Don't look back

I really like Washington license plates. What a strange thing to say. Maybe the truth is I don’t actually care about license plates, and that I’m simply experiencing some extreme nostalgia as I slowly twist the screwdriver in my hand and gently lift the plates off my car. I wish I could keep them, but the DMV says ‘no’ for obvious reasons and so here I am, swapping my car’s, and my own Washington identity for a California one.

I hold a quick funeral for my former car life. When I first got my Washington license. When I got my car. I had a weird mnemonic I came up to remember my plate number: American Eagle Company, extra wide. Don’t ask, I promise it was meaningful to me.

They’ve already taken my photo for my new California license, which I don’t like. They had told me to look down, which seemed strange but I obey orders so I did it, and now I just look half asleep or drugged up.

I screw on the new California plates, which look decidedly boring with its white background and blue lettering, and nothing else. I grew up seeing these everywhere, and yet they look so, foreign. Nothing like the peaceful, faded blue silhouette of Mount Rainier. I notice my arm, which is always shaking, but right now it almost registers as trembling.

I think about a line a Seattle friend wrote to me in a goodbye card, as I carry my plates back into the DMV to surrender them, and my former life.

Don’t look back. Go change the world into a more beautiful place.

I wake up one morning and notice my car keys are in a basket next to my dad’s couch. Which is not where I left them.

“Where are my keys?” I ask him, purposefully not looking at where I know my keys really are.

“They are in your room.”

“No they’re not,” I purse my lips.

He rocks himself back and forth to get to his feet. For a moment, he almost loses his balance and falls over, but he catches himself. I feel nothing about this.

I follow him as he shuffles to my room, where he discovers what I already know: My keys aren’t on my desk. I know he moved them. I know why he moved them. I know every reason for the little things he does, whether it’s moving my keys so he can feel like he has access to a car, turning off my air purifier because he thinks I left it on by accident (which makes my allergies worse), or even putting trash in the recycling bin because he throws things away by geographic habit and not logic. It doesn’t change that I have almost no patience left in the tank for this.

“I do not know,” he shrugs, waddling back to the couch and sitting down.

I decide to reveal my hand, and look at the basket next to his feet. “Oh. Here they are.”

My dad doesn’t respond.

“How did they get here?” I demand, disingenuously, the way a parent does when they already know the answer they demand of their child.

“How am I supposed to get around?” he begins grumbling. I know the subtext of this conversation, for him, is all about me trying to restrict his freedom by moving car keys around and him responding by taking my own.

But that’s not what this conversation is about for me, and I’m fucking tired of my dad interfering with my literal life, and for figuratively continuing to play emotional games with me.

“That’s not what I asked you,” I spit out, and repeat my next few words with anger and in slow-motion. “How, did my keys, get here?”

My dad’s response is predictable: “Go ahead. Crucify me.”

Game over.

So, did you? A friend texts me when I tell him what my dad has said.

He’s buried now. I write back. I’m waiting three days.

We both laugh. Hundreds of miles away, at least two humans are laughing at the most dark, bleak, yet relevant to Easter joke possible. Sometimes, you just have to laugh.

I know this is incredibly dramatic, which is appropriate for my personality, but I actually wonder if that’s what I need to do: figuratively bury my dad. Specifically, I mean the image I have of him, and the desire, the desperation to engage with him and to have my dad understand his son.

Kids always want their parents to see them as grown ups, but the parents never do. I wonder if parents experience the reverse, where they get frustrated that their kids never see them as anything other than grumpy authority figures. Maybe I need to learn to treat my parents as something else, to recognize I have a stubbornness that pushes me to want my dad to still be the dad I know, and for him to understand me and treat me right.

That will never happen.

Maybe, it’s time to make a mental switch, to make a choice. I can choose not to give up on my dad, to treat him as somebody who could respond if I just was more creative with how I revealed my love for him, and to struggle through the emotions and everything else that goes with it.

Or, I can detach. I can put some distance between the two of us, and begin to ignore him when he acts in nonsensical ways. I can forego building the kind of relationship I want with him, the only kind that I think exists.

I don’t know which one is right. I don’t know if there is a right.

I desperately want to do the former. I’ve thought it must be the kinder and more compassionate thing to do, to believe that my dad is never beyond the reach of creativity and affection and love. But I’m starting to wonder if maybe I got it wrong, that maybe giving up is the kind and compassionate thing to do. To just accept that his brain doesn’t even work anymore, for whatever a working brain is even supposed to look like. To not think of dementia as the thing that’s taken my dad away from me, but that dementia is my dad.

