Personal post

Reflection and sharing

I’d like to use this post to share some personal news. I hope that is okay; I’m sensitive to the fact that this newsletter goes into people’s email inboxes but I want sometimes to share.

I’m heading to Memphis to see my mom and dad. My dad had fairly advanced Parkinson’s and I’ve not seen them for several months. My siblings and I are having to transition into a new equilibrium of regular trips there to be with my mom as the cost of full time care is bearing down on her, both financially and emotionally and also physically.

My dad’s descent happened unusually quickly, but then I wonder if all descents seem unusually quick. I remember when they visited Waco, though, four years ago in 2020. I was living on the second floor of a house converted to an apartment. Dad climbed the stairs which is sort of my mental anchor to remember it wasn’t that long ago.

But now my dad stays in a something like a modern medical bed. Modern in that it seems like it’s just a home version of the beds in a hospital; nothing fancy. Nothing except for a bar to keep him from getting out of the bed. I’m not how frequently that even can happen anymore but if it could stop happening, that would be fantastic as my dad cannot walk. And when he does get out, it means he’s collapsed on the ground and it’s on my mom to get him back in that bed. My mom’s mind is fully there but who is otherwise physically not the person I’d want to picking up a hundred pound of dead weight to put back into a medical bed at 2am.

Dad’s symptoms are odd. I assumed it would mean he shook violently since that’s all I knew at the time but dad’s version of this is very different. He doesn’t seem to shake or if he does it’s much lighter. No, dad has full blown hallucinations. He finds them frightening he once told me (his word was “terrifying”). But I couldn’t tell if he actually remembered them either. They were like jumbled memories. He’d call 911 for a while there to say someone was breaking into our house in Brookhaven Mississippi where I grew up — a place we haven’t lived since 1989. Mom at some point took the phone away as a result. But then dad would hold his palm up, while laying on his back, and right in front of us “swipe” his hand as if he was moving through a phone.

Another time he was convinced the FBI was coming to the house because he’d caused a stock market crash somehow.

But now it’s different I think. My son saw him this week on a drive from his other grandparents to Waco and told me “Pappaw’s not doing well”. I said what do you mean. And he said he just wants lucid at all, wasn’t present at all, and was always looking at the ceiling whispering and moving his hands somewhat.

So, I’m in a plane now flying to Memphis to spend a few days before Christmas with them. I don’t know how exactly I feel. I am grateful to see mom and am grateful she has such a good group of friends from church. They seem like they love one another a lot and the friends come over weekly to play Farkle with mom and dad. It wasn’t too long ago, to be honest, that dad could be rolled out to the kitchen and manage to roll the dice when it was his turn, but now I think he leaves the bed less often.

Last, the nursing support. Mom hires people not quite around the clock but more than a 8-5 thing too. But it still doesn’t seek enough to be honest. We arranged it for her to get away for a week to see my sister and brother in law in chicago for a week and I think it probably cost $10k give or take.

Which is why the new equilibrium is more regular long trips. This is my first one, but going forward it’ll be something I have to do more often.

As I said I’m not sure how I feel. I’ll save that for another day, but the only thing I’ll say is that I remember dad sharing with me what the doctor told him when he got the diagnosis the first time:

“Nobody dies from Parkinson’s;

They die with Parkinson’s”

So sometimes it seems like it’s going to be a long journey.

The second reason I’m going, though, is mom is giving me her old Ford Explorer. She no longer needs it and its blue book value is basically three digits. She owned it so that she could transport her paintings (she and my sister are painters) to her gallery, but she can’t do that anymore. She still has things in galleries but I think she can’t paint at the level she’d been doing.

