The Lost King

Family, Ambushed - Part Four

Dad’s dementia since his brain injury had rocked him and our whole family, especially my mother, who at eighty-eight couldn’t help but mourn the loss of her one true love even when he sat dozing beside her. But for me, what was most unsettling was that in my heart, the dad of the injury, confusion, and anger had pushed out the dad whose courage, depth, and insight flat-out blew me away for over sixty years. Somewhere in the middle of these most difficult months, what happened to my dad and the family crisis it brought on, threatened to destroy the truth of this extraordinary man’s life.

I carry a martini for Mom and a fake beer for me into the living room of my parents’ house in Delaware after we’d spent a long afternoon at the rehab center with Dad. I put her glass down on the table next to where she sits in the blue leather wingback chair. As I plop down in Dad’s matching chair, we both let out exhausted sighs.

Mom takes a big sip of her drink and looks out the window at a pair of cardinals fussing at the birdfeeder. “The calm brown one is the female, the bossy bright red one is the male of course,” she says. “Nice couple, they’ve lived in our maple for a couple of years.” Then turning to me says, “Your father’s getting better. Recognized me for the whole visit today.”

“Though he did get thrown toward the end when I said it was time to go,” I say. "And he patted my arm and told me to be good.”

Mom nods. "And rolled his chair right out of the room, hollering 'We’ll be back to see you soon, son!'" And she starts to giggle. Then we're both laughing and can’t stop.

Finally, the pressure eases and we each catch our breath. Mom wipes tears from her eyes, takes another sip and says, “Your father and I have kept you away from your wife and kids too long. You belong with your family in Georgia. They need you too.”

She’s right. I’ve been here for over three weeks this time. But I’m still terrified of leaving Mom at the mercy of my father and his untethered mind. Dad’s been yelling at her, calling at all hours from the rehab center demanding to be “set free” and going off on jagged, time-traveling, paranoid rants filled with old enemies and dead relatives.

She sees my hesitation, leans forward in her chair, and points at me. “You’re worrying about me,” she says. “Now stop it. I can handle things myself now.”

There’s no doubt Margaret is overwhelmed. She’s substitute teaching, handling a super tight budget, new town, new house, our two kids, and her 81-year-old mother living in our downstairs bedroom. We talk on the phone every night before midnight, and she’s always supportive. But I hear the strain in Margaret’s voice.

Mom assures me that despite the phone calls, Dad is improving at the rehab center, and over the last weeks we’ve sorted things with insurance agents, bank people, and doctors. Over many dinners, we’ve talked about her sense of loss since Dad’s fall. Her big, strong, take-charge husband went down hard, but there’s no reason to give up hope. He’ll get better. He’ll be able to come home soon.

“Now you have to go home,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?

“Of course, I will,” she says. “Your brother visits me every day. You’ve taken care of everything that needs doing for now. What could go wrong?”

Right on cue, the phone rings. I glance at the clock as I get up to answer it. “Eleven-thirty. I bet its Margaret,” I say.

Mom thinks that Dad talked an aide into dialing for him again. “You tell your father I spoke to him an hour ago,” she says, “We’ll see him tomorrow.”

I pick up, anxious to tell Margaret that Mom and I talked, and I’ll be home in a couple of days. But Mom’s right, the call is from the rehab center. Though it’s not Dad on the phone. It’s Thomas, the charge nurse on Dad’s floor. “I need you to get down here as soon as you can, Mr. South,” Thomas says. “Your father’s become violent. He’s injured people.”

I hop in the car, leaving my mother at home in her robe and slippers doing her best to stay calm. I promise to call from the center as soon as I know what’s going on. Cutting through town by the university where my dad had been the head of Life and Health Sciences, I try to keep myself calm and imagine what could have happened. My dad, violent? It can’t be true. I’ve seen Dad angry a few times and he could scare me silly as a kid -- but violent? No. He spanked me only once growing up. I was eight and when it was over, he cried more than I did.

