The last three years of my father’s life were the most undignified as a person could imagine.
After his death, I made peace with my big sister, long enough to get through our father’s funeral, and spent two nights in her home, and so did my son. Almost three years earlier this same big sister had run me out of town with threats of violence and suicide because she was so incensed when I came to the state to try and help with my father, as my little sister had begged me to do.
Upon entering the bathroom that Dad had been using, I was swarmed by fleas. The inside of the bathroom door and the sink was covered with fleas. I was speechless to imagine what Dad’s life had been like in his final two years.
Across the house, from the kitchen through the living room, there were puddles of dog piss all about, in different stages of dehydration. Some puddles were thick, gelatinous and sticky. Other puddles of dog pee splashed when you accidentally stepped in them.
This was how my father, who had always kept his homes and cars pristine, lived in the last 3 years of his life. I’d kept his home spotless for him while living in his house, before big sister ran me off and out of the state. It devastates me still to imagine where he spent his final days.
My big sister complained to me that when any car pulled up to the house, a house that is hidden on a backwoods, dirt road in rural Texas, Dad would run out the front door of her home, looking like a wild animal with his shoulder length white hair and chest length white beard, wild eyed, trying to speak to the visitors, whoever they might be.
My sister told me, in an agitated tone, just hours before we buried my dad, that he had embarrassed her all the time by doing that . It shattered my heart to hear the level of loneliness he endured in those last three years of his life.
I took him to visit old friends all over the state, and took him to meet with his lifelong friend, of over sixty years, on a regular bi-monthly basis.
I helped him stay groomed, taking him to barber shops for his haircut, keeping him stocked in the Grecian formula he requested, and taking him to a barber shop. He was always clean shaven and kept his hair short his entire life.
In the end he spent his last three years in hell, I am completely certain. And I have not shared this opinion beyond the borders of my children’s ears until now. It’s a difficult decision to decide whether or not to share some of these sour grapes stories. But I believe there are lessons to be learned in them.
In my own defense, I took my father to visit all his old friends who were still in contact. He knew two retired couples in Lockhart and we met them at a popular Barbecue place in town.
His friends were shocked when they saw him and were clearly uncomfortable to see his state of mind. He was unable to communicate in words. He knew that he knew them, but not sure how.
We traveled to a coastal town, to visit a friend who was living at a very large, relatively nice, retirement home for veterans. He wanted my Dad to consider moving there. He didn’t know Dad’s condition.
I don’t recall the man’s name but he told me how his mother and my grandmother had been in competition, along with all the other single ladies, for the favor of my step-grandfather. He told me how my grandmother won the competition when she married him.
And then, of course, there was Ray Orr, Dad’s lifelong friend for over sixty years. I took my Dad to have lunch with Ray at Ray’s favorite Mexican restaurant in San Antonio almost every week that I lived with him.
I took him all around the town of Seguin, where he proudly posed beside a number of monuments that he had been responsible for bringing to the town of Seguin. He never saw those monuments again, nor the town of Seguin where he’d lived the last sixty years of his life.
I was deeply saddened to learn that my Dad had never visited with any of his friends ever again, once my sisters took over.
The only places he had visited were the home of his ex-wife who despised him to her last dying day, and was never silent about it. She complained to my big sister repeatedly about her bringing him along at every family gathering. The only places my father went, other than to a home where no one loved him and no one welcomed him, was a nursing home with the coldest of environments, and she would also ship him off to the home of her maid, who she eventually fired, a maid’s house, whose son came to my sister’s door with a gun, seeking revenge for some kind of drug deal gone wrong. I was not supposed to know about that. I’m under orders from the family to shut up about that, and all the other crimes for which this family is guilty.
It’s incredibly healing to write about these painful events. The question is, is it necessary or even a good idea to share them. It’s been a year now since my remaining big sister sent me an email, cc’d my nieces, and said that I had not contributed enough to the family … that I had taken terrible care of my father the nine months that I was there … and that I had been an awful daughter. This is a woman who used to stand in front of our parent’s doors, in her thirties, and scream for hours about what terrible parents they had been. She did it on trips in plush hotels, the more public the place the more likely she was to do it.
