I’m not usually conspiratorial, or even that paranoid generally, but there is a certain kind of eerie “shadow government” kind of aura to President’s Day in my mind.  The degradation of what it was – Washington’s Birthday, a holiday that the US began celebrating in 1879 – into what it is now – a way to offer sales and deals and a chance to have employees dressed as Uncle Sam – speaks to a kind of symbol-squashing that is far too pervasive in mash-up culture.  The President, a position of authority, held by so few Americans in our 200 plus history, now reduced to caricatures of these important figures, reduced to xerox-copy level interpretations of what the idea of leadership actually could be.

 

It is funny how these things come about.  I am not a particularly philanthropic person, and I usually don’t offer to take care of people.  I’ve never pursued hospitality or babysitting as a pastime, and I never suggested – even for a moment – that this was a career I would follow, or take an interest to consider.  These things never happen according to any plan, for sure.

I’ve had my share of weird jobs, for sure.  Cleaning and feeding birds at a aviary.  Bookstore management.  Teaching college freshmen.  Goat farm hand.  Band manager.  There are some jobs that are certainly memorable.  But taking care of people was never something I had done before.  I am slightly solipsistic by nature, and I have a hard time dealing with bodily fluids or anything slightly gory.  The human fleshiness of our mundane existence has always been something I’d rather forget, and it’s own ironic tediousness and ultimate pointlessness is a comedy that I’d prefer to enjoy through narrative, rather than experience.

Still, when I first met George, I knew there was enough common ground that we could at least get along.  I had no idea that I would be taking care of him someday; in fact, he was merely my girlfriend’s grandfather, someone I didn’t think I would see that often when we first shook hands.  Even when she became my live-in partner, and eventually my wife, I imagined that I would see George only at holidays and family gatherings, and that our interactions would be short, but friendly.

Time passed, and the world around us changed in a number of ways.  The details are somewhat un-interesting, and as they are of a personal family nature, will remain undisclosed, too.  But George’s condition went downhill, and soon the pacemaker and his pre-diabetic nature was adding up to a host of daily pills, and an attitude that seemed to be in decline.  Being 89 has a toll on someone, and he was never a health-conscious person to begin with.  His interest in playing cards all day long and sitting in a chair when possible caught up with him, and his years of military service and working for the State of Oregon couldn’t erase the damage of neglect and age.

We hemmed and hawed and tried to ignore the matter, but it became clear after he fell a few times, and then wound up in the hospital after his lung collapsed, that if he was going to continue at all, he would need someone to take care of him.  His balance was so bad that he already needed a walker, and if he was going to get the physical exercise he needed and the assistance with preparing food, he needed someone to be there with him at all times.  He could barely operate his inhaler he had to take at least twice a day, and while the house he was living in was just fine, there were enough challenges to everyday life that it made sense to make sure those challenges didn’t aggravate him any further.

The timing was quite strange, actually.  While I had grown accustomed to avoiding the word “unemployed” to describe my own state of being, when pressed I had to admit it was uncanny in its accuracy.  Within my close family, this condition led to a lot chores and odd-jobs getting put on my plate in an effort to exploit my particular circumstances.  I’m not usually prone to delusions of grandeur, but I found the joke funny enough to entertain myself, and preferred to explain that I was a freelance writer and radio producer.  While absolutely true, this statement tended to betray how much time I spent cleaning the house, and how early I started pouring my own cocktails, I also spend as much time writing and editing audio, too.  It wasn’t that I was on the couch burning Js and catching up on Adventure Time.  Far from it; I managed to keep myself fairly busy with job applications and daily routines like cooking and baking, not to mention leaning on my freelance arrangements to draw the occasional $50 check when all other hope seemed lost.  It wasn’t an awful way to spend your days, and I actually quite enjoyed it, but it was also very difficult to create the impression that I was so busy that when family really needed my help, it was expected I would take time out to wait for a package to show up, or spend hours on-hold while we sorted out some billing mix-up.

I’m not sure how the idea came up at first, but when it was suggested that I could be George’s daytime caregiver I immediately said yes without thinking about it.  I had been secretly preparing for this eventuality when it had become clear that he was not doing well, actually; when I still had a desk job that I loathed with all my heart, I would remember the weekends where I was talking to George about his time in the Philippines, and I imagined that I just wanted to spend my time listening to him.  Being new to town, he was sort of the only other person I knew, and the time I hung out with him became absolutely more interesting than anything I did at work.  While I was not in denial about what I would be doing, no amount of human waste and brushes with death could be as bad as the bullshit of office life.

