Barn Pixie

We are burying him in a sextant box. A box he made for a sextant he refitted with mirrors and caused to function, and gave to me when I graduated high school in 1978. A couple years later, the sextant itself has issues, and on assuring him I was no longer going to need to do celestial navigation, he took it back and used it to repair a couple other sextants that were in use on R/V Westward at SEA. I kept the box, a thing of beauty constructed of mahogany, many many coats of varnish and brass corners, latches and handle. With a special engraved brass plate on top from friends. I just finished polishing all the brass parts, and I need to install the new brass plate that has his name and dates on it. We are headed to South Carolina on Tuesday to bury his ashes next to his sister, and his parents, in the Episcopalian church cemetery.

He died at age 97, after about a decade of increasing dementia. I know, it always increases. For a while he was just forgetful, and then he was confused, and then even more confused, and finally he reached a resting state resembling a placid and venerable house cat. Easy to care for, mostly, spending a lot of time warm and napping on the couch, waking with real enthusiasm for meals, and wandering about the house after dark, sometimes tipping things over. He was at home with his wife (each of their third marriages, this one lasted 35 years, more than both his previous ones combined) until September when he started falling over, and she couldn't get him back upright again. He was also in some pain in his back, which turned out to be cracked vertebra - the third time he fell in a 24 hour period and she couldn't get him up by herself, she sent him to the ER and from there they xrayd him and noticed the vertebra and it was generally decided to send him to rehab. Except with his current levels of dementia, he needed combined rehab and memory care.

I was worried about his wife looking after him for much longer, in part because after spending two days with him I was entirely out of energy and patience and cope. Having him in care was an enormous relief for me, and I think for her. She and I tried to make a point of visiting routinely, but as my husband pointed out, it was more for ourselves than for him. Whenever I came, he was always pleased to see me, no matter who he happened to think I was. I brought my dumb little guitarlele (uke sized, guitar # of strings and tuning) and would play the old folk songs he'd taught me when I was 6 and 7 and 8 years old, when he could play the banjo. The staff there took incredibly kind care of him - when he was night wandering and fretful, they moved him closer to the nurses station so he had people to talk to, and flirt with, when he woke.

Around Thanksgiving he started having odd ...collapses? I'm not sure what else to call them. He'd throw up, and then be unconcious for 12-24 hours, the care center would call us to prepare us for the worst, and then he'd just wake up, a little less there than before, and eat and talk and carry on. This unnerved everyone. And then he caught Covid, in spite of all the precautions staff and everyone else took, and that had him down for a couple days, and he rallied briefly, and then he declined for most of a week and finally died. Of covid? Or old age? or the battery in his pace-maker giving out? I do not know. I know that visiting him while taking covid precautions was extremely difficult - I was gowned and masked and gloved and still trying to play an instrument and sing. And also cry.

I was really lucky in my dad. He made sure I knew he loved me, and that he was proud of me. Honestly I think he was proud of almost everyone who tried things, a crucial part of the he mellowed as he aged. A friend came over to play cello for him this past summer, along with my older kid playing bassoon - he was delighted. He was pleased to have music entirely for himself, and sadi learning both of those instruments was hard - he was proud of them for putting the effort into it.

In a lot of ways I have been missing him for years. We emptied out our garage and installed his machine shop - these big working machines older than me: a South Bend lathe circa 1949, a Bridgeport milling machine circa 1952, several drill presses, a band saw, a truly terrifying table saw - but being in it made him more anxious than it was worth. Sometimes he could wander through it patting his old friends, but sometimes he'd lose a tool or a name for the tool he wanted and would get more and more agitated looking for the thing in his memory and in the shop itself. These machines are also my friends - I learned to use them when I was small, like 9 or 10 years old - but I do not have the facility with them that he did, nor do I have the projects he would use them on - building test beds for for engineering projects that I did not ever completely understand. By the time he'd moved down here, he didn't have the projects to use them either, a different thing that made him anxious - that we'd changed our lives around to install this array of tonnes of machinery, and it was not paying for itself somehow.

I miss talking about boats we sailed on together. I put together a short list of the ones I could remember, and was looking for pictures of ones like them online, they were some classic wooden boats of the late 1950s, designed by Names, but I finally realized that wouldn't help him, it was more a thing I was invested in.

