1.12.25
New journal, new word.
rondure—a circle or sphere, or a graceful curving or roundness
You could describe something as having rondure
“gracefully rounded curvature”
I got a “Gotta love it” out of him
We are sitting at the end of the hall, looking out through the glass of the door. Busy Sunday afternoon of visits. Two o’clock. Snow still firmly on the ground although it is now beginning to melt. Forty degrees today for the first time in…ten days?
1.31.25
There’s not much to say anymore. Dad is slumped, silent. One hour, not a word. Nonverbal the answer no to every question. My hands are covered in paint. The failure of night is in my bones. The highways are closing, the quarry is empty.
Reading room. A little sun outside. It’s not cold but it is damp. Melted snow, yesterday was all day rain. Slept (again) at Teasdale. And not well, on a camping mat. Abandoned house. Of course I circle back. Outside in the courtyard, Greg and his mother Phyllis. It has clouded up again after a brief burst of sun. Phyllis is under a blanket, hanging on in mint green socks just before lunch.
2.6.25
Writing, fall back to it like a raindrop scattering earth.
Dad is back in Dammert after a few nights in the hospital. It was probably norovirus that sent him there—stomach flu. He was nauseous; had thrown up. Had shortness of breath, eventually diarrhea.
“I don’t go to lunch unless they have something particular.”
Pat arrives.
Chiquita goes by, “How you doin today?”
My dad is up but maybe in the bathroom. He was in bed when I got here. He looked more disheveled and dried out than ever but he was more aware than anytime I saw him for all of January, and maybe all of December. Sharper. Had some memory. Knew how long he’d been at the hospital, had a sense he had not been out of bed.
Tony is also gone to the hospital and someone named Kevin who I do not know. They went in a little after my dad did. I mentioned to Pat that my dad had barfed. Lester, apparently, did the same. It’s interesting to compare this norovirus incident with prior outbreaks of Covid. The concern level is lower. Although Covid seems to be more deadly, I don’t remember this many residents going to the hospital.
Norovirus spreads via the fecal-oral route. Contaminated food or water or person-to-person contact. Contaminated surfaces or through the air from the vomit of an infected person.
A.K.A., the winter vomiting disease.
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the lemonade. I had only coffee when I was with Dad and Lester on Friday. Hmm. I never had any of that meal: fried shrimp, split pea soup, mac and cheese. I wanted a plate but I never went to get one. Nor did I get any from Dad, though he did not finish the soup or the mac.
His face is red. It was dry. Karin thought it might be a reaction to the antibiotics. Which, now that I think about it, wouldn’t be effective in treating any virus. Mention of cephtin, or seftin?
He is also unshaven, more than usual, but I’ve never minded that. I’ve never seen him with any kind of a beard. Supposedly he had one back in the seventies when he broke his leg or was it his arm playing racquetball? His facial hair is not high on my list of concerns. His missing tooth sticks out when he smiles. That I’m not used to seeing but Pat told him she had been missing his smile. Five minutes to noon, let’s go to lunch.
There are definitely more foodservice workers with mask on, and St. Francis is still on lockdown. The meal today was in honor of the Chinese New Year.
Father Maes has transitioned to the lounge chair.
2.28.25
Last day of February and a beauty. Warm and windy, blend me some of that balm.
He’s taking a shower. Or getting a bath. Per Karin. She saw me coming and intercepted. Not just to tell me about the shower but to tell me that, “He’s more confused than usual today.” She wanted to let me know so I wasn’t blindsided.
Many of the days he’s been here he’s been confused so this should be interesting. Not a surprise to hear, per a text from my mom, and another text a couple of days before that.
I haven’t seen him in six days. I went to Farm this week. Two nights and a whole lot of bliss. Last time I saw him I wrote nothing. This writing, I fear, has gotten redundant.
I hear him moaning…
They wheel him in.
“They got me, John,” he tells me in a high-pitched voice. “They’re gonna put me down. I been up too much.”
“You know where you are?” I ask him.
“Dammert.”
“You lookin out the window,” I ask him.
He nods.
“Birds,” he says. Rubbing his index fingers together, hands clasped, lying in bed now. Karin and another nurse laid him down, with the Hoyer. I could see his red and purple bottom. The other nurse put some cream on him. I’m not sure what her name is. She’s not new but newer. Hell of a nurse. Dresses nice sometimes. Reminds me of Tasha Rodgers. My dad seems content but he is looking past me, out into the beyond.
“Anything new?” I ask him. “Anything going on?”
But he doesn’t answer; just taps his fingers together. Is it Morse Code? Tap tap tap, tap tap dash.
“You hungry?”
No answer. Then he says I already asked him that, which maybe I did.
Now I hear the hairdresser reaming out the nurse for giving someone a shower. The hairdresser is upset because she just did this lady’s hair and her family is coming to see her. Cringe. F her and bless these nurses. They work on behalf of God. Who could ever fault them for keeping the residents clean? Who cares about what someone’s hair looks like.
I turn on the TV. My dad says something about me watching the stock market channel but they don’t have it here. A shame. I find PBS Create, for a cooking show, which is what I watched here one recent Saturday for three hours, my dad in bed the whole time. It’s peaceful with the sound off. A beeping somewhere in the background on this hall, not insistent, a slow pulse.
I know he wants me to stop asking questions but I don’t know how else to talk to him, and this is all of him I have left. I ask him if he remembers his career, what he used to do.
“I used to, I used to….” he says.
