Martin, 48” x 30”, oil on canvas, October, 2023

One afternoon, November 27th of last year, my brother, Marty texted me asking me to go find my father, who had been driving around since eight o’clock that morning.  It was 2:30 p.m.  He was concerned because my father had been getting lost of late due to what we believed to be the beginning effects of dementia.  Six months earlier, my husband thought it would be a good idea to place an Apple tag on my dad’s key ring and one in his vehicle after my dad reported to me that, sometimes, when he was driving around, he could not recognize where he was.  Routine areas were becoming unfamiliar.  I checked my dad’s location on the Apple tag locator on my phone.  He was on Niagara Street north of downtown.  He knew that area and I was certain he could find his way home.  I did nothing.  Mostly because I had attempted to drive to find my father on previous occasions but could never arrive at his destination while he was still there.    Also, I hated him.  I hated who he was-the offensive posturing, thinking that he’d better get the better of the world before it got the better of him-even to the point of criminality. I wanted to be nothing like him.  So, I decided to sanitize him from my past-no more abandonment or other darknesses, albeit during his period of dementia, no more of his psychology sickening and corrupting me.  

The upset, now deep inside me, bubbles up and replays over and over again in my mind, disturbing my thoughts and redirecting my consciousness toward terror. I wince.  I grimace, my face unable to contain the horror. It’s like being gripped tighter and tighter by a giant invisible hand unable to move of one’s own volition or to breathe.  How to drown out the voices?  I analyze, classify, restructure, formalize, pathologize, and reframe my existence.  Intellectualism is how I tamp down the cysts of truth and separate the little me inside, keeping little me covered and cloaked.  

 I remember when I was five.  It was 9:00 p.m. and all of us seven kids were slung ‘round a banquette in a dirty bar.  My dad brought us there in a drunken stupor to buy us all fish frys.  I refused to eat the plate of getting-cold fish in front of me. Well…my father hit my mother. And although I can’t recall any times where this happened, my mother later told me in my teenage years that he used to hit her until she told him that the next time he hit her, she was going to call the cops.  I just stared at him.  Back then, I used to refuse to eat-when there were onions in the food or if it was something I didn’t like, or, and especially, if it were served in a disgusting bar late at night by someone who treated me disdainfully on the regular.  He stared at me.  I would not eat.  But then my mother asked me. I cried as I ate, feeling a huge lump in my throat from the upset.  Even at the tender age of five, I told myself I would never eat that fish again.  

My brother texted me a few more times over the next few hours.  I did nothing.  Then, he called, pleading with me to go find him, “Please.” It was five o’clock.  So, my husband, Denis, my two chihuahuas, Salty and Chauncey, and I climbed into our car and headed for the location of the Apple Tag-Niagara Falls, about thirty minutes from where we lived. Denis sped through downtown and along the Niagara river.  We thought we had him, but by the time we arrived in Niagara Falls, the Apple tracker put him in Youngstown, the northernmost point in Niagara County about 30 more minutes away: go any further and you’re in Lake Erie.  “We’re not going to Youngstown. Let’s just call the police and let them handle this. It doesn’t make sense.  By the time we get there, he’ll be gone.”  But Denis insisted.  We started driving again.  Except this time, the tracker stopped moving.  Denis located it at a gas station on the lake. I called the police explaining that my father had dementia and was driving around lost. I shared his location then hung up.  Denis found out the name and phone number for the gas station/pizzeria on his Tesla computer screen and called right from the car.  He explained the situation and asked the attendant to look for a red blazer and a confused old man in his eighties. The attendant found the truck. It was empty.  Denis thanked him,  hung up, and continued.  The police called back.  The gas station attendant found my father and called an ambulance.   That’s all we knew.  My heart raced.  We arrived on the scene a few minutes later.  There was already a state trooper on the scene.  We got out of the car and looked inside the vehicle, empty.  Denis went into the gas station and inquired.  We were led outside around the back of the building, down twelve steps and off a three foot concrete slab.  At the bottom there was a fence, a bloody rag, and my dad.  He had gone around the side of the building, presumably to take a pee, and had fallen down the twelve steps, off the concrete slab and onto a cinder block.  He was in excruciating pain. His head was gashed in and bleeding.  While we awaited the ambulance, my dad kept saying how mad he was at me for being in the predicament he was in.  It was dark and starting to drizzle.  It was freezing outside and he was not wearing his coat.  By this time, it was 6:30 p.m.    

