An elderly man moved in next door on the same day my dad was moving into his assisted living place (May 15, 2023). He has a very large family who come to visit often and one young woman (a granddaughter?) who is there daily. More often than not, they sit out in the front patio and while I don’t know what they’re saying, I can hear the rhythms and inflections of their conversation. There is a lot of laughter, mostly from her seeminglyabout something he’s said. His low rumble, her tinkling laughter.

At first, hearing their enjoyment and steady chatting moved me to annoyance. I’d feel it in my bones, a kind of agitation and heat swirling around my insides. Why? I’d wonder, then spend exactly ten-ish seconds diving not very deeply into that question until I moved back to agitation and suppression. Nice spin cycle, that. Truth was—and I can see this now—I couldn’t understand the lightness. For the last year-and-change it seemed there hadn’t been one moment when I wasn’t thinking about how to care for my dad better. And while I was really rooting for my dad to succeed in his life, in his new surroundings, I always had the feeling that there must be a trillion things I could do better to make his life easier, happier, whether of my doing or by way of some gadget. (Witness my Amazon orders&deliveries account for 2022 and 2023.) And in my shadows always lurked the sense I was failing somehow. I mean, a lot of things I did were kind of Let’s-try-this moments (I’m looking at you pill box with alarm that he duly ignored so that the medium-to-loud beeping carried on for probably hours). Or bribing him with martinis so he’d take a shower (pretty low success rate. He still got the martini). Stuff like that. I can’t even remember now what all worked and what didn’t. And I guess that’s the point: Overall what mattered was when we’d make our way outside to sit and just be. That was the golden time.

Hearing the conversations and laughter rising and falling from the man next door and his grandaughter takes me to another place now that my dad’s gone. One much more poignant and calm. Underneath that: heart-swelling and tear-filled in a mostly good way. I’m taken to memories of me trimming my dad’s hair on our front patio. During the pandemic I became his de-facto barber so there we’d be, him with a towel draped around his shoulders, me standing behind with a pair of not-very-sharp scissors snipping away, listening to the train whistling crossing warnings on the hour, and, then, after the tiny bits of hair had been shaken out, sitting in the morning sun, his gnarled hands holding a cup of black coffee with a donut on the table beside him. We’d talk about whatever. He’d say he really appreciated me and loved me very much. I knew that was true and I knew he knew I felt exactly the same way. And I’d say so. And on we’d go.

I can let that rise to the surface now and that, to a large degree overrides the memory of worry I carried that I was not winning at figuring out everything he needed to keep him safe, sound, and happy because really, he actually was all of those things: safe, sound, and in his way, happy. And I know I helped facilitate that along with Dennis and the excellent friends my dad had who’d check in for a chat. Funny how it takes hindsight to bring that reality home yet naturally that’s true. There’s even a saying about it.

Now, meaning literally the last month-or-so, there have been a lot of moments where I’ve been whirling or some-such dance-like move through this apartment while my obssession band plays quite loudly in my headphones so I’m missing some of the sounds of joy from the man next door and his granddaughter but still…I do hear them at some point each day and 98% of the time I choose to let myself be joyful for them, for me, for life. The other 2% is just complicated.

Tomorrow we’re having a celebration of my dad’s life in our clubhouse. We’re going to put up a lot of prints of his artwork and let people purchase whatever they want with the proceeds going to The Art of Elysium charity. In next week’s post I’ll include a link to my website, which will have a section with some Dean Spencer collages for anyone who wants to order one (or more) online with the donations going to the same charity. In the meantime, the laughter keeps drifting over and I ride their waves.