The Measure of a Man

As cynics go, my father was a model citizen. He never missed an opportunity where he could say something like “They’re all crooks,” or “they’re just in it for the money.” Nothing at all could restore his faith in humanity. He was a constant believer in man’s inhumanity to man.

I remember him as a jaded pessimist, yet there was a time, before I had reached adulthood, when my mother’s family and friends could tolerate him and he wasn’t quite so crotchety. He wasn’t the life of the party, but he could at least attend the party and appeared to want to attend, anyway.

That’s how it was with his kids, as he recorded some of the fun times in our lives on 8mm film; although, after a while, he seemed to not want to add much fun, either in person or on film, but instead just review the documentary evidence. With the adult friends of my parents, it was another matter, as vague, overheard objections seemed to either cloud those friendships or end them altogether.

When my mom passed away, Dad may have been in the early stages of Alzheimer’s—or, he had gotten to some other point. His pessimism was functioning as a computer’s operating system handles a PC: he appeared to be hard-wired to operate that way. He did later develop Alzheimer’s, without a doubt, but whether he had it at my mom’s deathbed, or to what degree, is unknowable. With her dying, and his life appearing out of control, he drew an assortment of incoherent conclusions, as he separated himself from reality.

Mom was dying of a gastric abscess, with breast cancer somewhere in the mix, also. During that time, Dad seemed to have everything to complain about, believing that no one was living up to their obligations. His regular intake of alcohol wasn’t helpful, either.

Mom’s hospice care was set up; they didn’t come often enough, he said. Mom was dying of an ulcer that was found too late, but he insisted that the oncologist come to the house; she, of course, did not. My ex-wife (my wife, at the time) reinforced what the hospital’s internist said: Mom had just a few days left. “What do you know?” was his response; “You’re just a nurse.”

My mom wasn’t helping, either. As she lay dying, she isolated my father even further. After she soiled herself, one night, my wife—with years of her own hospice experience—cleaned her up, making her feel more comfortable than my father had. Mom denigrated him one final time, telling him to be more like my wife: “Be gentle, Jay, like she is.”

When Mom finally did pass, my father wanted to get back at the world for taking her. He also wanted to get back at himself for allowing her to go the way she did.

The no-show oncologist got paid in tiny increments; he wrote her checks for $6.66, since he considered her the antichrist. My wife was another enemy. He believed she murdered my mom, since she administered morphine for pain relief and—ipso facto—she died, as a result; he later tried to sue her, to take away her license to practice nursing (My thought was, Never mind, Dad, that this woman supplied half of your grandchildren’s household income).

To get back at himself, he tried to kill himself. He attempted in front of his therapist, which was a relief to the rest of us—since he could then get immediate help. He wouldn’t admit that it was a suicide attempt: while drunk, he tried to drink the bottle of morphine that the hospice service failed to collect. Everyone around him considered it an attempt.

Dad said that he didn’t set out to end his life; he was just testing out a theory. He only wanted to see if the morphine would have killed him. That way, if the morphine did kill him, he would then know that it also killed Mom. He would then, if blame could be levied from the grave, have further reason to point the finger at my wife for my mom’s death. That’s how the blame game was working.

This was the aftermath of losing my mom. Later, with the Alzheimer’s obvious, Dad needed to be placed into an assisted-living facility. The time between these two phases of my father’s life were five years of tension.

I was torn between loving my father and protecting my family from his accusations. Weary worn, I opted to create and maintain a separation between the cynic and the nurse.

I made it clear to Dad that I had to consider my immediate family over him and that he wouldn’t be seeing his grandchildren as long as he was going to use my wife as a scapegoat for his wife’s passing. Nonetheless, he would still call every once in a while and ask about occasions we once celebrated together, as a family, and wonder if we could all get together again. He had no idea what I meant when I reiterated to him No.

Through the interim years of him being on his own, I called him infrequently. I thought about him a lot. That’s about all I could do—think about him, and wonder what was happening to him and why he had dug such a hole for himself.

I knew that he was basically alone, even though my needy brother was with him. I wondered what had crept into my father’s soul. Something undefinable was preventing him from eventually making a clean break with the past, and with the wife with whom he had finally been able to reach some amicable accommodation, in a relationship that was never noticeably comfortable.