The ambulance took my dad and me to St. Mary’s hospital in Lewiston.  In the emergency room, I had a chance to talk to my dad and asked him some questions.  He was so confused, really disoriented.  The doctor said he was low on saline and fluids. An attending nurse gave him an IV of fluids, took some x-rays, and administered other tests. From his fall down that flight of stairs, he suffered a fractured pelvis and skull.   Five hours later, they released him. We headed for Denis’ parents to borrow a toilet chair and a walker as walking for him was excruciating.  The doctor also prescribed pain killers.  On the way home from Clarence, we stopped by Mighty Taco and bought two tacos for him since he hadn’t eaten since that morning.  He hates tacos.  He complained.  I read in The Encyclopedia of Mental Health, Volume 4, that old people, because of feeling unloved and unwanted, will retaliate with aggression and hostility by complaining about the food that they’re given.  It was almost midnight and it was the only open restaurant.  We arrived in North Collins around 1:30 a.m. and were greeted by my brother who we had been in contact with throughout the night.  We settled my father in a recliner so he could try and get some sleep and left.  

I arrived the next day to check on my dad and see if he and Marty needed anything.  That’s how it went.  I would show up at noon or just after and give Marty a chance to go to the store or wherever he needed to go for a couple of hours.  He needed a break.  Marty complained how tired he was, that my dad had not been sleeping and that first day, when Marty gave him the pain killers, my dad threw up and had diarrhea all over the bed.    Marty cleaned it all up.  “Marty”. “Marty”. “Marty”.  My dad called my brother’s name every ten seconds.  And he expected a response.  That’s how it was-around the clock.  So for more than two weeks, Marty didn’t sleep.  He would cook for them. He would clean for them.  After a few days, I realized that the situation was untenable for us.  I sought help from an aide service.  They couldn’t start the first week but were scheduled near the end of the second week.  The first day they were scheduled to come, they canceled:  the aide was ill.  

On Thursday of that second week, my brother David and two of his helpers came over to my dad’s to empty and pick up my dad’s trailer. Marty suggested that we sell it to him. As they were emptying the trailer, Marty helped.  I cooked supper for my dad and Marty that day, broiled fish and macaroni and cheese.  I had somewhere to go that day so I only stayed for about an hour, cooked their meal, received $2,000 from my brother David to partially pay for the trailer, and headed for the bank.  Everyone was still there when I left.  There was a flurry of activity and a mess to clean up in the basement as the boys were just depositing my dad’s numerous tools from the trailer into the basement. It was probably one o’clock.  

As usual, I arrived the next day but something was different.  The screen door was locked.  I wriggled my finger through the screen and unlocked the screen door.  The kitchen door was locked too.  No problem.  I had a key.  I opened the kitchen door and found my brother lying on the kitchen floor with his head resting against the cabinet.  He was bloated and looked twice his normal size.  And he was dark purple.  Blood trickled from his nose and was forming bubbles with each of his breaths. My dad was sitting in a rocking chair beside him, just staring. I touched him.  He was cold.  The broiled fish was half-eaten and sitting in water in the kitchen sink. I asked my dad what happened and he explained that he had just fallen asleep there and didn’t wake up.  My dad was too demented to know enough to call 911.  So he just sat there and stared at Marty.  I called 911.  A State Trooper arrived maybe 10 minutes later.  I explained what happened.  He called the medical examiner who came a short while later.  The medical examiner said that he suspected foul play and asked us to go into the living room.  There was an indentation in the back of Marty’s head.  In the living room, there were several nutty buddy wrappers and peanut crumbs strewn about the floor.  Finally, a mortician came.  

I don’t know what they did but all of a sudden, the house filled up with a horrific stench.  I kept gagging, thinking I was going to vomit.  I opened the windows for some relief even though it was winter.  Then, from what I could hear, they put my brother inside a black bag and carried him off.  I explained to my dad that he was going to come live with me now but he argued saying that he could live by himself in his house.  The trooper had to insist that my dad come with me.  He acquiesced.  Several weeks later we received the results from the autopsy.  Marty died from an overdose.  There was crack cocaine, pain killers, and fentanyl in his system. He perished in the hours of the early afternoon which meant that my father sat in that chair watching Marty for next to 24 hours, subsisting on Nutty Buddies from the freezer until I arrived.  

