Rambly update
This summer, in a lot of ways, has been a major bust.
I got fired from my job in late June. Long story short, another person got a promotion that I was in line for who was, in my view, less competent and certainly less experienced. So I started working to rule, which translated into "is not a good fit for the direction this department is going". I would have been a lot more concerned if I had not found a new job within a week. Also, I was the sixth person in the last 18 months to quit or get fired. In that department alone. With a track record like that, I'm fairly certain the problem wasn't mine. (However, I didn't help matters by being a bit of a shit disturber; as a friend observed, I don't suffer fools silently. Which says something about keeping my trap shut...)
As noted previously, my father - to get technical - went fuckin' bonkers. I finally had to take a trip to Ontario for a week to find out what, precisely, was going on. I was getting radically different pictures from my mother and sister regarding dad's state of health.
A week certainly wasn't long enough to get stuff sorted. It was long enough to get him admitted to the psych ward. It turned out that neither my mother nor my sister had the wherewithal to, essentially, pull the plug and get the old man admitted. In part it seems that both my mother and sister were doing everything they could to give my father choices, to maintain independence and self direction. But, from what I could see, he's been beyond that point for a long time. And I still don't know whether he's suffered a major mental breakdown, is having onset dementia, or whether 30 years of self medicating with benzodiazapines has finally fried his noodle. Shit. I didn't even know he'd been using Xanax, let alone for how long, and practially unsupervised. My father was always a 'do-er' - he could always 'do' something to change things, or to make himself feel better. But he's now 71. He can't really work at his old job any longer. Younger people have taken over. The contacts he had that helped to make him the mover and shaker he once was are mostly dead. And, as is typical with the world, what knowledge and experience he does have certainly isn't valued, at least not to the extent that it is worth paying for. So, he's worried about retirement finances (my folk's took a major hit in 2008 and saw a major portion of their RRSPs evaporate). His back is also buggered, and he can no longer play golf. And in a lot of ways, that last thing is the kicker; my father can no longer do the one thing that gave his retired life focus. My father is not a reader. He is not a musician. He is not a gardener, or a woodworker, or an historian. He does not sail or fish or hunt or ski. And he does not seem to be able to make the transition, or never learned the skills necessary, to figure out how to be in his life in a way that is now different from how he's always lived it.
My father is a broken man. And I don't know how to help fix him. My mother and sister are, sadly, making a bog of it (again, in my opinion, and from a distance). They aren't advocating for my father's care. They aren't asking questions, or challenging people for better solutions. He's been in and out of the hospital over the last two months, the last admission after losing consciousness due to low blood sugar (yeah, add Type II diabetes to the mix...sigh). And from what I can tell, they're still giving dad 'choices' - what to eat, what to wear, what he wants to do. I don't think he needs choices; in fact, I think they're frightening and confusing him. But I'm not there, and these are not my decisions. I just get to watch from a distance.
However, I shall happily remain the guy who put his old man in the psych ward. Go me.
Last, my ENT threw in the towel, and I now am learning to live with a hearing aid. $2000 later and I can hear. Sorta. Over the hissing.
Sheesh.
Okay. Things can only get better. Right?
Right....?