Very quickly the arrangement of my job and duties were made.  I would show up at about 7 AM and stay until the afternoon, Monday – Thursday.  (Friday I would do a half-day, and would remain “on call” or “as needed” on the weekends.)  In addition to making sure he ate, and keeping the house clean the house, I would also work with the Home Care Nurse to make sure I understand his medical and physical needs, considering his condition.  After getting a full run-down of his medications, I also developed a exercise routine for him that was achievable for an out-of-shape octogenarian with a heart condition.  There were other occasional chores, like baking bread, doing yardwork, wrestling with the garbage and recycling, and chatting with George about everything, to keep him engaged and entertained.  We sometimes watch TV, but for the most part he doesn’t follow it anymore, and when asked, would rather have it turned off.

George lives with his daughter, who has been his primary care for the last 10 years.  She is in her 50s, and is my mother-in-law, too.  While she’s only a bit younger than my other mother, there are enough similarities to claim they have a shared generational experience at the very least, while being different enough to not have that creepy feeling when someone gives you a “mom” vibe.  While she is my mother-in-law, she doesn’t treat me like a “son,” and that tends to make things go more smoothly, for sure.  She doesn’t work either, but keeps herself fairly busy in a given day, with shopping and crochet and reading.  For her, taking care of George was easy when he could get around on his own, drive a car, remember to take his own pills, and could cook for himself.  But in the last 10 years, she has seen him become more and more dependent on someone to be there for him, and anymore it is too much for her to handle and do the shopping, and do the cleaning, and have a life of her own.  I’m sure it wasn’t easy for her to admit that she needed help, but when she did, she made it very easy for me to want to help.

Like many people his age, George is stubborn and set in his ways.  He essentially lives to have another cup of coffee anymore, and while he is on decaf – and now by doctor’s request, should drink as little as possible – I fix him coffee more often than anything else.  His meals are very simple: he can usually have anything he has an appetite for, provided it has low salt and low sugar.  I fix him a lot of oatmeal and bran cereal for breakfast, leftovers for lunch, and some sort of meal that I help his daughter prepare for dinner.  One thing that has not diminished over the years is his appetite.  He will eat anything, and always finishes his plate.  Outside of going back and forth between his bedroom and his chair, he also visits the kitchen and the two bathrooms as well, but doesn’t do much else.

We also have some of the same conversations every day.  Part of the problem with George is that he is not at all forthcoming with anything about himself.  While he will occasionally contribute to a conversation, he is very much of an age where it was impertinent to talk about yourself, and clearly comes from a long line of people who preferred to put up with minor inconveniences so that he isn’t a burden on anyone.  And this is easy enough for him to think he needs to continue with, too; unfortunately at his age, he tends to forget how old his actually is.  So I usually have to go through a series of questions with him.  “How are you feeling?  Is there any unusual pain that you’re experiencing?  How’s your foot?  How’s your hand?  Do you need a pair reliever?”  By way of example: over two days I kept asking him how he felt, and his response was, “I feel like my head is in a fog.”  I tried to get him to elaborate, but he couldn’t say any more.  “Do you have a headache?”  “Not really, no.”  “Does your scalp hurt?”  “Of course not.”  “What do you mean, fog?”  “You know… what’s the word… it’s in a fog.”  By the end of the second day I was finally able to get him to say, “Well, you know when you feel pressure in your head?  Like your nose is stuffed up?”  Ahhhhhhhh.  I have a decongestant right here, George.  Let me get it.

There are a few consistent problems that we are regularly combatting.  Because of various problems he is suffering from, his left hand and his left leg have a tendency to swell.  As it was explained to me, fluid is pooling up because he is not very active.  So, whenever possible, we need to elevate his arm, and when he naps or sleeps, elevate his feet.  Improving his hygiene was a challenge, too; showers were difficult for him, and even when they were successful, exhausted him for the rest of the day.  So a professional started showing up once a week to get him in and out of the shower without a fall.  And, while this is embarrassing – and I do not mean to take away any of his dignity with this – he does have a consistent problem with wetting the bed and shitting himself.  However, I have chosen to see that as a boon; one negative health sign is when he stops being regular, and at least for now, he has absolutely no problem with that.

The biggest challenge I faced in the early days of taking care of George was cleaning his room.  Soon after I started coming over I realized that George’s daughter hadn’t been in to clean his room in ages.  Part of this was out of practical problems; while we has napping and sleeping was a bad time, and between feeding him and helping him with anything else, there was often little time to get in there before he wanted to take a nap again.  Combine that with the other daily chores she was handling, and it was easy enough for anything in George’s room to be forgotten once he closed the door.  So when I began to poke around and find the dust and filth building up in the corners, I realized I had to undertake the task of diverting a river into his room.

