Still Dad

We'll go see Dad on this Father's Day, and maybe he'll be with us and maybe he won't. He is 90 years old now and lives in a memory-care unit, his life force at twilight and dimming. Dementia and accompanying Parkinson's have reduced him to a shell of the Dad we once knew, a shrunken figure scrunched down in his comfy recliner, the TV endlessly tuned to old black-and-white movies that go mostly unseen and unacknowledged.

And yet.

And yet, perhaps this will be a day like the day not long ago, when his eyes briefly focused and he pointed at the TV and said, "Humphrey Bogart." And then pointed again and said "Sidney."

Which would be "Sidney Greenstreet," the old character actor. Dad was right on both counts. It was an old Bogart flick, and Sidney Greenstreet was in it.

You live for those moments, as your father recedes toward what Abraham Lincoln called the dark indefinite shore. Most days, when he's awake, he is far away from us, his mumbled words describing things and people who lived and moved 60 or 70 years ago. One day he told me he'd been visited by an old high school basketball teammate who'd been dead for decades. Another day he might greet me with the news that he'd sold his Model T, which he kept in a barn I presumed had been gone for decades -- and, oh, by the way, did he tell me they'd cut off one of his legs?

You learn to roll with all of that. You learn even to roll with it when he asks how Mom's doing, and if she's coming to visit him anytime soon.

Mom has been gone since 2013.

Still, he is Dad, and sometimes even now you see glimpses of it. You'll catch a crooked grin or a dusty chuckle, and remember how easily he smiled, and that booming, audible-three-states-away guffaw of his. And you'll remember that this was the man who taught you a reverence for history and old things, and to do a job right or don't do it at all, and to honor your commitments.

I am not half the man my father was, but some of it took. My wife frequently notes that I go at everything -- work, exercise, sports --"like a dog killing chickens," and that is Dad's doing. Do it right or don't do it at all.

And so there came a time, not long ago, when I was walking out the door after a visit, and Dad called after me. Hollered after me, truth be told. Startled, I turned around and walked back into his room.

"What is it, Dad?"

He looked at me -- really looked at me, which doesn't happen often anymore.

"Get me out of this chair," he said.

"Dad," I said, "we've been over this. Your legs don't work anymore. You can't stand up anymore."

He kept looking at me.

"Get me out of this chair," he said again.

And then his eyes softened.

"Help me," he whispered.

Well, that did it. I should have called for the aides, who knew how to move him. But those two words -- Help me -- erased my common sense.

So I lifted him up. He weighs only 140 or so now, but he was dead weight and 140 pounds of dead weight is pretty much a bridge too far for a 63-year-old man who never had any upper body strength to begin with.

But somehow, the dog killed the chickens again. I managed to get him from his chair into his wheelchair. And when he was settled, and I was trying to catch my breath, he looked at me and said two words that seemed to reverse time.

"Thank you."

Whoa. Hold on there, Dad.

That's my line.