Then again, there’s Dad the WWII Ranger. There aren’t any Nazis at the rehab center. But maybe he thinks there are. Oh, come on, he’s eighty-six years old. He couldn’t relive D-Day on Rehab Floor 2E if he wanted to. He can’t even walk. But those Rangers crawled under bullets and bombs all the way across Europe. He’s tough and out of his normal state of mind. What if he got his hands on something dangerous?

I push the night button of the rehab center and rush in through the double doors. When I round the corner of his floor, I see Dad parked in his wheelchair in front of the nurse’s station. He seems alert, but his head is down and he's staring at the floor. He looks up as I approach and shoots me a sly smile that’s not so much from a soldier as much as from a nine-year-old me; the defiant and scared kid he caught setting a fire across the street.

He raises his head and watches me with a mixture of guilt and suspicion as Thomas pulls me aside. “Your father struck and kicked three aides, hurting all of them," he says. "We sent one woman to the emergency room. She’s home now, but this is a serious situation.”

I nod, dumbstruck, and tell Thomas my dad has never been violent before. Thomas says that many brain injury and dementia patients go through personality changes. They can get progressively agitated over time, especially in the evening hours when they become obsessed with getting out and going home. Dad is one of the most extreme cases Thomas has ever seen. He says tomorrow I’m to meet with the nursing director to discuss finding other accommodations that can handle my father.

“Right now,” Thomas says, “We need to get him tranquilized. He’s refused to take the pills, so we want you to help calm him, holding him if necessary, so we can give him a strong enough injection to turn this behavior off for tonight.” I nod and try to absorb what the nurse is saying without looking horror-stricken and terrified.

When I was a kid in the fifties and sixties, ADHD wasn’t known, but my parents knew that I was odd. Reports from school and neighbors confirmed that when I wasn’t distracted and lost in daydreams, I was given to wildly unpredictable spells of energetic acting out, sometimes resulting in fights, stealing stuff, and accidentally setting fires. In fourth grade I was twice brought home by policemen. In fifth grade I was kicked out of Boy Scouts. Over and over again during those years, when everybody else called me a crazy weirdo, my dad told me that what the rest of the world thought about me didn’t matter. What mattered was my family. Crazy weirdo or not, they loved me. In the end, he said, the people in your home, your family, were the only people you could trust.

As I finish listening to Thomas and step toward my dad, I think about all those times he’d stood up and took my side against school principals, bullies, cops, and local store owners. Like he’s reading my mind, he winks at me and gestures for me to get down close to him.

“I need you to bring me a knife,” my dad hisses in an urgent whisper. “An eight-inch knife, no shorter than six, but sharp, you hear me son? I mean razor sharp.” He leans forward from his wheelchair to me, crouched in front of him, our heads together like conspirators in the middle of the night in this bright hospital corridor.

“Why do you need a knife?” I ask, careful to keep the alarm out of my voice.

Dad squeezes my arm, his face two inches from mine, his clear eyes locked on mine. “Why do you think?” he says, and letting go of my arm, stabs, and twists the air between us with an imaginary blade. “To kill these people,” he whispers, “gut them, get the hell out of here and go home.” He grins at me, his eyes sparkling with energy and purpose. I can’t help but smile back. Dad seems so happy. He’s stronger and much more alive than he was just this afternoon. All great news if he weren't also spouting vicious, bloodthirsty nonsense and physically attacking the nursing staff.

“Dad,” I plead, my voice low and urgent, “could you just take the pills they want you to take?”

Dad’s eyes narrow. “No,” he says. “No way, no how.”

“But then they’ll have to use a needle.”

“Let them try,” he says, his grin flashing, “They’ve got to get past you and me first. And together we’re one hell of a tough nut.”

Thomas steps up behind Dad, catching my eye. Dad senses the movement and grabs my arm again. “Don’t look at them!” he shouts. “They’ll trick you!”

I gather resolve in my shaking body and ignore Dad’s protests as Thomas steps forward with the hypodermic of Ativan. I lean forward, holding my father’s arms and restraining him with my weight. I tell him to stay calm, that it’ll be all right.

