More heartbreak

After the roof incident, the whole family went to Mexico for Thanksgiving. I will always be grateful for that trip. My father could still communicate, albeit slowly. He could still walk with help. He knew what was going on around him.

When the new year started (06) Dad started getting worse. He couldn't go up or down steps anymore without the very real risk of falling. I had to take his car away from him and sell it. Mom just couldn't handle that task. He would come up to me after the car was gone and pat his pocket and say, "I can't find my keys, have you seen my keys? I need to run an errand." It was sad to explain to him he wasn't driving anymore, but then it became easier to change the subject because he quit understanding what was going on.

My father in Mexico

My mother decided they had to move and found a cute two bedroom house close by. If I thought things were bad before the move, I was wrong. They got much worse, much more quickly. He quit knowing who Mom was and started calling me at least daily (for some reason he could still remember me and my phone number) telling me there was a strange woman in the house who said she was Natalie. He once told me that the strange woman said they were married but that didn't make sense to him; he had never cheated on his Natalie.  I would hear Mom in the background crying, "I'M NATALIE!, I'm your wife!" but he didn't understand. So I would drive over there and sit with him and get Mom to back off. Logic didn't work, but redirection did. I would get him to tell me about Tom, his brother who died when he was in college. Or about his childhood. He walked with an old man shuffle and a walker now, so I would take him outside. It was as if he were a toddler, regressing before my eyes. He was only 65.