Lack of Closure
He's probably dead, so I don't think my father is updating his Facebook page. Still, it's there — a picture of his 80th birthday three years ago.
A picture of his 80th birthday. A group picture of our third trip to Dumaguete. A picture of him in Singapore in a noodle bar. A group picture with me and the granddaughter he barely acknowledged. Fragments of his life in the Philippines.
I don't know that he's dead.
I do know his caregiver moved him out of my condominium in the dark of night, months after they disappeared, odd requests asking for money appeared in my cousins' inboxes. I know that the legal system in the Philippines won't touch this sort of thing because it's just Kano stuff.
I suspect that my father is dead, but I don’t know.
The Best of Intentions
My father is struggling financially. It's been this way for a long time.
I suggest the Philippines. It's cheaper. I have resources. His social security is ample. And he moves here with my step-mother, and they live.
In what turns into a recurring theme, I install him in my Manila apartment and move into a studio above our offices. He inherits a couple of maids and my car and driver. Eventually, he moves to his own place. His household staff goes through various permutations and combinations.
A Caregiver is Hired
Caregiving in that household is a very, very hard job. At this point, he is easy to handle, but my stepmother is a problem.
She is depressed, mean, and manipulative. She is seriously overweight and addicted to painkillers and antidepressants. She drinks Starbucks frappuccinos incessantly, making her fatter, rotting her teeth.
She is relentless with the household staff, and my father's caregiver steps up. The caregiver is responsible for overseeing my stepmother's care. My father charges her with limiting the pill intake.
I know what it's like. I was raised on her daily psychic assaults. She has mad skills. A friend meets her and tells me that he's surprised that I'm not a serial killer.
She passes away. Everyone is relieved except my father. His raison d'être is gone.
The Best Intentions Chorus - Relocation Rhapsody
I suggest that my father move again. This time from Manila to Dumaguete. It’s cheaper. It's nicer. I can see him more.
My girlfriend and I find a bungalow outside of town on a well-managed cluster of rental houses on the ocean. It’s paradisal. There is a gazebo on the water at the edge of the property, and this is a good walk for my father, there and back. I bicycle the 20 kilometers two or three times a week. At one point, I’m going over every day. Sometimes I bring food like tacos or shrimp from one of the restaurants in Dumaguete.
It’s good. It’s tranquil.
In the aftermath of my stepmother’s death and the move to Dumaguete, when my father’s cost of living should go down, the demands for additional funds spiral upward.
Culpability
The fact that someone is looking after my father, whom he trusts and who is sturdy enough to lift him, takes me off the hook for day-to-day elder care. So if the caregiver is skimming or making some poor decisions about using funds, I’m okay with that.
A few hundred dollars every month is a small price to pay.
The Best of Intentions Chorus
It’s good until a conflict arises between the landlord, a formidable woman from Negros Occidental, and the caregiver. In the Philippines, these conflicts get nasty and protracted. The caregiver’s side of the story is that the landlord pressures her to marry my father.
Knowing that tranquility is gone, I suggest they move.
Finding a place for my father is an issue. He insists on two canes when he needs a walker. This makes it key to find a place where he has easy access to support — especially in the bathroom. (The bathroom is an increasingly lethal place.)
The caregiver looks for houses and doesn’t find anything that I think is acceptable. I’m not in Dumaguete all the time anyway, so I cede my apartment to them. Bathrooms are customized, and the move transpires.
Reality of If/Then Bites
If I had come to Dumaguete and overseen the house selection, this would have been a small matter. If I had been more insightful about the border war between the landlord and the caregiver, I might have seen it for what it was. If I had supervised the household budget more assiduously, I might have prevented the whole affair.
On my trips to Dumaguete, I stay in a hotel two buildings down from the condominium.
I visit two or three times a day to spend time with my father. I recover his passwords frequently, deal with his computer, remedy Internet access, and so on. I’ve bought a smart TV which outsmarts him with too many viewing choices.
My father expresses his intention to marry the caregiver — to help guarantee her access to survivor’s benefits.
Probably on the precipice of dementia, my father espouses recidivist notions on race and the Civil War. He becomes distrustful of a world that has evolved beyond his ability to understand and cope. He endlessly regurgitates Fox News sputum.
- We discover the bills, including rent, are in arrears.
- I insist on financial controls.
- They disappear.
- COVID happens.
Refreshing Guilt
I tried to locate my father.
This was complicated by the complexities of expatriate life in the Philippines. Western men make the voyage here, hook up, and then grow old. No one in authority wants to insert themselves in these dramas.
When I see his Facebook profile updated, it recalls the whole sordid affair. He returns to haunt my dreams and my remembrances.
Do I mourn his death? No. I mourn his life.
He watched his brother grow up in an idyllic household that turned nasty and brutish as loathing born of infidelity colored his childhood. He sought out people who manipulated him. He felt cheated out of an patrician life conjured out of a southern gothic narrative writ small.
Food: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches pronounced "pee-nee-butter sandwiches', boiled shrimp, Coca Cola pronounced "coke cola", McDonald’s french fries.
Films: The Lion in Winter, A Year of Living Dangerously, S.O.B.
Kindnesses: After a particularly nasty pounding from my stepmother, he returned from work with a Saturday Night Fever album. Taking friends to breakfast at Denny’s after a sleepover. A visit to my high-school graduation.
Travel: An extended business trip to England. Our first trip to Dumaguete because he hadn't seen the ocean after three years in the Philippines. The Blue Ridge Mountains.
Pride: A Ph.D. Patents in organic chemistry. Whiteness — betrayal and outrage as equalizing race relations erodes entitlement.
I mourn the things I never said to him, and he never said to me.
I mourn the grim obligation of our relationship, shared DNA stirred by sins of our fathers, of their stillborn hopes and expectations.
I wish for a closure I will never have.
I wish I’d done it all differently.
