Waiting for heaven is hell

My father on his 78th birthday

A well kept body doesn't die easily. Even if its inhabitant wants to.

My father turned 78 on the 7th of March. In all his life, he had never smoked, hardly took any alcohol, worked physically hard as an electrician and was morally a saint.
     He has been suffering from a severe depression for the past ten years since my mother's death. Her fight against cancer lasted almost twelve years.In all probability, looking back, my father may have been suffering from depression since his father walked out on the family when he was only three years old. Back in 1939, divorce was the exception to the rule. My grandmother managed to raise three children by sheer will fuelled by bitterness that kept her going right up till her death at the age of 84.
     All through our childhood years we suffered the consequences of my father's dysfunctional upbringing. He tried his best, I'm sure, but he wasn't equipped for fatherhood and lacked good coping skills in difficult situations. His way of dealing with a problem was to lose his temper, verbally abuse all and sunder, and storm around slamming doors or his own head against the nearest hard surface.
      I carried a deep resentment and anger towards him all through my teenage years, adulthood and right into middle age, causing as much damage to my children and marriage as my father had to his, I think.
      Somehow, although I have younger siblings, my parents ended up living with us in the final years of my mother’s life. It somehow always boils down to the one who has room, money, or both, doesn’t it? Time none of us really have. Maybe also the responsibility usually falls on the one with the least pressing personal needs.The ones with the stable home life.With the long-suffering spouse and "easy" children". Or so I kept telling myself.
      My father and I cared for my mother until she passed away in 2003. I softened towards him somewhat in those final months as I stood witness to his deep love for my mother as he tirelessly tried to help ease her suffering.But deep down I blamed him for the years of tension and the unbearable stress his behaviour put us under. I believed my mother’s illness was due to this.
     My own divorce three years later devastated my father. He was still in deep mourning for my mother and he felt a double loss as he remained on the farm when I moved out. Although he still lived independently his depression soon got out of hand and he had to be hospitalised to be stabilised.
     Another three years passed during which he started pulling out of the depths of mourning as I went tumbling into my own dark night of the soul. At the core of this darkness lay a terrible fury. Against the way we were brought up and the choices it caused me to make and the time I had lost living up to the standards of warped religious norms. I lay it squarely at his feet: a good enough Christian as good Christians go, but no mentor as to what really mattered in life. To be “saved” seemed to be one’s highest aspiration. After that, you just grit your teeth and try to get through life to get to heaven. If you also saved some more souls along the straight and narrow way, you really did all God expected of you. This may seem over cynical, but I see this now in my father’s aimless final years. According to his belief system he has done what he was put here to do. Now all he can do is wait.
     I warned my siblings that I would not be able to care for my father the way I did my mother. But as before, his general welfare remained mostly my responsibility.
     In 2010 he went and got himself married. It was a tragic mistake. The emotional baggage of both partners soon caused incredible havoc. My father digressed from being reasonably independent to being totally unable to see to his most basic needs. He needed full time frail care.
     The move with us to Wakkerstroom where we placed him in a care facility was therefore necessary. We had high hopes that it would help him to make a fresh start. But he went steadily downhill, with the depression clamping down on him and causing behaviour which ranged from obsessive compulsive to truly repulsive.While being remarkably healthy as far as circulatory, mobility and mental faculties go, he has serious "plumbing" issues. Coupled with severe emotional and psychological issues. 

     He eats compulsively and has difficulty swallowing especially when anxious which causes him to vomit at very unfortunate times, leading to him having to eat in isolation at the care facility. The gastrologist and psychiatrist suspects spasms of the oesophagus. He also cannot relax when in a manic episode to have a bowel movement which causes him severe discomfort.To top it all he has an enlarged prostate that blocks the urethra and has a catheter inserted that may only be removed in a month's time if the prostate responds to treatment and shrinks sufficiently.

     A month ago he tore out the catheter in a manic episode, causing a severe shock reaction which resulted in behaviour that horrified the staff at the care facility. We were told to get him stabilised or to find somewhere else for him to live.
     As before, I am the one with room. Pressing personal needs? Who, me? Time and money? We have just settled here at Barrowfield and we are desperate to start earning a living here.
     But, somewhere during the past decade, I have been freed from my anger towards him. Maybe in facing my own defects as a parent and spouse. Maybe in the realisation that I am a survivor (my daughter’s brilliant intervention through art therapy caused this breakthrough) I now realise that I have acquired skills that I would not have had, had my life been otherwise. I found the gift, I suppose. In the post A pa like mine I could recall the good times we had with deep gratitude. 
     Since bringing him home, he has contracted pneumonia and spent four days in hospital. He also developed a urinary tract infection which is still not fully under control. He is becoming stronger everyday physically though and all along his blood pressure has been like that of a healthy young man.
     But the dark fog of depression clings. With manic episodes of restless ranting and raving. Night after night of not a single minute of sleep as he pulls at the catheter and fights the demons of his past.His medication gets constantly revised and adjusted by the psychiatrist. Nothing lifts the fog. Even the slightest physical discomfort, infection or feeling of insecurity throws him off balance and brings on an anxiety attack that can last a whole day. He cannot eat or go to the toilet by himself. He cannot wash or dress himself, walk unaided or keep himself occupied in any way. He has no concentration span. Yet, his most repeated question is: “What now, Tilla?”
     We are exhausted. Caring for him is an all consuming task. I am a machine with him unable to fathom that I might need sleep or get tired. I super-manage everything. Write down every detail of his medication, his behaviour and vitals. I cook good meals and clean up scrupulously afterwards. The washing gets done somehow. The beds changed. I keep him clean and dry and neat. He doesn’t smell like an old man. I do nothing else and think of hardly anything else, but him.
     Sometimes I rant as loudly as he does. It frightens him and I recognise in his eyes my own fear of him as a child. Then I look out the window and see the poplars shiver in the late summer rains. It is as heartbreakingly beautiful out there as it is sad in here. A walk in the vegetable patch feels like a holiday.
     Downcast days of mists and drenching rain, a blocked sewage, a mouse rummaging in the kitchen leaving its stink all over: all feels like similes of this condition we feel stuck in. I am beginning to realise that we are unable to help him. If he doesn’t want to be helped. If he doesn’t want to live any longer. He wants to be with my mother, he says.

I took his blood pressure just now. He was hyperventilating and restless with anxiety and fatigue.

120/80. Just perfect.

I’m considering taking up smoking. Either that, or aim for something higher than heaven.

Matilda