My dad died back in January.
In one way, it had been coming for a long time. He'd had early-onset dementia for close to a decade and his condition had been in a steady decline.
In another, it came as a shock. Although he'd been in a "secured perimeter facility" for over a year, at his last birthday he was still walking, still talking, still noticeably a person, even as his ability to communicate had waned considerably, now being completely unable to follow a conversational thread and what he did manage to say way mostly nonsense.
He'd been increasingly cranky and self-isolating before he took a nasty fall in mid-December, one that he never really recovered from. He stopped getting out of bed. Then he stopped eating. He was put on hospice, then hospice nurses came to stay with him 24/7. We met with Ophelia, who was the first of the hospice nurses. She was extremely nice, we chatted about whether to leave the blinds open, whether we should talk to him, what was likely to happen. We listened to the Grateful Dead (American Beauty and Workingman's Dead). I think it was New Speedway Boogie where he was moving his legs and arms slightly back and forth. We joked that he was dancing.
"Of course *he* would!" said his ex-girlfriend, when we talked to her several days later. She was the first person to notice that my father was declining. She called me, concerned, noting that while my father was never the most straight-forward thinker, he had recently forgotten to send the second mortgage payment in a row, something that was completely out of character for a blue-collar Irish-American from Oakland who had always counseled me to avoid debt, to calculate how much savings would be necessary in case of emergency, and who never bought cars new, taking excellent care of them and driving them for decades. That she was right became readily apparent during my sister's wedding.
My father loved weddings as they provided three of his greatest joys, dancing, eating good food, and interacting with small children. Their infectious, unfettered joy, I speculate, reminded him of his own emotional freedom before he got caught up in Serious Adulthood (in his case, delayed until he turned thirty) and all the Evil involved there. This time, however, he was tentative, spooked, and while many friends and relatives have stated that they loved the swing dance he did with my sister, you could tell that he was not there, that there was something wrong.
After spending most of the afternoon, we said our goodbyes, including several minutes each by ourselves, talking to the figure in the bed. "Is he a stubborn man?" Ophelia asked and we laughed and agreed that he was stubborn, yes. "Probably a few more days then."
The next morning, my sister called me while I was on my way to work. Seeing her number on my phone screen was enough to know what had happened before I'd called her back. If it had been anything else, she just would've texted.
The last few months have been confusing as I'm working backward through my relationship with him. For so long it was me taking care of him, often against his wishes, that I'd forgotten the decades where the relationship was nominally equal, and then back to him being my father, which becomes more powerful and recognizable as I negotiate my relationships with my own children.