Marty used to hold our hands when we were little.  He was just a bit older than my twin brother, Matthew and me.  At eight, he used to build two story tree forts out of discarded old wood with jagged edges that he found in the woods.  They rocked and swayed, being built into brush with branches that bent under our weight.  But you could climb into them.  And hide.  At 18, he was a shoe salesman.  Did he have a gift.  He could talk to anyone, strike up a conversation about anything.  The cart collector at Home Depot.  The cashier at Tops.  Near recently, he talked a state trooper into not carting him away during a welfare check.  The trooper wouldn’t sit down and my brother turned the conversation around, after stating that he was neither a danger to himself nor others, by asking the state trooper why he wouldn’t sit at his kitchen table.  Marty twisted the conversation suggesting that the state trooper thought he was better than my brother, and that was the reason he would not sit down.  The trooper left after a few minutes, judging that my brother was, indeed, harmless.  Unfortunately, at that time and for years before, Marty was experiencing paranoia.  In his defense, his perspective was certainly twinged with truth.  Members of the government who sometimes act in their own self interest became the C.I.A. is conspiring against me.  The F.B.I. was wire-tapping his phone which was probably true because he was addicted to crack cocaine and was associated through his drug use with a most motley crew. Marty also believed that the current state of cities was an impossibility, that the buildings that we see are too numerous and old to have been built by human civilization.  

Once, during the last two weeks of his life while he was caring for my father, he came downstairs in his boxer briefs, excusing himself, that he was so tired, he couldn’t even get dressed.  I didn’t mind.  But for all the men I’ve known, he was one who could be trusted with a woman.  I knew he would never see me as a sexual object.  I admired and respected that.  It was unusual and welcome.  The last few years, he was tormented.  I saw him several times a week, and then everyday towards the end.  I listened.  I would suggest that what he was saying was true, at least to some extent, but what are we to do now, knowing that the government was trying to kill us (their policies, teaming up with big business and allowing the import and sale of items made of harmful toxins and poisons)?  How are we to live our lives?  

Fentanyl took my brother’s life.  But what contributed to his being addicted to crack? I believe partly that he just had the right genetic makeup for addiction and that he lost the genetic lottery.  But also it was his family of origin derangement, the poverty mindset, the lack of education, and most importantly, not having someone he could truly count on, someone who was even keeled and kind and compassionate, that kind of person in his corner.  Although my father loved Marty, he cannibalized Marty’s life by always giving him a job, always giving him money all the while talking discouragingly to him, making him dependent so that my dad would not be alone.  There comes a point when you must let go of your children.  They must be allowed to pull up their own roots and transplant these into their own garden, digging their toes in new earth, where they can breathe fresh air and feel Spring rain and the winter frost.  With each season they will lose last year’s leaves and sprout more and more plentiful new buds.  In the warm summer months, honeybees will land on them and they then will bear seeds.  The seeds will drop and begin to grow, growing leaves and stems and a strong trunk if allowed to flourish.  But these new plants must also have room to grow to be healthy and strong and able to withstand storm. So, the second generation too, must let go.  

Recently, I inquired at a Veteran’s old folks home about whether my dad could live there.  In preparation, I pulled out an old hard cover text of the time when my dad was in the Air Force.  He was stationed at Smoky Hill Air Force Base in Salina, Kansas in the 802nd Food Service Squadron in the fifties.  He was an Airman Third Class and, looking at his picture, was not entirely thrilled to be there.  He repeatedly told me that he joined the armed forces to eat.  In the portrait, he looks so young and uncomfortable, really sad.  He looks lost, too, as though in a blinding storm with no one coming to help.  So, although I’ve already told you that I hated him, the prose that I’ve cobbled together here is not neatly assembled into one tightly bound garment, and is, in fact, threadbare.  When I look at his picture, I feel sorrow and tenderness; there is a common thread that I share with my father, that being needing love and tenderness and affection, to be understood and welcomed, but not only not knowing how to obtain these, but that we rabidly work against and make enemies of those who would try to give us this.