JOURNAL ENTRY
Furbee, Mary Rodd
JOURNAL ENTRY Mary Rodd Furbee A Song for Last week, I sang to my seventy-five-year-old father, who has Alzheimer's disease. I took the hands that rarely cease their futile effort to remove the...
...Meals of half-frozen chicken, pureed peas, and outdated yogurt are served on trays without silverware, followed by desserts of sherbet or pudding mixed with crushed Haldol, Adavan, and Thorazine...
...I took the hands that rarely cease their futile effort to remove the canvas restraints that tie him to his hospital bed, looked into his half-closed eyes, and sang Red River Valley...
...With varying degrees of avoidance, resignation, and depression, the rest of us accepted his dismal fate...
...They need us to fight their battles for dignity and win...
...If we are to live with ourselves and inspire respect in our children, we must build a system of long-term health care that honors our mothers and fathers...
...The old soldiers on my father's ward and thousands of others like him are neither sainted heroes nor spent shells...
...But after a few months, my father would decide that no matter how nice a jail it was, he wanted to go home...
...to colorless day rooms rimmed with gaunt and disheveled old men in stained and tattered hospital pajamas, who sit in wheelchairs and do nothing all day...
...Yet on the heels of her grief came a comforting realization...
...So he was sent back to the last stop on the line for crazy old soldiers: to sterile wards smelling of urine, talcum powder, body odor, and antiseptic...
...We requested diaper changes, nutritional supplements, medical information...
...When the song ended, this agitated, drugged-up, tied-down, malnourished man who rarely speaks an intelligible word begged for more...
...Afterward, he was more relaxed than I had seen him in five years...
...For years, my mother and six brothers and sisters and I visited as often as possible...
...In the end, all but my determined, persistent mother stopped asking...
...My father cannot raise the heavy curtain of silence and apathy that shields our nation's other veterans hospitals from public scrutiny and concern...
...In the ensuing battles, my father dislocated a nurse's shoulder and punched an aide in the face...
...They are human beings still, who did the best they knew how for their children and their communities...
...They need us, and the caretakers whose salaries we pay, to sing, dance, draw, read, walk, and talk with them...
...He chucked the nursing assistants under their chins, and nodded gallantly to residents shuffling down halls...
...That's more time than he spent as an Army pilot and ambulance driver during World War II...
...A week after I sang to my father, his lifelong best friend died suddenly...
...Twice during these years the VA has discharged him to nursing homes...
...to televisions blaring staff favorites—soap operas and MTV...
...He fixed my plumbing, helped me with my taxes...
...And on the rare occasions we saw them, we lobbied doctors to cut back on his medications, and allow him at least some exercise...
...I guess it's my turn now...
...We came bearing laundry, drawings by grandchildren, a bag filled with cheeseburgers, milkshakes, and fresh fruit...
...For an hour he gazed at me, transfixed with a joy so powerful that tears streamed down his face...
...Some nursing assistants are kind, but others screech at their patients to get their "skinny chicken legs back in bed...
...Slowly, he raised his head, opened his eyes, and gazed up at me like a lost child who has found his mother...
...Within weeks, he walked, talked, ate solid foods, gained weight...
...Yet no one sings to him and the thousands of others like him...
...Because of that, he has spent most of the last five years at a Veterans Administration neuropsychiatric hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania...
...The restless, angry, distant father of my childhood—unemployed writer, job-hopping businessman, community activist—never fixed anyone's plumbing...
...But my acceptance died the day I discovered my father is capable of great joy...
...But in the decade before his illness and incarceration, he retired from saving the world, worked hard to mend fences with his children, and took his beloved grandchildren for countless walks in the park...
...There, he was gradually taken off the powerful tranquilizers and psychotropic drugs routinely used as "chemical restraints" in psychiatric hospitals...
...He taught me that the truth can expose lies, that injustice deserves anger, and that action born of love can defeat intolerance and tyranny...
...But he knew his children by name and sauntered proudly about in his favorite khaki pants, V-necked, navy-blue sweater, and blue-jean jacket...
...Both men—the formidable father of my childhood and my daughter's gracious old grandfather—are now as gone from this Earth as my friend's father...
...Here, in the same body, is a helpless man-child who spends his days and nights fighting a battle for dignity he cannot win...
...But I am my father's daughter, and he taught me how...
...There can be no escaping—it's our turn now.* Mary Rodd Furbee is a writer and public-television producer in Morgantown, West Virginia...
...After the funeral service, I hugged his daughter and she said, "I don't know how I'm going to cope without him...
...It took three employees to get this still-strong, former Penn State football player away from the door...
...Braving resentful or indifferent eyes, we asked whether his missing glasses, slippers, or sweater had turned up yet...
...So I sang—It's a Long Way to Tip-perary, Get Me to the Church on Time, Daisy, Daisy, Rock-a-Bye Baby—eliciting the sweetest imaginable euphoria and calm...
...He never did anything for me without teaching me how to do it myself...
...It was his favorite song...
...I was drained and devastated...
...He thought President My Father Kennedy lived in the nicely furnished, private-pay room down the hall...
...And come hell or high water, no one would stop him...
...On good days at the nursing homes, my father thought he was in a fine New York hotel where he had stayed just after returning home from the war...
...And he paid far more attention to a long series of causes than he did to his wife and seven children...
...Once in a while, we won small battles, but often we lost...
...The doctors say my father, William Herron Rodd II, has senile dementia of the Alzheimer's variety...
...After the two-hour drive home, I took to my bed, cried in my husband's arms, grieving for this man who once had a life...
...On bad days, he herded us into corners, whispered that he was being held captive by a group of deceptively sweet-looking Mafia thugs, and insisted we come up with a rescue plan...
...No one plays with them, reads to them, or takes them walking in the sun...
Vol. 59 • May 1995 • No. 5
