my father's night table

my father's night table, originally uploaded by Susan NYC.

3/29/09 My mother bought that photo wheel decades ago. I've changed the pictures. The one showing is a picture of a family vacation we took in the early 80s - the only family vacation I remember we ever took. Other trips together were to see my mother's family in NYC, and I didn't ever consider that a vacation. (I grew up in western Pennsylvania.)

For a long time my father loved looking at his pictures - he has a lot of them. Now, though, he doesn't remember who's in them and rarely likes to look at them. He does, however, love looking at pictures of himself. There's a computer on his floor at the Hebrew Home, and I play the Flickr slideshow of his pictures, which he can watch for a long time. He makes wisecracks about each picture: "big nose," "handsome guy," and provides sound effects: laughter, chuckles, groans.

The gingerale is always there - for medicine, I guess.

I have no idea who uses the phone. I doubt if it's even hooked up. I don't call my father. I'm afraid he'll jump up to try to answer the phone and fall out of bed. That's if he even hears it.

My father's first room at the Hebrew Home

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Originally uploaded by Susan NYC

The light is great in my father's room. But the curtains are always closed when I go in. I pull them back. . He has windows facing south, too, perpendicular to this wall. Those curtains, too, are always closed. (They're broken, so my father couldn't open them - he doesn't have the balance to reach up and pull them back.)

And the aides don't put the blue quilt on the bed - it's lightweight and washable, just so he'll have something cozy - so that's another thing I do when I arrive: take the quilt out of the closet and put it on his bed.

I guess they always sleep in the white sheets I see when I go into the room. The rooms are warm, though.

In the summer the rooms are usually warm, but when the air conditioning broke, the rooms were unbelievably hot. I just happened to visit the day after the master air conditioning system broke and went out immediately to buy a big box fan.

The air conditioning was broken for several days. They never informed families, so they could bring fans.

A note: my father's bruises are almost healed. But now he has a sore on his lip. I wonder how often he gets to wash his hands.

Dad: Napping With his Sunglasses On

Dad: Napping With his Sunglasses On, originally uploaded by Susan NYC.

1/223/07 I found my father curled up when I arrived and put his robe over him. I always wake him if he's asleep when I arrive - he has no trouble going back to sleep. Apparently he hadn't felt well this morning, but he told me he felt fine. (The aide said he hadn't felt well.)

dad & I at the Hebrew Home: newly arrived

dad & I, originally uploaded by Susan NYC.

8/20/06: For quite a while my father enjoyed moving from nursing home to nursing home, from room to room. He was always hopeful, I think, that he'd be less bored. Even at 93, his mind pretty well gone, he still complains he bored. And the staff still marvel at his vocabulary and skills. But they don't engage him in any way. Nursing homes are awful places.

I moved my father from the Fairfield to the Hebrew Home when the Fairfield was sold to a private nursing home company. The Hebrew Home had owned it. I don't know if the new version of the Fairfield was a good place after the transfer, but I do know that staff started quitting right away. A bad sign. I loved the Fairfield - by far my favorite nursing home.

engrossed

engrossed, originally uploaded by Susan NYC.

4/25/06 My father has always loved to read. Here he's at the Fairfield nursing home, where he had good light and a (plastic) wing chair to relax in. I brought him loads of magazines from my daughter, who got them through airline miles and saved them up specifically for my father.

Now he still has magazines, but he's in a dark room at a different nursing home, and he doesn't really enjoy magazines any more. He can't really read them - but I'm not sure he could read when he spent all those hours leafing through them.

My father used to fall asleep reading books or the newspaper on the couch when I was little. I don't remember seeing him actually read.