loss

February 22, 2022

The Soundtrack of My Life – 7 – Time in a Bottle

There is something other-worldly about this song. The guitar intro trickles in like pixie dust drifting through the air. The shimmering specks land on the closed eyes of a sleeper and transports them to another place and time. It’s a bittersweet imaginary adventure where they enjoy the moment for what it is, but know that it won’t last.

It’s weird. This song takes me to a time when everything was very real, but life still felt like a dream.

My father had started to have trouble walking again. He had had this issue once before when he had been diagnosed with hydrocephalus, which is fluid on the brain. At that time, my husband and I were convinced it was because my dad was just fucked up on prescription pills. When he got out of surgery it was like someone had flipped a switch. He was walking and moving better than he had been before.

Fast forward 10 years and we were back to the same. This time it wasn’t as bad. It was basically just a stiff leg that was causing him pain. Oh, and the little thing of him repeatedly falling.

I accompanied my mother and dad on his doctor’s visit down to a specialist in the LA area. There they said they were going to do a spinal tap and test the fluid to see what was causing him this issue. They didn’t know then, but I am almost certain it was ALS related. There are just too many coincidences for me.

On the way back from that visit, I told my dad, “What do you want to listen to? Anything in the world, what would you want to hear?” He mumbled out “Jim Croce.”

I pulled up spotify and started playing the top hits, and this was the first one.

I may have heard it growing up but I don’t think I was paying attention to anything adults did. I was pretty self absorbed and really only focused on what interested me. A bluegrass/folk singer would be right at the bottom of the list.

What’s funny is I am a lot like my dad. I share with him an obsession with music and a particular habit of repeatedly playing the same song. There was a story of my father doing this with a tape while on a road-trip with my mom. He would listen through, stop it, rewind, and play it again. He drove my mother so nuts with this that she ejected the tape and threw it out the car window. I don’t know what song it was, but I just have this gut feeling it was this one.

The early Monday morning we had my mother’s appointment to confirm she was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, I noticed some big bruises and cuts on my dads arms.

“What’re those?” I had asked.

“I fell two times yesterday,” he said.

I joked and said he needed to be careful and should I buy him a helmet? “Do you need a life alert?”

He chuckled.

I should have bought him a helmet. I should have given him a life alert.

That following Thursday morning, while he was using the bathroom, my dad fell and hit his head on the edge of the counter. He made it to the bedroom and from my mother’s COUNTLESS, gruesome retellings (complete with re-enactments) he called for help and began to seize. My mother’s idea of “helping” was running outside and literally yelling “help.” Not… dialing 911. And even when the school bus driver told her do just that, she rushed inside and forgot the number.

I’m pretty sure my mother’s disease will, in the end, claim two lives.

That morning I got a call from my dad’s cellphone but instead of his voice was a stranger’s. She told me that he had been taken to the hospital. I went to work as normal and then informed my boss of what happened. I got my mother and went to the ER.

He was braindead by the time we got to see him.

I called my mooch of a “step-sister” (it’s complicated) to let her know. She cried and told me to play (of all the bands my dad loved) Jim Croce for him. For a brief moment I thought she actually cared and could be a real “sister.” But then she began her grift the weeks following. Didn’t send flowers. Didn’t do anything. She was a “Hensley” in name alone.

We pulled my pop from life support and he was gone in seconds.

That following Saturday evening my husband orchestrated this little get together at a bar to celebrate my dad’s life. (This was also the first time Josh ever hung out with me and Charlie. He was uncomfortable at first, but because of the circumstances powered through.)

We hijacked the jukebox and played Jim Croce all night and drank all of my dad’s favorite spirits in his honor (peppermint schnapps and Coors.) I don’t think I have ever cried as much as I had that night. Nor do I think I have ever been as drunk. Good lord…

“Time in a Bottle” is a sad melody, but in the chorus for a brief moment there is a turn and it becomes hopeful and bright. I live for the chorus. I belt out the lyrics as hard and as loud as I can muster every time.

But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do once you find them
I’ve looked around enough to know
That you’re the one I want to go through time with

Like life, the song is mournful for the loss of time, the microscopic moment we all get to experience it. It is loss, it is pain, but there is brief moments in that sea of yearning that are hopeful. They give us enough joy to carry on to the next chorus.

February 11, 2020

Chocolate Smiles

Alzheimer’s is strange. Honestly, if she has to have some debilitating sickness, I wish my mother could have been diagnosed with anything else. At least then there is a possibility of a cure or recovery. With this it is just a trudge to the end. And in the end, it takes everything from you.

My mother is, mentally, a child. Well, preteen. She gets excited for visits, loves cookies, and watches romantic comedies like they’re going out of style. Really, she’s me circa 13 years old. Back when I still had hope.

The childishness was never more prevalent than a couple weeks ago when the husband and I took a trip to see my cousin’s new born. The husband had made a batch of chocolate chip cookies and brought them to her, which she insisted bringing half with us on our road trip.

She left them sitting in the sun so they got gooey and the chocolate started to melt. This new state of cookie existence did not stop her. She chomped away happily.

I was not aware of this until she made a garbled statement from the backseat and I turned to see her with a chocolate grin and matching fingers.

The husband doesn’t believe in tissues or napkins in his car (“cause I’m an adult that doesn’t make messes”). So we had to make due with a handkerchief (previously owned and used by my grandmother) and a bag.