She’s giving me the SUV because I’m going on a two week road trip to the Redwood National Park in California with my adult son the day after Xmas. I just didn’t feel good about taking my beloved “Turbo Brick” — a 1991 240 Volvo turbo wagon — as I think he probably couldn’t handle the trip. This SUV will and if it doesn’t, then no harm no foul. The cost of a rental was around the cost of the net higher spending on gas (as you can imagine, it gets crap mileage), I figured, and it would be nice to have something I can haul stuff around to the dump finally. I have to for instance dispose of a mattress that my cats destroyed when they somehow got trapped in one of the girls bedroom. I just want to burn that thing it’s so gross now, but a landfill will suffice.

But I cannot even express how excited I am about this trip with him. I love the United States and I love driving it and I especially love driving it “right to left” (ie driving west). The plan is:

1. Waco to Marfa, Texas and get a tee pee

2. Marfa to New Mexico and tent camp. Go see white sands and Carlsbad caverns

3. Make our way to Grand Canyon, camping along the way and there.

4. Make our way to California. Maybe stop in Death Valley.

5. Do not stop In Vegas for even one minute.

6. Make our way to California, see cities, eventually find our way to pacific coast highway 1

7. Drive to Redwoods.

8. Drive back via Reno, Utah, Colorado, Montana

I’ll do Xmas with my ex wife and the kids before that though. Once the ink dried on the divorce papers, I don’t think we’ve had one single negative interaction. The holidays spent together aren’t the most pleasant of feelings, as I am nostalgic but they are good being there with the kids and as a family.

I am doing well. Had a bit of a bumpy road last few years but I think it was all for the best. It helped me wake up; I’d been asleep for a while. I’m deconstructing what it means to be in relationships, including community and more. I think I both see and believe for maybe the first time that no one can make me happy except myself. And no one can abandon me except myself. I am learning more about these parts of me I have never liked — like my historic “need” for external validation, or my strong tendency to clutch to guilt and simultaneously to see myself the victim of this or that, or my hyper vigilant protection tendencies or my hyper rationality — all therapy words. I see them in a different way, and that’s almost entirely because of a scene from Silver Linings Playbook when Jennifer Lawrence’s character, Tiffany Maxwell, said:

“I used to be that way, but I’m not anymore. There’ll always be a part of me that’s sloppy or dirty, and I like that part of myself, just like all the other parts of myself, and can [Bradley Cooper’s character] say the same? Can [he] forgive? Is [he] even any good at it?”

I’d seen the scene 50 times but one day it dawned on me: she meant the things ordinarily despised by self hating people. And she said it Cooper, whose character had severe bipolar, for whom his “sloppy and dirty parts” were his bipolar symptoms.

So if she’s saying the path is to love and accept with compassion one’s “sloppy and dirty parts” even while resolving to change, and he’s supposed to do that his own bipolar symptoms, what does that mean about me and my “sloppy and dirty parts”?

Means the same thing, I realized.

I think now about some of the bumps in the road the last few years brought. I now am grateful for some of them immensely and feel very lucky they happened to me despite at the time they were hard. Some teachers are just tough graders with tough assignments, but they’re the best teachers of the best classes. And I got a good grade in the class so to speak because my only answer on the final was, “I am not a victim” and that got me an A in the class. But it replaced all the Fs I’d gotten that semester. Still I passed.

And then other stuff was sad and they’re not things I like to reflect on as gifts. Some stuff are gifts and the rest you just have to let go of, and I’ve had both.

So it’s been honestly really helpful to hear that, and I spend now a lot of time in practices that have built on that.

That’s all I even can put into words. The rest is for me.

I’ll end with a word for you all this week. First is from the Avett Brothers:

“I have no enemies

I’ll have no enemies”

From “No Hard Feelings”. I encourage you to meditate on those words as you move into the new year. It’s a beautiful, haunting song about life, our mortality and a willingness to let all things go and have no hard feelings to anyone again.

And then the other message I leave for you as you move into the holidays and new year is this:

“May you be happy. May you be well. May you be safe. May you be peaceful and at ease.”

So happy holidays and happy new year and be safe and be kind to yourselves wherever you are. It’s a joy to be alive. One day we won’t be and many of us are no longer.

peace and love

Scott