Art is Life is Art: Susan Reep Photo Art

Six Keys by Don Whittemore

August. On the other side of the year, counting down. Life is Creative Every Day’s theme for August, and today I had a stark reminder of being on the other side of life.

My dad is 92.  His memory is going.  There are visible changes daily, and he’s in that delicate stage when he recognizes it.  On the other hand, my mom’s been beyond that stage for so long that she has no idea she doesn’t remember. She thinks she still does things like cook dinner.

Walking in yesterday morning at 9:30, I found Dad at the breakfast table with a handful of keys.  He was agitated because he had lost his keys the day before and was trying to scare up extras.  As he fiddled with the keys on the table, he got more and more disturbed.  I know some of it was caused by him knowing he’d lost something he couldn’t find, knowing his usually well-orgainzed keys were missing tags, knowing he was losing his grip on things.

Mom walked in and said, “Do you remember this?”  She was holding the key rack I made in Camp Fire Girls so very long ago.  It’s green with two big flowers and three hooks, and I thought those were the very most beautiful flowers ever painted.  (I probably can’t do much better right now.)  We talked about it and she wandered off with the key rack.

Dad caused a lot of this agitation himself because he is who he is.  Some of us have insight into ourselves and can make changes.  Some of us, like my dad, both do and don’t have insight.  I’m not sure I understand it: he can bemoan some of the habits his father had, yet have the same habits himself without recognizing them.  He knows he can be difficult (difficult is an understatement) but he’s never been able to modify his behavior.

So my sister had told him she wasn’t going to be there the day he lost the keys, but for him not to worry, there were duplicates and she’d get them made.  She thought she had finally gotten through and he’d just relax and wait.  But that’s not my dad.  Even though he is 92 and knows his stamina is limited, he spent the rest of that day looking all over the yard, even raking it, sure he had dropped the keys when he was fiddling with the fountain (a whole other story).  I’m sure he lost sleep over it, and he hadn’t even eaten breakfast when I walked in.

He just couldn’t stop being him.  He never would have lost keys in the first place; if he did he’d find them right away, and everything would be in order and in its place.  Basically, he would have been in control.  He never recognized that he always had to be in control, yet he understood that about others.  How can a person have awareness, even self-awareness, yet be blind at the same time?

One thing led to another: my sister had taken the extra mail box key so he didn’t know how he would get his mail! (No, she had one made for herself and checked the mail frequently for them.)  If only mother would have agreed to put a mailbox key on her key ring, he’d have that. But Mom can’t even find her purse usually.  Dad knows that.  He was worked into a fine froth.  I made a mistake, trying to divert attention.  I said, “Dad, speaking of purses, do you ever wonder what Queen Elizabeth carries in her purse? You know, she always has a handbag with her wherever she goes.  I think it’s empty.”  The mistake was, he didn’t laugh.  He said he knew why she carried a handbag! To carry her intimate items.  I’m thinking sanitary pads (except that she’s a bit old for those), but Dad was thinking lipstick.  Oh well.

So I said, “Dad, I’ll look and I’ll find the keys.”  And I set out, outside, since he was convinced that’s where he lost them.  But my sister called and asked me to check between the dryer and the wall.  I did.  I saw something that looked like it could be a key tag, but the space was tight and I couldn’t budge the dryer.  So I got a meat fork and tongs from the kitchen, used the fork to snag and pull out what did turn out to be keys, and the tongs to secure them and lift them out.  I noticed the key rack was right above the crack (somehow Mother put it back where it belonged), and Dad had probably returned the keys to the right place but missed the hook. He was so positive they were outside.

I stood up, Dad walked in, and I said, “Are these the keys?” He leaned on the dryer and began to cry.  He was exhausted from this incident. He was hungry, tired, and emotional.  I think mostly he was crying because he knew just how close he was to the other end of life; he knew how much he couldn’t do, and it was just too much.

Portrait of an Old Man by Egon Schiele

I moved the key rack to the other wall so if things dropped, they wouldn’t disappear into the gap.  Mind the gap.

When I left I called my sister and asked her not to tell Dad that it was her idea to look between the dryer and the wall.  Because I was a hero, and I just let myself be a hero.  I knew it was useless to try to explain that it was Cris, not me, who thought to look there.  In his emotional state he couldn’t have processed, so I let him laud me as the hero, the person who could solve anything.

Besides, I think it brought back some luster to my branch of the family after my husband tarnished it in the plumbing incident.

Tags: fathers, losing keys, lost items, memory, old age

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 7th, 2010 at 10:44 PM and is filed under Essays about Life, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.