I moved into my dad’s last week. Here’s what I learned (& how): The sleeper sofa is not quite long enough to contain the full-length of me; there are still mice who live in the kitchen as I discovered on the first night when, on my way to get some water in the dark because I didn’t want to wake my dad since he’d left his door ajar, I heard a scrabble of little feet as I approached and the next morning discovered the meeses enjoy avocados, as evidenced by the half-gnawed avo that had been left in the cabinet to ripen and was now shredded; that when fire alarm batteries begin to die they apparently wait until the early-morning hours to begin chirping, as happened on my third night there requiring me to find the stepladder, turn on the hall light, and climb up to remove the thing located over his bedroom door, which he’d closed. He slept through the whole thing. But ultimately, I learned tow very immediate things: that my dad and I and the space of his place are not quite conducive for us to be roommates. That’s one side. The other is that it is great to hang out with him, even as I was centering all the other things like medication and meals. We ate together, and I cooked up stuff like a rusty J.Childs no rabbit, but definitely, some animals I hadn’t handled in a while (I’m looking at you chicken and steak). I also came to really understand his bachelorhood, a state of being he’s lived in since I was 12, so doing the math, 49 years. Alongside this independence lives the very real fact that I’m his daughter, and while he wasn’t necessarily trying to be a host, there were moments he was aware of me being there. After the third night, tho, I saw what a day into night looks like: coffee, paper, napping, martini in the early afternoon(!), second one in the late afternoon (!), then TV rotations on the news, then, and I think this is because I was there and made it happen, dinner, maybe more TV, bed. I love the man beyond so the privilege of being with him was incredibly real along with the observation of who he is right now. Glimmers of his humor are absolute, evidence of his cognition losses also absolute. The loop-di-loops of conversation.

Here’s something astounding though: Dennis and I had been staying on the topic of his choices around his living right now: Moving to a one-bedroom apartment at an independent living place down the road where he was on a waitlist or him staying put and me moving in. He always wanted the third choice: everything exactly as it is. That third choice was really never on the table and for the first many of our discussions, he’d get really angry about that seeing as how he never remembered how many times he’d fallen and/or exhibited risky behaviors in the last few weeks. But yet, we stuck to it: You have these two choices. Right, let me not lose the thread here: The astounding thing is that a one-bedroom apartment became available last Sunday. And so on Monday we went and had lunch there and saw the place. He was quiet but not altogether sullen, just observant. We looped around him asking if the place was for us? We framed it back into his world. And the conversation continued. A very wise woman who I’d spoken to last weekend had given me some amazing tips on how to help him be a part of his own life given his cognition and one suggestion was a whiteboard so all this last week, the whiteboard became the talking points around his choices. On Tuesday, he said Yes, it makes sense to move to that one-bedroom. A couple of salient points about that: As much as we love each other, he does not want me living there. Some reasons: He wants his own place. He doesn’t want to be responsible for taking me away from my own home. We Spencers have that thing about I don’t want to do anything to cause any discomfort for anyone else because then I’ll feel guilty about it and I can’t handle that. (Wow, there’s so much more to that and perchance I’ll revisit it in a future post.)

He and I went down and signed the lease on Thursday. We have a lot of work to do (natch) and what’s written on the whiteboard now are the next steps, which overall confirm that he won’t need to do anything more than pick out his favorite furniture and then we’ll move him in two weeks. He is tremendous in ways that I watch as he ebbs&flows toward this choice he’s made. He’s not altogether ecstatic, and perhaps I’m really seeing more stoicism than anything, the very same I’ve seen about his not driving anymore. He’s stopped talking about the third choice, also because the move became more framed around him not needing to worry about any upkeep of his place anymore (see mice and fire alarms, not to mention roof leakage and furnace failures that happened this last winter. Oh, and weeds, that don’t ever seem to be pulled enough on a regular basis).

The emotion of this move has not really settled in me yet. Putting my energy into the things that need to happen between now and then is where I seem to be focusing, yet there is a jiggle where once I unloose that pebble in my soul, what will trickle then flood will be waves of feelings. And I’ve no doubt that as I start to pack up his space after he’s settled in his new one that this writing space and all my morning pages and perhaps some actual short stories will be filled with the sounds of my emotions. And here we go.