I ask him if he remembers using his phone. He used to use it a lot. He doesn’t remember doing that. Printing articles, I tell him, sending them out to people through the postal service, sending out lots of emails. He claims he never really sent out much.
He watches the cooking show intently, left index finger to his lips, rubbing slowly back and forth.
“You know how long you been here, in Dammert?”
“A couple weeks, ” I think.
Which might be correct, if dating back only to his trip to the hospital on February 2nd, Groundhog Day, my sister’s birthday, a day I was headed to Farm when my mom texted to say he was in the hospital with an illness.
I ask him if he’s been having any dreams or premonitions. It’s not the first time I’ve asked him about dreams. I’ve been having some strange ones. Strong and vivid. Odd. One last night that didn’t feel like mine. About a kid worried about his gambling debt. I thought about it and told this kid that he might not have to pay the debt because he was a minor and never should have been allowed to place the bet anyway. Unclean hands on the other side, laches; other party estopped from collecting. I don’t know who this kid was. And, no, I don’t think he was me. B mentioned crazy dreams the same morning I woke up after some doozies Monday night at Farm. After feeling like it had been a while since I remembered any dreams at all. Stopped writing them down. This is as close as I’ll get.
The TV transfixes him. I don’t know what else to do. I’ll go out and get my salad out of the car whenever his food arrives. Could be half an hour, easy.
I listed to voices from the hall. Evelyn’s daughter. Or granddaughter, who knows. I only had one interaction with Evelyn. Her chair was at a chokepoint in the hall. I wanted to move her. Asked nicely then just tried to wheel her a few feet but she put her foot down, literally.
“No,” she said, “I don’t think so. I’ll stay right here.”
Another time she didn’t want CNAs to take her out of the lunch room. I look back and my dad has fallen asleep, his left index finger still trying to stay awake, to stay up, still pointing.
Evelyn played basketball in college. My dad snaps back, left hand back up to his face. It’s her granddaughter that’s visiting her, pretty sure. How am I the age of so many grand-kids here?
Earlier I asked him how he felt, overall.
“I feel good,” he said.
It might be Evelyn who’d had her hair done—yesterday!—and then got the shower today. A whole $28 down the drain. The shower my dad got seemed to have revived him, definitely worth $28 to me.
Evelyn still has some lucidity. She still talks. I mean, I’d take pure gibberish from my dad. I’d take nonsense, non sequitur, monolog. Anything not hateful, anything not ugly. He said something to the nurses when they wheeled him in after his shower but I couldn’t hear it.
One-thirty. Dad ate his shrimp. Hardly managed any reply when the nurse practitioner came in to check on him. I remember her from early on. She said one of the nurses told her he was thrashing in pain in his chair this morning. That must have been what Karin was talking about. I told the n-p that two weeks ago I took my dad out to the solarium and he was in terrible discomfort the whole time, complaining about his bottom.
He stayed awake for half an hour after lunch but he’s nodding away now, left index finger to his lips.
Now there is another granddaughter visiting a resident on B hall. This resident is newer but not an unknown. I have heard her name but I don’t know it. She’s been visible out the doorway for a while, facing into this room, on the far side of a round table.
She is totally with it. But told fellow resident JoAnn, who stopped to ask after her, that she is not doing so great. She is very weak, she says. She ate the shrimp but nothing else. I am listening to whatever I hear. The granddaughter’s mother passed away sometime last year or the year before. I gather that this granddaughter’s mother is not the nursing home resident’s daughter but must have been on the paternal side of the granddaughter’s family.
I ate the salad. It was fine. I have opened the window. My dad sneezed while the nurse practitioner was in here, trying to get some info from him. First he seized up a little, like he does, and I knew what was coming. She stepped back a little and then he ripped one off, not as all-time booming as his sneezed used to be, but still pretty loud. Strong enough to startle the unexpected.
“I wasn’t sure if that was going to be a sneeze or a burp,” she said.
The opened window might have triggered it but the breeze has been worth it, warm and full.
The resident’s name is Joan. She does not mince words. She notes that the CNAs have not been around.
“They seem to get lost,” she says.
The conversation with her granddaughter is wide-ranging. Federal job cuts, layoffs at the EPA, the measles outbreak in Texas. The rest, really too personal to relay, a daughter with autism, what I guess is Joan’s great-granddaughter. I am just sitting here; not seeking it out.
As I was making my way out I went to his bedside and he seemed to start, to see me again for the first time.
“You’re John?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know where I am anymore.”
Before that he had been in pain, and did convulse a bit at the mid-section, moaning.
“No, no. I can’t do it,” he said, “I can’t do it, oww, oww, oww.” With that front tooth missing.
I think he was passing a turd. Earlier in the month is was diarrhea, now he can’t poop and it’s causing him pain. That could have been the thrashing Karin saw this morning. He started to fall back out of it as I made another attempt to leave.
“Do you know where you are?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I’m in my room,” he said, “with the screen door open.”
It was a window that was open, but close enough.
“Do you remember me?”
“Yeah, you’re my son.”
He came back close enough, far enough to tell me he loved me. I told him I’d be back in a few days. Will I? Don’t know. I wanted to tell him, “It’s OK if you want to go. You don’t have to stay here.” But it’s not for me, and it seems like such a patronizing thing for me to say. I can just walk out of there anytime I want. He’ll go when he goes, and I hope he does.
drouth
because antelope
seem impossible anymore
fractal of prickly pear
prickly pear garden
the rocks and the old dry ground
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