But as the needle pierces his thigh and the plunger pushes the tranquillizer into his body, he can only stare at me with shocked disbelief. That spark I saw dancing in his eyes just minutes before flickers and dies with the realization that his own son has betrayed him. And then, as the drug takes hold, he understands that now he is completely alone.

A couple of days later, after I’ve delayed my trip home again, I visit Dad at the rehab center to prepare him for transfer to a facility we found that can handle dementia, in the hope that with the right meds, he can eventually improve enough to go home. I know that his impairment will only let him see this as another prison sentence, and another betrayal, so I’ve spent the past night preparing a bribe of sorts -- a peach cobbler I made. I find Dad in the physical therapy room, depressed, medicated, and unwilling to do his next set of exercises. He nods and gives me a half smile as I sit next to his wheelchair. He eyes the plastic container and spoon I’ve brought.

“What do you have there?” he asks. “More bad news?”

“No,” I say, opening the container lid. “It’s peach cobbler.”

“Is it poisoned?”

“No,” I say again. I pull out a spoonful for him, guiding it to his hand. “I made it myself.”

“So?” he asks. “What does that prove? You taste it first.”

“Sure.” I pop the bite of cobbler in my mouth, swallow, and smile, licking my lips. “Here, your turn.” I load up the spoon and put his fingers around it. His eyes are on me as he brings the spoon to his mouth. But his hand suddenly shakes, and he drops it.

“Damn,” Dad says. His eyes well up with tears. “Damn it to hell.”

I tell him that it doesn’t matter, that I’ve got plenty. But he shakes his head and says that’s not it. “You didn’t know I was joking,” he says. “You think I meant it about the poison.”

“No, no, Dad, I knew.”

But he can see the lie in my eyes and a huge sob breaks out of his chest. “I don’t think I can stand this, being this…” he says. And then we’re both crying, leaning against each other, my arms around him. Holding him there I am taken back to Christmas 1957.

I am eight years old and have discovered my present isn’t under the tree. It’s on a table next to the wall, covered by a white sheet. As happy as I’ve ever seen him, my father lifts the sheet to reveal an enormous castle made of grey metal painted to look like stones. It’s got a working chain drawbridge, towers, catwalks, little red and yellow cloth flags. And standing in the courtyard in brightly colored outfits, a king, a queen, knights, and horses. I can’t speak. I look at him and back at the castle and I know Santa has had nothing to do with this. My dad made it for me.

I look over at Dad and Mom holding hands and smiling at each other. Mom laughed and said Dad had stayed up all night bending tabs A into slots B and placing and rearranging everything just so. I want to jump over and hug him, but the moment is too good to even move. I don’t want any of this to change, ever. In 1957, and to this day, it is the most stunning, meaningful gift I have ever gotten.

I’ve often railed against those who would define me or my children by our ADHD instead of seeing the whole person, yet here I found myself doing the same thing; allowing the disability to become who my father is. When we think of quality of life, we’re talking about meaningful connection between people. The challenge facing family, friends, and caregivers of those with any type of disability or chronic ailment is to keep the whole person center stage. The problems, strategies, and medications are important, sure, but the human being comes first. And I had forgotten that.

In the rehab center, my father and I stop sobbing and get down to eating cobbler, sharing bites, touching hands. A nurse steps up to us as Dad and me, our faces wet with tears, finish eating. “Are you two all right?” she asks, touching my father’s shoulder. 

“We could use a tissue or two,” I say.

Dad nods. “This one has always been a crybaby,” he says. He winks at me, a tiny bit of peach drops off his chin, and we both break out laughing.

Though I’ll be with my family in Georgia this coming holiday season, my thoughts will also be with Mom and Dad. And I’ll wish a deep and grateful Merry Christmas to the dad who built a castle for me and filled it with a king and queen and loyal knights fighting for honor and true love.

Revised from my memoir, “A Chicken in The Wind and How He Grew.”

An earlier version of this story was first published at additudemag.com.