November 17: Veterans' Hospital, My Father, Diminished Capacity

A sign in there said that adults only were allowed in the back.  There were peep shows in the back that showed movies of young women and men with no clothes on.  It cost a quarter to look into a machine for one minute.  There were still photographs of naked young people for sale back there, too.  You could take those home.  The stills were a lot more Tralfamadorian than the movies, since you could look at them whenever you wanted to, and they wouldn't change.  Twenty years in the future, those girls would still be young, would still be smiling or smoldering or simply looking stupid, with their legs wide open.  Some of them were eating lollipops or bananas.  They would still be eating those.  And the peckers of the young men would still be semierect, and their muscles would be bulging like cannonballs.

But Billy Pilgrim wasn't beguiled by the back of the store.  He was thrilled by the Kilgore Trout novels in the front.  The titles were all new to him, or he thought they were.  Now he opened one.  It seemed all right for him to do that.  Everybody else in the store was pawing things.  The name of the book was The Big Board.  He got a few paragraphs into it, and then he realized that he had read it before--years ago, in the veterans' hospital.  It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials.  They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.

Well, I could talk about all of the sexual abuse charges being leveled at politicians and movie stars right now.  This little passage from Slaughterhouse really touches upon the objectification of women and men in pornography.  However, there are two words that really leapt out at me as I transcribed those two paragraphs--"veterans' hospital."

My father, who is a veteran, is not doing well.  He is 90-years-old, and, over the last month or so, it has become abundantly clear to my sisters and myself that he simply can't live at home anymore.  He keeps falling, has wrenched his knee and cracked three or four ribs.  On top of that, his memory is failing, and he can't control his bowels.

I don't say these things to be mean or insensitive to his struggles.  He's always been a very proud man, and I know that his diminished capacity is very frustrating to him.  He wants to remain independent, but he can't.  Tonight, I spoke to my sister about nursing home placement.  Since he is a veteran, we are hoping that we might be able to find a room for him at our local veterans' hospital.

However, I know how my father will react to this possibility.  He's made it abundantly clear that he doesn't want to be anywhere but home.  My grandmother, my dad's mother, died at the veterans' hospital, and my father has felt guilty for over twenty years about placing her in that facility.  Basically, he associates that place with dying.  The equation in his mind goes something like this:

Veterans' Hospital = Death

I understand my father's fears.  However, living in his home is simply not safe for him anymore.  He's bruised from head-to-foot because of his falls.  He can't clean himself, and he can't go to the bathroom by himself.  He needs 24-hour care before he seriously injures himself.

If it sounds like I'm trying to convince myself of this fact, I am.  Seeing my father seriously diminished is not easy, but admitting that he can't and won't ever get better is tough.  When he goes into the veterans' hospital, he will not be coming out alive.

Tonight, Saint Marty is thankful for the care the nurse provided for his father this evening.