I am only human, so I abhor stressful or uncomfy situations for the most part. I learned early on that I have a tool in the box that lessens the emotional pain that would come before inevitable split or breakup or traumatic experience.

I’ve learned it’s called emotional disconnection. Gradually, you stop caring. Not about the person, but about the situation. You start looking forward to the end. You become deadened to present circumstances and you focus solely on physical survival. Eventually, when things fall apart, then you’re not as invested, not as involved, and it’s easier to extricate.

Anyway, I’ve emotionally divested from my bio dad a while ago. After being hurt so many times by his actions and inaction, I withdrew. I wanted him to live his life, safe and happy and whatnot, but I couldn’t continue to involve myself with a man who made me doubt my own worth. Was I worth love? Was I worth being listened to? Was I even a good son?

And then the dementia kicked in.

And like that, all avenues for resolution closed. I was left to speculate what he meant, a loop of interactions playing where I could only imagine his intentions and motivations. Because the door of answers had closed; at any point during the day, my father would proclaim that he was just a few blocks from his childhood home, that people around him had worked with him or gone to school with him. All things that were not true, but his brain had told him the truth.

At a few points, though, clarity kicked in, and he remembered. When visiting recently, he remembered me. He remembered who my mother was. He remembered my mother’s brother. And just when things were going really well, he turned to the wooded area that surrounds the facility and proclaimed that he had run those woods as a child.

Anyway, he stayed with my sister for a while before she got him into the facility, and she was cleaning up that room, and found a note he had written to himself.

Text reads (in my father’s pretty decent handwriting):

“Think I have missed appointment for my eye dr

Don’t know what to do now.
May God show me a way because I really need it.”

A moment of clarity from a man who hadn’t experienced it in a very long time. A note of sorrow, a feeling of helplessness, torn out of a notebook. A sense of vulnerability, of fear, amidst his brain fog of mixed memories and electrons not connecting anymore, losing more by the second.

I read this, and I cried. I was dedicated to his care, keeping up with my sister as she served as the local caregiver and working through the issue of his business and resources as those he supported moved on from him or waited in the wings for the windfall they were sure was coming as soon as he stopped drawing breath.

He wasn’t the doddering senior I had convinced myself he was, at least not all of the time. Every now and again, he felt fear. He felt unsafe, uncared for, confused. And once again, I felt that I had failed him.

That’s a bad feeling.

In a few weeks, I’m flying back to Southern California where I grew up, and I am nervous.

Why am I nervous? I think it comes down to the fact that I’m there for a finite time, and I want to do all of the things. See my people, eat the food, be outside. Do the things, see the sights, drink the drinks.

What I want to do and what I have time to do may be two different things. I have a list of people I’d love to see, but I’m not sure I’ll see them all. And that sucks; I come 2000 miles to see and hug on certain people, and there is potential that I won’t get to.

I suppose this is completely a first world problem that I’m traveling and have these issues at all. Still a tough pill to swallow.

I swear, this starts off horribly, but there’s a point here.

So, we’re at my father-in-law’s wake (told you this starts off horribly) and the funeral home people offer to have music playing. “Usually, it’s whatever the deceased would like, because people remember the deceased liking the music.” Fine. Thing is, my father in law, “from yard”, or, island-born Jamaican, loved reggae, and…well, maybe you don’t play reggae at a wake. Or maybe you do.

Anyway, my in-laws didn’t want to play reggae. Sensing that they had other things to think about, and every one of them was on the edge, awaiting an unknown number of people coming by and with the patriarch of the family laying in a box mere feet from them, I huddled the funeral home attendants.

“I’m thinking something light, not melancholy, good background music that doesn’t sound too chipper but is still good music. What you got?”

They told me that they had access to Spotify, and could hook that into the speakers in the room. I turned to my in-laws, all in states of distraction. “I got the music, y’all. No reggae, but nothing too loud, nothing distracting. I got it. Y’all do your thing.”

I turned back to the funeral home people. “Spotify? Okay, do the Bill Evans playlist. Put it on repeat, but I doubt it’ll run out. Piano-centered, good music, not too chipper but not sad either. Put it on random, and that will work.” They nodded at me, and seconds later the sounds of a piano solo were on, low and slow. My eldest sister-in-law, trying to be the one in charge, looked at me with amazement.

“What is this? What did you have them play?”

I told her, and she asked incredulously, “how did you know to put this on? How did you know this guy in particular?”

I told her I didn’t want to get into the specifics of my jazz listening history, just that I thought of some parameters and that he would fit them. She walked away to tell my wife “He just KNEW this guy’s music would work. How?” My wife shrugged; she had listened to me talk about jazz enough to know that I kinda knew my shit, but now was not the time to speak accolades. There were people to say hi to, to reminisce with, to try not to cry in front of.

I didn’t do much that day; I was around for my wife when she looked for me, I thanked people for coming, I talked to some people I knew and met a ton I didn’t. But I did a good thing that day, and it all came down to knowing my music.

“You look like a guy I used to know,” my father said as we walked into the memory care home. “Yeah. Look just like you. Big feet, gap in the teeth. Yeah.”

“Hey Pop. I look familiar?” I hugged him and he hugged me back.

“Yeah, you’ll pass.”

