at my son and say, “he’s a better dad than I was.”