dispatch from a holiday
On our way back east to visit family for Thanksgiving, we hit thick fog on Ryegrass pass, right at sunset. It's an interesting experience, entering a fogbank when the sun is still up and watching it swallow the world around you, and then emerging into the post-sunset dusk. Everything feels quiet, wrong. It seeps into the car, even, that sense of something being just a little off; no one talks, even the music seems to fade.
We pulled into town around dinnertime, right when the caretaker from the memory care home where my dad now lives called, because he didn't want to eat dinner because he didn't want to start eating without us. So my stepmother put him on video call and showed that we had a table full of food and people ready to eat, and assured him that we would be fine, so he should just go ahead and dig in. He told us he would get started, then. (Or, that's what his caretaker told us he said. When he manages to get words out I can seldom understand them anymore.)
This sort of thing is fairly typical of our interactions with him, at this point. Some new development suggests that his condition (late stage dementia) has deteriorated in some way, and some little thing which still shows that somewhere in there he's still the sort of person who won't start dinner until everyone's there. He likes to know where everyone is. He likes to help. He likes to look after people who need looking after. I'm told they've found out that he likes watching videos of people singing music that he knows, and that he was even singing along to a video of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." I didn't know he even knew that song.
I went outside tonight after everyone else went to bed and just stood there for a moment in the night air. It's so quiet here at night. With all the new factories in town the night sky in November has a glow to it almost reminiscent of the sky after a snow, which lends the silence an ethereal quality, like the edges of the world are just a little softer here. I hate this town, but there are times when it is unfathomably beautiful.
The holidays here are always a whirlwind of activity, of people coming and going. It's too much noise for me. Even in my college days when I found myself constantly flitting from party to party, I always preferred to find a quiet corner and an interesting conversation to settle down; the constant commotion of a crowd always leaves me overwhelmed, frustrated, exhausted . . . but at the end of the day, certain things are expected of us. At least my family is mostly good people.
And after that it's another visit to my dad, who still sometimes recognizes us when we show up, and we try as well as we can to make him happy, to fill his days with people who care about him. And it's hard, and some days I worry that every visit erodes some old piece of my memory of him. But at this point after every visit no one can say for sure it won't be the last. Certain things are expected of us.
I don't know if I've ever told anyone this story before: after my mom died, when I was just a kid, she had an open casket funeral, and afterwards the sight of her there, lifeless and empty, was so jarring I felt like it burned out all of my other memories of her. For years that was what I thought of when I thought of her: not her smile or her voice, but a pallid corpse in a wooden box. And I was terrified that watching my dad fade from the brilliant man that he was into the state he's in now would do the same to my memories of him. I think, though, that the problem was that I didn't have stories. I was barely five; I had maybe two years of permanent memories under my belt at that point. Not enough time to build a repertoire of stories.
The road back home in November is a long and gloomy one. We are fortunate enough that the weather has settled down enough that the mountain passes are relatively clear, after a week of storm and snow. There is a bitter irony in the fact that the holidays, the times when we are most expected to brave the pass, are also the times when Nature is most likely to remind us just how precarious our position on this earth is; but still I take some pleasure in watching the landscape as it turns from this windswept desert back into towering pine trees and snow-capped mountains, over the pass towards the vast cold waters of the Pacific, and the Puget Sound that shields us through the winter from the worst of its caprices.