Friday, August 28, 2009

Happy Birthday Daddy

This would have been your 95th birthday. I think you would have still been with us if it weren't for that blasted Alzheimer's. Your body was so healthy, but in reality we lost you many years ago. You were not the same person.

I still think of you many times a day. Little thoughts of you creep into my memory, and they seem so real, so vibrant. I am finally getting accustomed to not being near a phone on Saturday afternoons at 5:30. That was our scheduled time to call, either me to you or you to me.

For years, every time something would happen in my life, I would file it away to be sure to tell you on Saturday. Those calls went on for 30 years after we moved away. When you began to be affected by the disease, those calls became difficult. Sometimes you were far removed from reality. It was in these calls that I could no longer deny what was happening to you.

I was truly "Daddy's Little Girl," and I loved it. Memories of my childhood are flooding into my memory as I write this. I want those memories to be the once that obliterate the memories of you being in the assisted living facility looking so disheveled. You were always of "natty" dresser. You were so lost there. You repeatedly tried to escape and go home. Your escape attempts still amaze me. Your knees were as bad as mine. I don't see how you could have done the things you did! But I want to push those memories into the deep recesses and remember back when. They are just too painful.

Happy birthday Daddy.


2 comments:

Judy said...

Missing my Daddy too-that's what I called him until he died last June at age 92.

Nice post--thank you K.

Susan Adcox said...

Thank the good Lord I still have my Daddy, though he's 93 and slipping a bit. My mother had dementia--probably Alzheimer's--and I experienced with her much of what you experienced with your father. My mother, however, was not a wanderer. When we had to put her in a nursing home, it became her home. When we took her for an outing, she was happy to get back "home." That made it easier for us than it must have been for you with your dad.