Defeated

I have this feeling that I'm in way over my head, that I'm only faking it -at least for right now.
From co-planning end of life care for my father to taking on a new job that I'm fairly certain I'm not qualified for- at least- I could be better qualified for.  I really don't know what I'm doing- and I'm doing it and learning how right now. For some reason the doctors and case workers are going to me with  various aspects of my father's case. Is it normal to be having to figure this stuff out at -35- as of the 1st- and to be watching your Dad die? Probably earlier than most because of the way my father treated his body. I'm trying to think how old my Aunts and Dad were when my Grandfather went down this same route. It's the long, scary road of strokes, taking the men out chunk by chunk.

Yesterday, after work, my third day on the new job, I stopped by the hospital. I brushed his hair and he asked me what his hair looked like. He launched into a story about how they shaved his head. I had to show him it hadn't been shaven. He then had a moment of lucidity and realized he remembered things very clearly that didn't happen. I have never seen defeat on my father before. I have seen a great many things, some that terrified me, but none sadder than seeing my father hobbled and defeated like that. I sat on the bed with him and he quietly told me about how he feels losing his mind. He could face losing his liver and his heart with his "boots laced up" but losing your mind was the most frightening experience for him. He talked about fear like it was a tool to help you brace yourself for something, which I had never thought about it from that perspective. And when your mind goes, you can't grasp anything, you are losing yourself and there's nothing you can do about it.

His cell phone lay silent and dead on the rolling hospital stand. After his first stroke, he had been dialing strange numbers and my sister took it. He threw a fit, perseverating on the location of his phone. He could no longer have his phone but I suggested taking the battery out so he can physically have it. It obviously would help him calm down. She brought it back, battery out and some piece of a charger. Both lay on the table and my father told me about how he couldn't pull the prongs out to get the charger to work. I looked at the charger and there was a piece missing- the piece with the prongs. I tried to tell him, even showed him that there were no prongs to go in the wall socket. He was convinced there were. After 30 years as a carpenter, a man who built his own house (well, half of it), he knows what a socket and a plug look like. It was clear this was another moment that displayed how the strokes are effecting him.

The strokes kicked his teeth out. He is a man with no more bite.
And, with all our long history, with everything that I've written about him, for his failure to step up over the many years of my life as a responsible father to me, for his favoritism of my older sister, for all of it, it still is an incredibly painful thing to watch your father be defeated and slowly die.