While walking into the common area, he introduced me as “the baby of the family.” My ears perk; we figured this might happen, that I’ll be confused with my uncle, his brother, who is his youngest sibling. But as we sat down, we were regaled of tales of running through the woods with the boys, woods that JUST SO HAPPENED to be outside the facility we were sitting in. Because, you see, we were in Arkansas, not suburban Houston. We were just a few blocks from his house, of course.

I told him that someone was taking about him, and when he asked who, I said my mother’s name. He looked at me and grinned. “That almost was your mama.”

Semantics aside, of course (because I’m pretty sure she’s not “almost” my mother), the visit went…how I expected. He claimed to have worked with other residents in the facility and insisted he hadn’t eaten lunch, both things untrue.

We sat with him for a couple of hours, and he dipped in and out of the reality we live in. My sister had warned me beforehand of some of his proclivities, but the one that really got her in her emotions was the fact that you could not tell him goodbye.

When he first got to the memory care facility, my sister would get him settled and say goodbye, and he’d rear up, demanding to be taken home. A door opening was his chance to escape, to get outside and make it home. My father is still in good physical shape for being 83, but the prospect of him escaping has caused him to rear up on attendants and nurses, once shoving one out the way in order to make it to the door.

So, we can’t tell him goodbye.

I get up, tell him I have to use the bathroom, and I’ll be right back. And that was the last I saw of my father that day.

All I can hope for is his care; that he’s safe, content, takes his meds, and is comfortable. We can’t take him back home; he’s almost blind in one eye and forgets to eat. His short term memory is shot, and he can talk with you for long periods of time about really nothing at all. The weather, the memories of him being a kid, of the place he worked for years. And you think, wow, he’s actually okay.

Then…no. And that’s really hard to watch. And you can’t argue with him, because what good does that do?

No Pop, you didn’t work with that lady sitting over there 30 years ago. No Pop, you are not in Arkansas. No Pop, I am not your brother, and my sister is not your sister. No Pop, you ate 20 minutes ago. No Pop, you had eye surgery yesterday. No Pop, you haven’t taken your meds yet, or I watched you just take them. No Pop, you never made it to Paris, or traveled the country, or did what you told us you were going to do the past 40 years.

No, Pop.

But you’re comfy, albeit confused. You’re watched 24/7, even while I’m sure your mind is going a mile a minute.

And this is where we are.

I was invited over to a friend’s place to dig through some records. His father had died of dementia recently, and he had invited a bunch of guys over to dig through the collection, to give us first crack at it.

The collection was vast, and while the paper sleeves weren’t in the best condition, the records were all in pretty decent shape. Definitely playable. The collection had a ton of jazz and R&B, and a lot of big names and a LOT of not-so-well known ones.

There’s something about estate sales, and open houses, that expose a little-examined fact. We are welcoming other people’s stuff into our home. Their keepsakes are our decoration, their playthings our decor. In this case, their music is now mine, and I took a minute to recognize what that meant.

On the surface, it’s just a transfer of ownership. A “this was yours, now it is mine.” But you’d know if, say, you were keeping something associated with a bad memory or something that used to belong to a person you don’t want in your life. On the other side of the coin, you’d welcome a memoir of someone you loved, or someone with whom you made a good memory.

As I go through these records, I will say a prayer of thanks and a note of reverence for those who have come before and those who made this possible.

As I type this, I am exhausted.

This past month has been non-stop with life-changing events, to me personally and to people around me. And to admit my fragility in these times feels wrong in the face of a unique American determinism – “manifest what you want!” – sometimes the truth is just the truth and I actually cannot control much of what’s happening around me.

This helpless feeling does not feel great. The feeling that death is coming, that emotion will run hot, that things are getting worse and worse; it leads to a feeling of malaise, of depression, of a condition not even soft-serve ice cream or a big hug can assuage. And that’s a tall order; sometimes, that’s all you need to temporarily put aside the notion that things are bad because, surely, they’ll get better.

But to be at a point where you can’t enjoy something because of a feeling of existential dread, there’s something wrong. And even though there is a movement to dismiss those feelings as not valid – “It’s all in your head!” – it’s not a feeling that can be shaken easily.

And that’s where I am. Dread and foreboding rules everything around me, and that cloud doesn’t look to be lifting any time soon. And I wish it would; I got shit to do!

Over the past month or so, so much has happened. I would sit to write, and more things would happen, and I’d have new thoughts, and before I could write them, something ELSE would happen.

It’s been a tiring, emotionally fraught, absolute slog of a month. Death, in many forms. Dementia and the mental decline. So many realizations about the state of our world, and how far it is from the world we actually want. Bad people winning. Good people taking Ls.

I’ve adjusted my worldview quite a bit. Had a ton of good people on my team, loving me and mine. Maybe I’m not meant to influence the world, just the world I’m in. I won’t reach millions but I can make things better for one, four, ten? That may have to do.

Someone I worked with asked me how I was, and I actually told them. Instead of “I’m fine” I gave them the short version of what’s been happening in my life. In-laws, my parents, winter blahs, both barrels.

The look I got!

I’ve written many times about how people don’t seem to grasp that I am more than a tech person; I like to eat, sleep, f-orget about things like anyone else. I do not go home to plug myself into the wall, but I do recharge at home amongst my stuff.

But it seems that I crossed a line by simply denying that everything was fine and I was fine and the day is fine and all my people are fine…when very little is fine.

Be careful asking me things; might get some of my life on ya.