I missed him knowing his grand kids as they got older. He was amused and affectionate when they were small, and captivated by their cuteness which he worked hard to get on film. But he missed out on them as conversationalists, having strong opinions about politics or economics. Aerin is musical and mathematical, and even in their current non-binary shape, they could have talked about a lot of things, or even at one point played music together. I am sorry that couldn't happen. Although they did have a hilarious (to me) conversation about shaving. Aerin is working on a hideous(affectionate) beard, and he asked what they used to shave, and allowed as how he had a thing he called the hedge trimmers. Aerin agreed that those worked, but they couldn't stand the vibrations and stuck with a safety razor. It just caught me Right in the feels. Alice could have argued the existence of economics as an actual thing or that money is made up, and he would be so proud of her off on one of the big WHOI ships as a scientist.

I'm not sure why I am writing all this down. Unlike the Muppets, it is not plot exposition. But it has to go somewhere, and I want someone lese to know these things.

full fathom five thy father lies
buried in his memories,
of his bones are coral made
his past life is naught but smoke
these are pearls that were his eyes
turned to see what no one sees
nothing of him that doth fade
future thoughts have gone astray
but doth suffer some sea change
fully brought, but disarranged
into something rich and strange
and fade again to rearrange


There is some kind of song there, or a parallel set of thoughts
my da is buried in his head,
it is filled with ghosts, and loose pieces of his past
interleaved
his connections to the current place and time are gone
his reference points for navigation
are the answers to the questions he asks,
and those whirl away again as soon as he hears the answer
lost in the current of things he doesn't understand right now
and he has to ask again
for reassurance
for anchoring
catching at wisps of memories
and losing them again, and again, and again

That has to be a hard place for someone whose life was engineering - designing the details, understanding the tolerances, down to thousandths of an inch

There is a kind of rhythm to caring for kids, and I have rediscovered that rhythm in caring for my dear demented Da. He asks the questions because he genuinely needs and wants to know the answer, and making him work for it does not make him any happier. Having the Whiteboard Of Answers helps only in that he can check in with it and reread the answers to make sure they are still the same, but I still wind up answering the same set of questions over and over and over. So I settle into it, and think about other things in between the questions, and knit, or text  a little (except that feels rude, even though he's hardly there). Being here for a couple days running while L attends a class reunion - the 61th, so a (small) group of well educated 79 and 80 year old white ladies - means I am on the hook for meals and distractions as well, although J comes daily for my respite.

Tuesday was long, and it took forever to get him to actually go to bed and stay there. He got confused about which house this is and was appalled that we'd lost the sleeping porch,and wanted to know, plaintively, where he'd be sleeping then. He came down repeatedly to check on the lock on the door, check on me, check on the cats... and then the wretched cats had a mad runaround at 10 and convinced him to come down and feed them, so that behavior will have to scorched out of them for the next several nights... This morning he was unsure of when and where he was, and why. It took several iterations before he got a grasp on the town, the owner of the condo we're in, who exactly I am, which always leads to "who's your mother? Where is she now? were we married? wy did we split up?" Once I stopped trying to end the conversation by answering, and started just answering and moving on, those got easier.

I have started to wonder if I could tell what parts of his brain are affected by what his deficits are - it is all memory and time and location and story telling about his past. He still has pretty solid language skills, word choice and order, not just word salad but reasonable responses to the answers to his questions. Physically he is ridiculously robust. I am deeply grateful he can do the basic bodily things on his own - eating and bathroom and even showering are things he seems perfectly capable of. So I would guess pre-frontal cortex, mostly, with the lower parts less affected (so far). If anyone knows more brain stuff tell me, or point me to it, because I am curious.

I have accomplished the first month of Patreon rewards! I am flipping MIGHTY!! Last night, before midnight, the email newsletter went out, and I finished postcard mailing today.

If anyone is interested in supporting my artwork in an organized fashion, I am grateful for even a dollar a month. For a dollar you get a monthly newsletter, three dollars wins you a postcard showing new work, monthly, plus the newsletter, and for ten bucks a month you get a small piece of current art in the mail every other month. It will be small, experimental and unexpected.