After about five years into this quiescent relationship came the diagnosis. It was then up to me to somehow place a cynical, eighty-five-year-old, alcoholic, Alzheimer’s patient into an assisted living facility.

I then was able to see in him what I thought would never be seen. With the years that were added to my father’s frame, he lost some weight and gained some wrinkles. This wasn’t much of a surprise. 

I knew he now had a disease of the mind; as such, he talked senselessly and endlessly on one tangent after another:  his work as an industrial engineer; his service as a boatswain’s mate, in World War II; work he had done around the house, including how he had salvaged as many as 100,000 old nails from the old-board bin, in the basement; how he raised his children; how he was raised, during the depression; what he missed about his home town of Bayonne, New Jersey; his work as a jazz pianist, in Staten Island and New Jersey—basically, his life’s story, told as though it were all one disjointed paragraph.

This was how the disease worked. It created loss without the victim feeling the loss. Instead, there appeared to be a feeling that the present made no sense unless it was related to the past, which was then related to still more of the past. But as horrible as it was to see my father losing his mind, it was as much of a relief to witness his former cynicism fading. The blame factory had shut down.

He could smile once again and, whatever was affecting him, I was both glad about it and then felt guilty that I was glad. But the former tension between us was gone, and I saw that he was somewhat trusting of me, now—something he could never formerly do without reservation. He let me into his house and wanted me to stay a while. He let me take him places.

One place I had to take him was an assisted-living facility. I had three trips planned: to introduce him to the place, without meeting anyone; to meet some of the staff, to be interviewed and assessed; and then to move in.

After the second trip, I took him to a psychiatric hospital, to see how he would handle life without alcohol. After two days in the hospital, he was found unresponsive and sent to another hospital’s ER, to be treated for pneumonia.

The next few days were tense, not like the tension of years gone by, but because he was looking like he might not make it. Then, after four days in critical care and three more in a step-down unit, he started to look like he would make it after all, though he was no longer in shape for assisted living. He would now need a nursing home.

When I visited him, he seemed barely alive and looked like his time left would be measured not in days but hours. He was called cachectic by hospital staff, meaning malnourished, and he looked like there was very little left to him. As weak as he was, he seemed to take notice when my wife and I visited him.

The alleged murderer and I spent an hour with him a couple of times, as he was given every chance to recover. On one occasion, we tried to communicate with him but could hardly connect with him. The head of his bed was tilted upward. He could hardly open his eyes. He seemed to smile at each of us; he appeared glad to see us. He wanted to talk, but looked too weak to move his mouth at all.

My wife told him that she forgave him for the things he did, years ago, when his wife was passing and had passed away. I’ll never know what, if anything, registered. I only know that he looked at us and appeared happy to see familiar faces.

I spent that afternoon on the phone with social workers and nursing homes, so that Dad could be transferred out the next day. At about four the next morning, though, I received a call from the hospital. My father had passed away.

I was sad at the funeral, but not grieving. I think that I had been grieving his loss for some years, since the loss of my mother, and had had enough of that kind of thing. Instead, I was mourning the lack of mourners. The total might have been about ten, about a tenth of how many had come for my mother’s funeral.

Since then, I’ve been wondering what to make of this, in the same way as I had been trying to know what to make of him, while he was yet alive. The reason for the no-shows may, in part, have had to do with the seven more years that had elapsed since my mom had passed, and that some friends and family may also have died, as well. That made sense, I thought, but I also believed there was more to it.

I knew that his inherent distrust in his fellow man tended to alienate his fellow man. I knew this because it alienated me from him. And I never really knew how to gauge that alienation until the day of his funeral, in the number of empty seats. Despite how he presented, in his final weeks, he was yet known as a skeptic, a disbeliever in everything foreign to all he held dear.

I now find myself doing what I thought, for a while, I could never do: miss him. I miss the man, compromised as he was by Alzheimer’s disease, who was just happy to see me, apart from hidden agendas, or his expecting one from me.

I miss the father that was finally real to me. This was perhaps the same father who was as real to me as when I was a boy being raised by him. The difference was that I was only permitted a glimpse into how he might have been toward me, as an adult, had the bitterness of middle age not grown up within him as a vine that chokes the life out of the tree that supports it.