There’s no cure for dementia. There’s no getting better. It’s not supposed to, to get better. Maybe in another world, he would be different if medical advancements allowed for it. But then that would be a different him. Which, is fine. But that’s not who he is now. That’s not this reality, and so if I choose to accept him, I have to choose to accept all of it as a part of him.

I test the waters of this strange new way of thinking the next time my dad yells at my mom.

“I’m not going to shower!!” he practically screams when my mom asks him. My mom mumbles something I can’t hear from the next room over, and my dad responds again. “Stop pushing me!” And then he does his weird Chinese/cowboy growl thing.

I get up and quietly walk over to my mom. My instinct is to yell back at my dad. Instead, I whisper to my mom. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, he doesn’t want to take a shower but he needs to.”

She looks a little downtrodden, and so I give her a smile and a hug. She returns the gesture, and we leave it at that.

The next time we go out to eat, he yells at the waitress for not taking away our empty plates the exact moment we finish them.

“Don’t mind him,” I chuckle, and sheepishly smile at her. I think she gets it. And I find myself leaving a bigger tip afterwards.

I grit my teeth and ball my fists with each encounter, but soon enough, the storm subsides, and my frail, emotional body is still intact.

I decide, this is indeed, the way to go. I need to stay intact if I’m going to survive.

One random afternoon, I head to Heather Farm Park, which is one of the larger parks in Walnut Creek. I also have some memories here with my dad, specifically of him giving me some bread to toss to the ducks in a pond. My dad and I have a history of talking about ducks.

I take a seat on a bench overlooking that same large pond, which has a large fountain spraying water into the sky, which is bright blue speckled with white cotton ball-like clouds. A few people stroll by on a walk. Kids laugh in the distance.

And in this moment, sitting and alone, because I am someone who needs something formal and concrete to remember my choices to demarcate a before and after, I hold a funeral for my dad.

I whisper into the air, talking to him, to the imaginary crowd who might be listening. I tell the world who he was, who he can still be as he’s alive, and finally, who he can never be, which is who I want him to be most.

My dad read me bedtime stories, a lot of which I loved as a kid and inspired me to obtain certain character qualities. Like Mr. Rabbit’s Thanksgiving, where a rabbit puts together a dinner hosting his favourite animal friends.

Or when he took me to play videogames at Toys ‘R Us, even when he was sick. I really, really wanted to play the new Yoshi’s Island game that I saw on TV.

He played catch with me once or twice.

And that’s honestly most of what I remember about him. The good memories anyway. I have plenty of bad ones.

More than anything, and I hate to admit this, but with his newspaper “letter to the editors,” the clumsy if still-thoughtful semi-autobiography that he wrote, and his terrible holiday speeches, my dad is the reason why I write. He’s the reason why I can write at all.

That has to be worth something.

It’s what I cling to, as I stand to my feet and turn towards my car to go home.

These days, things are decidedly different with John.

I’ve deduced the kinds of diapers he wears and buy them online so he has a huge stock in reserve. I bring home large family-sized boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios, even though he’s the only one in the family that eats them. I make sure his cabinet is stocked with green tea and coffee.

“Wow, thank you very much, Daniel,” he says, with a smile even. “Look!” he turns to my mom, “Daniel bought me these diapers online.”

I smile back at him, but it’s a sad smile. A little empty, even, to prevent myself from emotionally getting involved. But he can’t tell the difference.

I’ve turned from seeing John as the man I need to have a special relationship with, to someone I simply want to help take care of.

It doesn’t mean there aren’t special moments, gifts, even.

One Sunday, 60 Minutes is blaring on the TV. I don’t think anyone’s watching; John certainly isn’t. I usually don’t watch either, but this particular program about using psychological principles to make social media apps addictive, catches my attention. And before I realize it, I’m standing in the kitchen glued to the TV.

“You can sit here,” a voice perks up. It’s John, on his usual couch, with his hand on the empty seat next to him.

I don’t want to sit there. It’s too close to the TV and has a bad viewing angle. But something compels me to anyway, and so I plop down next to him, arms crossed, eyes still glued to the TV, but sitting next to him anyway, like father and son. Maybe not the same father, and definitely not the same son. But still a father and son.

Maybe, in addition to wanting to take care of him, he can also be someone I just want to be with, no matter the state he’s in. Maybe, that’s something special by itself.

You’d think I would have learned this lesson before. I already wrote about it.

But sometimes you have to learn the same lesson over and over again. I don’t know if that’s a sign of looking forward, but I choose to believe it’s a sign of not looking back.