She was clearly gas-lighting me because I pointed out to her that, as self-appointed executor, she had not, after four years, accounted for a 100,000 bank account that Dad had at the time of his death. Not that I care about the money, but I just love to rib her at this point.
The last thing that I heard my father say was over the phone, within an hour of his death. She, the psychotic sister who has abused me all my life, called me to inform me of his condition, to inform me that he was next to his death.
“I HATE YOU!” I heard my father bark at her in the background, with a final burst of energy. I heard his agony. I heard how much he hated her. I knew what she had put him through. I was sickened to the core, a thousand miles away and helpless.
He died an hour later. I never mentioned this to my sister, that I heard him loud and clear. She said when they rolled him over minutes after his death, a part of his back had liquefied. He’d died of a kidney stone that was larger than a grapefruit. How did that happen? I took him to doctors every couple of weeks. How did he have a kidney stone grow that large? I’d taken him in for surgery for that when I was there. I guess no one else kept up with that. I believe in my heart my father died of complete neglect, but I never said that before until this very minute 4/27/2021. It’s just enough already.
Dad’s last home: the nursing home
The last time that I saw my Dad, a few months before his death, he’d been placed in a nursing home, he had finally become too difficult to manage at home. He was in a wheel chair and every time my sister’s arm came close enough he would grab it and try and sink his teeth into her like an animal. She had marks on her arms from his previous bites. He was enraged at her. She put on a show, patting and talking and smothering him with her presence, trying to pretend he wasn’t trying to dismantle her limb from limb, making it impossible for me, or my son, to have any interaction with him at all. I’d brought him some pastry from a Mexican bakery and he grabbed it and started shoving it into his mouth like a prisoner on the floor of a 3rd world prison who had not seen any treats in years. I used to keep his drawer full of his favorite snacks. Hot spicy peanuts and pecans. She never even knew he liked them. He ate over a dozen bags of hot peanuts every week when I stayed with him. When I mailed him a case of them after he went to stay with her she said she threw them away and that he didn’t want them.
He had two favorite meals and I took him out to eat for one of them almost every day that I was there. Eating out had been his favorite past time for quite a while and he didn’t like my cooking, which broke my heart because he used to. We had the same taste. Nachos, enchiladas, meat and potatoes. For some reason nothing that I fixed for him tasted right to him. Maybe it was his meds but the only thing he found acceptable for most of those nine months was fried oysters from any of 3 different family style restaurants in the small town of Seguin, or barbecue from Luling’s city market. Waitresses from 2010-2011 could no doubt tell you about the frail little skeletal man who came on a regular basis, pushing his rattly walker across the floors of their establishments, and I bet they could tell you what he always ordered. When I was concerned about the number of fried oysters he was consuming and asked my father’s physician he burst out laughing and said, “If an eighty three year old man wants to eat fried oysters every day, give him fried oysters!” So I did.
When I inquired into my sisters provisions for my father (we had not spoken for 3 years, her being furious the first day I arrived in Texas 4 years earlier and not resting with her rage until I was gone) I asked her how often he got to have fried oysters. She didn’t even know that he liked them. I asked her to get him some, I kind of nudged a lot. She finally did. She said they were poorly made and he didn’t care for them. She was skeptical that he ever liked them.
As far as the Luling Barbecue. He never had it again after I left.
I took Dad to visit several friends across the southern half of the state during his last year with me. One of them was a friend he had been friends with for most of his life and we met with him for a Mexican meal on a regular basis. Dad never saw any of those old friends again under her care. I don’t know who he visited with her, other than our mother, who finally told her to stop bringing him because he had ruined her life and she despised him. At that point he didn’t even have a clue who my mother was, but she sure had not forgotten him, nor her hatred of him.
It was heartbreaking but there was nothing I could do. My father was now in the hands of the person I’d begged him to save me from for most of my life … I remember the last time … when she called the authorities on me four times, trying to have my son taken from me. I remember his words,, “I can’t do anything about her. You know that. “
It gave me no pleasure at all to see him suffer that way. None at all. Watching justice play out before your eyes is not always as pleasurable a thing as you’d think it would be.
Oikos 