Daddy Care: Life Turns on a Dime

Downriver View from Riehl’s (artwork and essay by Janet Grace Riehl)

Pop relaxes in his green lazy boy chair, even though he’s never been lazy—not even now when he’s feeling poorly. I stand next to his chair holding his hand surreptitiously taking his pulse as I look over our hill to the Mississippi below with Scotch Jimmy’s Island a long stone’s throw from the bank. My eye grazes over a bluebird house my brother built, the birds that fly towards one another for their pas de deux, and the bare black trees that filter my view of the river.

I’m singing along to a CD we recorded two weeks ago—cranked up loud so that he can hear.  “I’ll Miss You When You’re Gone” and other love songs hold pride of place. My father increasingly quotes a line from one of his poems, “I cry not for my death / but for the music that will die with me.” He’s a repository of music from the 1920s through 1940s—tunes that are little known or no longer played. Music—even today’s music that seems to be everywhere—has to be played to stay alive. Even though we’ve endlessly documented this music from his youth—including by a Smithsonian Scholar—it can never be enough. Just as a life such as his could tick on forever and never be enough.

Life turns on a dime. I left Sunday night and Pop was fine. By Monday morning he was sick, but not deathly so. By late morning his blood pressure had dropped alarmingly, he struggled for breath, and his other vitals weren’t good. My niece Diane, bless her heart, was here in the morning and afternoon–despite her own family chaos and incalculable work stress. By this time she must have the equivalent of an advanced degree in Daddy’s medical condition. I drove back to Pop’s in the early afternoon. By the end of the day he was on hospice, and Diane finally went home.  We’re not saying “hospice” to him just yet. We’ll see where it goes. He may yet bounce back as he’s done so many times before.

Currently we’re guessing it’s a lung infection—complicated by the 12 other things that are wrong with him of course. Hospice for now means two visits each week by a nurse. I asked  her yesterday that there not be a chaplain involved. (Daddy has his own religion as we know.) And, that if a social worker needs to visit for their organizational needs, that they talk just to the family and not with him. Amidst the dysfunction that most families bear, ours is remarkably functional around Pop’s health and dying issues. We’ve gone through death before and we’ll make ‘er again.

So, his medications remain the same plus some tweaking. Oxygen is turned up to the max on the dial, and that clear plastic tube looks to be a round-the-clock accessory rather than just at night. He’s on ibuprofen and cough syrup not morphine. We’ve had a “no hospital” policy for some time—unless he were to break his hip or suffer something fixable—but no invasive procedures ever again. Right now we’ll just take it day by day. This morning he’s up and dressed, with some help, out of his bed and into the aforementioned chair where he eats his fried egg and raisin toast.

Because I put myself on a Rest Cure this past month, I have some reserves to bring to the situation. Coming back home to the Midwest from California after my sister Julia’s death in 2004— and then for keeps in 2007— was one of the biggest, best, and hardest decisions of my life.  One phrase by a friend released me to make that decision: “Everyone deserves to know the truth about their lives.” And, this surely is where a big chunk of that truth resides.

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Read more about my father Erwin  Thompson at Riehl Life: Village Wisdom for the 21^st Century at www.riehlife.com. Just type his name in the search box. A bounteous archive of posts by him and about him will pop up.

4.5 Daddy Care: Tending His Creative Fire

By Janet Grace Riehl

The deal is: My father at 96 is a strong spirit in a weakening body. Sight, hearing, hands, heart, lungs…are all giving way. Yet, he carves, sings when it suits him, and…he writes. Here’s a recent conversation.

Photo: Erwin A. Thompson by Janet Riehl

 

P = Pop

J = Janet

Pop sits slumped over at the dining room table behind his computer desk.

J: You look like you’re in a Brown Study (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-brown-study.htm)

P: Very. I’ve finished Part Three of “March 1^st” I’m at loose ends.

He’s been working on “March First” for a year; it’s about the day the mortgage payments came due during the Great Depression.

J: Grace Madison thinks there’s a Part Four.

P: Yes. Probably. But I don’t know what it is yet.

And so,  I start to think. What can he write on while he’s waiting to know if there is a Part Four and what it is?

 J: You pulled together all the letters, and poems, and stories about your brother Willard. And, we have stories about Uncle Ralph. What if you wrote more about your relationship with Ralph? Especially about how you worked together fixing things? You could start with the family story of “Between me and my brother I know everything in the world.” Then you can compile and expand on stories you’ve already written like how you fixed the furnace on a Sunday by making the part you needed.

P: Maybe, but I feel like I’ve already done that.

J: You have the individual pieces, but you can bring them together into one piece. The way you’ve done with some of your other family portraits like “A Woman Before Her Time” for your Aunt Mim. Or, what if you wrote about your brothers together? I haven’t seen you do that. It would be interesting to see them side by side.

P: Uhh.

J: Uhh.

This, in fact, is the one he goes for first. It takes about a week. It starts out, “It seems to me that I have written this all before, but Janet thought that I needed to put it all together in one place.  I will try.”  Last night he handed me what he had written and asked me what I thought.

J: It’s good. I learned things I didn’t know. As  many years as I’ve heard and read these stories there continue to be little twists and new details that shine a whole new light on the point of the story and how it fits into the family story. But, I think you could do even more with this story of your two brothers.

 P: Like what?

And so we talk about what that might be. Both Willard and Ralph were extremely talented and bright, but lacked opportunities and education due to family circumstances and the Great Depression. There are sad elements in both stories that feel too delicate to put in print. We agree, and talk about what can be comfortably said. My father’s motto is “Let history be kind.”

Now we’ll see which (if any) of my other suggestions he might take up.

1) My father was a pipe-fitter for the gas company. He uses pipe as a building material for a handrail up the back steps, lamps, mother’s African Violet tree.

 J: This could be funny. It’s trendy now to use pipe in art. But, you’ve been doing it for decades. Write about pipe as a character.

• How did you meet it?
• Get to know it?
• Do with it?

2) The Dumbest Ideas I Ever Saw (This is one of his favorite phrases.)

This one hits pay dirt. He begins to tell me a long story which I take notes on. “It doesn’t suit me what I’m going to tell you. There is this thing called progress. Sometimes it isn’t. It started in 1931 when they put in the pipeline to our house. It was Virgin Soil. We never had a leak in our good galvanized pipe from corrosion.” And off he goes to tell me about what a dumb idea it was (in 1965 when he worked for Union Electric) to use anodes to heal up the holes already in the pipe.

3) History of guns on Evergreen Heights (our place) and in the family. For sport, protection, and farm use.  Your Grandpa Riehl, Uncle Frank, you, and Gary.

That’s a pass. We talk about it briefly.

4) “Line Out”

J: Daddy, what’s the origin of the phrase “line out” that we use to mean get organized to work?

P: (thinks) It must be related to the nursery business.  (Evergreen Heights was an innovative working horticultural business.)

5) You’ve put together photo-documentation books and extensively documented E. A. Riehl’s horticultural work here on the place. But, what if you looked at that in an even bigger context? (I draw concentric circles.)

• Life of the family
• Neighborhood
• Community
• State Nut Growers Society
• National horticultural world

What about an essay that draws all this together?

And so it goes. Now? Time to take the clothes out of the drier and put some food on the table.

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Pose questions about practical creativity; give ideas for future cycle themes; and join in the dialog. Learn more about our audio book “Sightlines: A Family Love Story in Poetry and Music.” Become a Riehlife villager.