What this event taught me was I need to carry wet wipes whenever my mother is around. Maybe even a diaper bag for good measure.

The more upsetting aspect of this is that while my mother is mentally a child, she is also still an adult. And she still believes that regardless to the facts to the contrary. So I am left to walk this fine line between being a son and being a caretaker.

It sucks.

This week we finally see a doctor for the growing list of her maladies. And hopefully in it get the final letter I need to get power of attorney. There is no doubt I will achieve my goal, it just means a legal turning point in this whole saga.

June 15, 2018

A Bookmark of Life and Loss

When I first met the man that I would refer to as my “bear cub” I hated him. I thought he was a narcissistic douche bag that I did not find the least bit funny. He thought he was hilarious. He came into my high school theater class making off-color jokes and being generally obnoxious just as I was getting out of it, and I would not see him again until we participated in a show down in LA called “You Make Me Physically Ill.”

For whatever reason when we reconnected, I fell in love with Jacob in a very non-sexual way. I felt this intense need to protect him and would defend him with my life if it came to that. I jokingly told him that my husband and I were going to adopt him, even though he’s only a couple years younger than me. (We have a habit of taking in strays.) Because I felt like a mama grizzly whenever anything pertained to him I would henceforth refer to him as my “bear cub.”

Yesterday I found out that he took his own life. The moment I got the text my eye caught sight of just his name and I already knew. If there was anyone who would commit suicide it would be Jacob. He dealt with the darkest of demons that I could not fathom what it must have been like to reside in his head. I think that’s why I found this need to protect and care for him. He, in many ways, reminded me of my father.

Now I walk the path every person who has lost someone to suicide travels: I am thinking of how I let him down and how I could have done more to keep this from happening. I feel shame in that I never spoke much with him after he moved to a different state, even though I did think about him often. Most recently he’s been in my thoughts because the upcoming Pokemon game is a remake of yellow and that was his favorite of the games; because you could get all three starters. I meant to reach out but I didn’t. I don’t know what stopped me. And I don’t even know that if I had, if that would have made any kind of difference. The thing about mental illness is that it is unpredictable and the best of intentions can sometimes be fruitless. Yet, we still have to try.

I can’t lend any new perspective or advice to the situation. In the end, it is what it is and nothing can be undone.

I will miss him.

June 17, 2016

Starting back at 1

How does one just throw away 27 years of sobriety? I keep asking myself that question as I think of my father who did exactly that. 

For whatever reason my father, that takes anti-psychotics to treat paranoid schizophrenia, decided it was a good idea to buy a fucking 30 pack of Coors Light and drink 19 of them in quick succession. 

The result is just as one may expect, he blacked the fuck out on his driveway, landing face first in his attempt to get the mail. 

One of the neighbors saw him and called 911 and he was rushed to the hospital. 

Then at 8:30 I get four calls from both my mother and father, one after the other. My heart starts to race thinking my aunt from my previous post has passed. 

I listen to my father’s voicemail and he non-chalantly informs me that he’s in the ER and needs me to pick him up because he fell after having a beer. 

I just don’t understand. Why ruin something you built so hard to build? He put so much distance between him and his past that for whatever reason he risked it all, including his life. 

What I hate the most is that I get it. Being an addict myself (not with alcohol) I know what it’s like to use something to ice the pain. He’s icing the pain and he was willing to destroy everything for a momentary solution. 

I asked him if he was on antidepressants and his big box of pills seems to contain everything but those. He laughed at me when I asked him. Clearly he doesn’t see the problem. 

My husband was furious with my father when he got to the ER. I’ve never seen him that angry before. Honestly it was weird. At one point I asked him to bring it down a couple notches because while it was deserved and justified it wasn’t helping the situation. No matter how angry one is with someone fucking up with their vice getting angry and making him feeling like shit is 100% counterproductive. 

After dropping my dad off and discovering his 6 beers was really 19, I went home to recoup. I had had enough and listening to him lie and tell me what he thinks I want to hear was frustrating me. There was nothing else I could have done. He was an adult man acting like a child. At least with a child you could have it committed to rehab or a psyche ward but someone that is coherent and present (most of the time) there is absolutely nothing one can do. My husband and I racked our brains trying to come up with some kind of solution. What it boiled down to was leaving him to make his own fucked up choices. 

The next morning (today) I went over to see how he was doing and if he had gotten more booze after we left. I didn’t find any in my quick search, but with my dad that doesn’t mean shit. He tends to hide his poisons. 

I found him wrapped in a blanket on the couch, staring blankly at the TV. I know how he feels, if he does feel any shade of remorse. I really understand. So, with a fresh perspective I tried to tell him what it is I would want to hear after I fucked up. I basically told him to keep calm and carry on. I let him know that we are all so angry because we love him so much and don’t want to see him do this shit to himself. 

He just stared at me. 

In the end I took his car key, cash, and credit cards. There is money hidden somewhere in the house but I don’t know the location and he is only aware of one of them, I guess. (So my mother thinks.) 

I really looked up to my dad. I never realized that I did until he disappointed me. I took his positive change for granted and without it I feel lost. It’s almost as if my whole childhood is a lie. He is lie. He is a fallible human being. 

He was my hope that I could get over my own demons. 

Today I remind myself that I don’t want to be him. I don’t want to let my past transgressions dictate how I handle situations which baffle me.