As explained by the Home Care professional, as people age the tend to sluff off more dead skin that the average person, which creates more dander and dust that normal.  That, combined with the detritus of being an old person with terrible memory – led to tissues and paper towels soaked in who-knows what kind of fluid accumulating in various corners of his room.  And, as the professional said, it was important to clean this often, as dander can lead to lung infections if you breath it too often.  So each time I would try to get in there and clean, all I saw was George’s DNA floating suspended in every corner of that room.

 

 

How do you feel productive when you’re not doing anything at all?

This notion of feeling accomplished, of wanting to do things, has always haunted me.  Even as a young child, I would talk about things I was going to do “someday.”  I had this idea that I would make movie props, that I would assemble the perfect room (from a photo on a Christmas card I got from my grandmother once), and made lists of things that I wanted to do (and, for some reason, never got done).  I remember, vividly, a list of 100 things I wanted to do before I died.  The list is gone; the impulse has not.

In High School and just after, this manifested itself in a creative impulse, to write and make ‘zines.  I arbitrarily picked “writer” out of thin air one day when asked about what I wanted to be, and have since pursued it in a manner that could best be described using “haphazard” and “slipshod.”  But the only way I knew to do this was to keep trying, and each new scheme seemed to materialize in the real world when I would say, “I can’t, I have stuff to do,” when my friends would ask if I wanted to do something that evening, also a habit I keep to this day.  Either by habit or by some innate feeling from earlier, I now carry with me this feeling of needing to be doing something else, somewhere else, at most times during the day.  I have trained myself so completely that sitting down I am often paralyzed by six other things I should be doing instead of sitting, and in some cases, ways to do those tasks while seated.  Even lying in bed feels like something that I should try and multi-task.

Put another way: even when I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing – or, the void forfend, what I want to be doing – I still feel like I need to be doing something else.  While my Honeymoon was amazing, and I did some of the greatest things of my life with the person I wanted to be with the most, the whole time a nagging sense of what I was not doing seemed omni-present, as if I could easily get up and do that thing at any given moment.  But these “things” I want to do, this “stuff” that I feel such a compulsion toward.  “Clean Basement,” “Sort old files,” and “delete cruft” all seem a little hard to do at The Grand Canyon.  And yet, they nag, the persist, and the overwhelm.

Part of what makes self-help appealing is the notion that you can change yourself by reading a book.  And, you can; just not the way we want it to.  When we read a book, we incorporate the ideas and thoughts into our daily narrative, at least during the period we spend reading the book.  When we finish, we either forget the story or remember it fondly, and how often we remember it becomes how important the book was to us.  But when it comes to the idea of self-help, we want the book to have a less subtle effect.  We are hoping that the mechanical act of reading is like inputing ourselves into the machine of the book, and that when it spits us out the other side, we will somehow be changed into the kind of person the book wants us to be.  No self-help book – not even Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – is that good.

I spent my teen years booking at a bookstore, spent six years working in a Barnes & Noble, and then six additional years at college, getting my degree.  I have grown up around books, and my family has always been avid readers.  (Or, at least, were; computers have sort of changed all of us.)  So I have seen the power that these books can have on someone.  But when I have read these kinds of books, I have found them to be incredibly lacking.  I usually feel as if my problems are not being addressed, that there is letting room for my kind of thinking in their view, or worse, that the steps to get from my kind of thinking to theirs were not clearly outlined.  How was I to have the same kind of epiphany as they did?  It seemed as impossible as climbing Kilimanjaro.  How?  Where do you begin?

Trying to implement Getting Things Done is interesting, because at the core is not a lot of mumbo jumbo, and even the system is almost secondary to the idea at the center: you need to be very honest with yourself about what you will actually end up doing, and discard the rest.  And in this case, being “honest” is the hardest part; you need to be brutally honest.  Case in point: I have had to look at my daily reminders, and ask myself why I have each of them, and even worse, why I consistently ignore them, or mark them completed when I haven’t.  I have daily reminders for things I do three times a week, on a good week.  At what point do I look at myself and say, “I need to re-think this; clearly something is wrong.”

And, to make matters worse, even the system – something that David Allen encourages you to change to fit your needs – contains something to learn from.  Each section of it creates a mini-metaphor about reflection and revisiting assumptions you haven’t questioned, to the point that you begin to wonder about what parts to skim and what parts to digest.  While not strictly a Self-Help book, GTD is very much presenting as one in many ways.  But, like all self-help books, it will not change you unless you want to be changed.

I have boxes in my basement, left over from my childhood.  Stuff taking up space, cluttering my life.  Every year I say I’m going to get rid of them, and I don’t.  GTD will never solve this problem for me until I really want to get rid of them, and it is that problem, that concern, that is really at the heart of my frustration with the book.  Because, again, the book isn’t the problem; I am.