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as long as childhood
Thursday, March 24 2011
My father had a couple of falls the other day that put him back in the hospital for the first time since last summer. Somehow, despite the use of a walker, he'd lost coordination and fallen against the tub. While it's possible this was the result of some incremental neural decline (he is 87), it's also possible he had insufficient hydration or blood sugar. My mother says that he doesn't drink water without being made to do so, and he himself told me on the phone the other day that he has trouble finding enjoyment in food these days. In that call, he'd sounded as lucid as ever, but his hearing was so bad that the only information I managed to get across to him was who I was and that I might be visiting soon.
This morning my mother called to tell me he'd been transferred to some sort of therapeutic program in Staunton. That sounded good. I stressed the need for Dad to build up his muscles and for my mother to have a handyman come out and install hand rails and perhaps padding along the living-room-chair-to-toilet corridor that my father uses, particularly near the bathtub (against which my father had supposedly hit his head).
I found myself pondering the fact that in modern times death can go on as long as childhood while making similar (or greater) demands of society. A possible advantage to beef-eating societies is that their old people die while still in their productive years of strokes and heart attacks.
I spent much of the day cleaning the house in preparation for the arrival of Gretchen's parents, who were flying up to attend the rescheduled college graduation at Eastern Correctional Facililty (in the collegiate collaboration program that Gretchen works in).
Meanwhile, weather has remained unseasonably cold. It's nice when the sun is out, and the sun can be out for a long time in late March. But once it goes to bed, ice crystals start forming in all their crazy patterns across the surfaces of the puddles.
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