The new normal.

Tuesday, Apr. 19, 2016 - 5:54 p.m.

So much has happened since I wrote that last entry. On July 31st Dad was sitting on his four-wheeler as he merrily waved Mom and me off to a day of shopping.

That was the last day of the “old” normal.

We got home around 10 p.m. that night and our neighbor came over and told us Dad had been thrown from the four-wheeler. He had found him on the ground about ten feet away from the four-wheeler, which had somehow climbed a pile of junk and smashed into a farm gas tank. He told us later he thought he was dead. But he regained consciousness and Reuben got him in the house and to bed, then told us when we got home.

The following morning Dad was in major pain. We figured he had broken some ribs again, so Mom and I took him to the small-town hospital where we usually go. They thought he had a punctured lung and sent him to the city by ambulance. We laughed, because it seems every single year he’d land in the hospital between September and November, and he was early this year.

He spent time in the big hospital, went back to a swing bed in the small hospital, and then to a nursing home. What a simple sentence to cover weeks of headaches and planning and taking time off work to go up to the hospital.

Through it all, we fully expected him to come home when he got strong enough. Mom fought him tooth and nail to convince him to go to a small town nursing home so she could drive to visit him several times a week. We finally convinced him. Mom did not drive there once. I drove us there every Sunday and Tuesday, week after week. Mom was growing more and more confused.

Finally, in mid-November, they told us he was as good as he was going to get; in fact, he had started regressing. So we made the decision—against their advice—to bring him home.

He bounced back amazingly the first couple days, then got weaker again. I moved my work over to the house and took time off to run downstairs and help with everything. My nearest sister came down when she could to give me a little break. During that time, our cousin that we call “the son Dad should have had” happened to visit from across the country, twice. He took Dad out around the farm. I took him out one time.

Mom, on the other hand, was becoming more and more confused. All she had to do was call for me when Dad needed something, and she had trouble with that. She fell a couple times. I felt I was caregiver for both of them. It was a tough time, and I felt so alone. My work at home coworkers were my lifeline. Some of them had been where I was. Words can’t express how thankful I’ve been for them.

This lasted a month. One morning Dad was too weak to sit up. We had to call 911. They took him to the city hospital, we spent time in the ER, he was admitted for about a week. Then he went back to the nursing home.

He passed away a week later, on January 5th.

Mom was totally out of it. The night before the funeral she fell and hit her head and we were mopping up blood at 3 a.m. We patched her up. She made it through the funeral. She still doesn’t remember any of it.

The funeral was nice, if you can call a funeral nice. I had printed up a bunch of pictures for a memory board, and we hung his cowboy hats and John Deere suspenders in the chapel. And the last mile to the cemetery we transferred the casket to a trailer and he was pulled behind a vintage John Deere tractor. We had a meal at the house afterwards and it was crammed.

Like I said, Mom doesn’t remember any of this. Her mind had been getting worse; she was getting more and more forgetful. I continued to work at the house because I didn’t dare leave her alone, but I slept at my trailer. One morning about two weeks after Dad died I came in to find her lying in a pool of blood staring up at me. I thought she was dead. But when I said, “I think we need to call an ambulance” and she said, “I think so, too,” I knew she was still with us. So they took her to the ER and, ironically, she was put in the same room Dad had been in the last time.

It seems the previous cut on her head broke open during the night and started bleeding and she got as far as the kitchen to try to clean it up and she collapsed from loss of blood. It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. They found her blood was really low—she’s needed transfusions in the past—and ended up giving her four units. When she came home she was more like herself than she had been in months.

She still has mild to moderate dementia, due to her sleep apnea, and we’re going to try another round of CPAP next month. I am not looking forward to the battle, but we have to try. She hates it so bad, she finally flatly refused to use it the first time around.

So now I’m working and mostly spending my nights at the house. Mom plans to sell our farmland to the young man who’s been renting it for years, so I’m dealing with all the legal stuff. We plan to keep the homestead. I’m torn between planning to live at the house for good and missing my own place with my own furniture and my own everything and my sunset view from the bay window in the kitchen.

And that is all I can deal with going into right now. We are learning to live with the new normal.

Oh, and today is also the 20th anniversary of my brother Dallas’s death.