St. Robin of Los Altos Gets Her Halo: As If!

My Dad isn't really cross in this picture he just isn't smiling. "It cracks my face," he says. "Because my face isn't used to it."

I'm finding it more difficult to write about my father and his dementia now that I am seeing him nearly every day. Perhaps I can't step back and get perspective now, or perhaps it is more painful up close--I honestly don't know yet. I just know that now, I keep thinking of other things to write about--other things that are farther away.

Perhaps it is just this: now that I am living less than a mile away from my father and see him almost every day, he continually tells me he doesn't see me enough. I know this is because he doesn't remember that he just saw me yesterday or a few hours ago, and that this is not his fault, but it does tend to make a person feel unappreciated. I took my father for coffee the other morning, just to give him a chance to get out of the house, which he loves. We spent a hour or more together. I bought him several iced cookies, and paid to have his coffee refilled twice.

It was pouring rain and getting him to and from the car with his walker was a challenge. His caregiver and I both got very wet holding the umbrella for him. When we were getting ready to depart, I moved my car at right angles to two empty parking places to make it easier for him to approach and get into the vehicle. There wasn't a good ramp nearby. This must be a serious sin in California because an older couple in a Mini Cooper stopped their car, rolled down their window (in spite of the rain) and yelled at me: "What kind of idiot are you," the man spit out. "Blocking three parking places like that?"

I threw my hands up in the air and looked back at my almost-ninety-year-old handicapped father. "He's old and he can't walk," I said in a voice louder than I had intended. "You might be there someday yourself!" The man and his wife drove away and parked elsewhere.

When we got back to the house, I put Dad on the couch--the world's most uncomfortable couch which "graces" my parent's country kitchen--and I sat across from him in the uncomfortable kitchen chair at the uncomfortable kitchen table and picked up the newspaper. I had been so busy giving care to everyone but me that day, I had missed this one thing I always do because I love to do it. I figured it was time for my father's pre-lunch doze and now I could read up on the events of the world. I figured wrong.

"Robin, I don't see your very much," said my father, sitting over on that ugly and uncomfotable object. "And so when I do see you I don't like to see your nose behind that newspaper."

I looked over the paper at him and smiled. He wasn't being grouchy, really. He just wanted attention. I put the paper down for a minute and after we exchanged a few pleasantries--never an easy task because he's deaf and you have to converse in writing--he put his head back and fell asleep.

I shifted my bottom in the hard wooden chair and picked up the paper again. This St. Robin of Los Altos gig is going to be much tougher than I thought.