My father moved in with us a few weeks before my daughter’s bat mitzvah. There I was, parked outside of his Briarcliff Manor, NY apartment with my 1997 Ford Taurus. We packed as much as the car would hold and left the rest for my sister and brother in law to sort out.
It was not the happiest ride. He was 84 and was told he couldn’t live alone anymore. My sister had done her penance taking care of her mother in law, it was my turn; besides, it just wouldn’t have worked. The two of them were far too much alike.
So I drove him home, making frequent stops – he was an 84 year old man, right?
At home we settled him into the room that had just been fixed up to be an arts and crafts room but was now going to be his bedroom. We unpacked the car and I collapsed having driven eight hours – a lot for me anyway.
My dad tried to be easy but never got the hang of it. He had to have meals at the right times and had some allergy to left overs, so we had to be better at serving them. He was a picky eater and capricious at that.
Five years later our daughter was going off to college and we wanted our privacy back. He was impossible, but we finally got him to look at some assisted living places. He wasn’t agreeable and never really was. But he was having a lot of falls (and we were spending a lot of time in the ER at 5am) and a social worker finally took pity on us and said to him “Simon, you’re not safe in their house”. I could have kissed her feet.
We moved him and visited every weekend and as my wife said I could love him again. Five years of stress and strain. We had three relatively easy years in assisted living with him before he broke a hip, spent his last few months in nursing home care and hospice and passed.
By that time, in fact I knew his entire last year of life that he was about to die, I was stressed and depressed. The transgender stuff was getting worse and harder to control and having a larger impact on my life.
Once he passed I grieved out of proportion because the depression was serious and then the trans ruminations were severe. He passed in 2010, eight years after he moved in with us.
It took almost two years for the transgender dam to break in 2012 and the depression to start getting treated.
Since then (and leaving out one or two things) I’ve been through my Parkinson’s diagnosis, separation, starting what is boiling down to a completely new life, having to leave my job due to depression (and most likely stress).
At no time in the last eight years have I had less than two or three stressful life changes going on at once. My pulse, which in mellower times had hovered around 80 bpm or a little lower now rarely sank below 100. One can imagine the cortisol coursing through my veins.
So why say all this. It isn’t to evoke pity, please no. I abhor pity, which I hope I’ve made clear. It isn’t pride. Rather I hope that those travelling through these paths will realize that there are ears to listen and empathy out there. Their stories are not entirely unique to them, they are, in some form, shared by all of us.
My Gifted Life 