Tag Archives: “secure” assisted living

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the man we were dealing with

When I first suggested to my father that he keep a key hidden somewhere outside his house in case he locked himself out, he refused, saying that someone would discover it and rob him. Old and vulnerable, leaving a key outside was too great a risk for him. But truthfully, by the time he really needed to have a spare key stashed somewhere; he wouldn’t have remembered where it was. Yes, people told us to put a key on a cord that hung around his neck, or around his wrist, or attached to his belt or belt loop – all great suggestions, IF he’d remember to do these things. But that’s the catch…it was his memory that was part of the problem.

Not to mention that he hated to have things ON him. He’d get rid of anything like that, within minutes, and if he couldn’t unfasten it, he’d cut or rip it off. When I first saw him yank something off his wrist, I realized that he and I were not so different. I could not stand it either and smiled to myself wondering if, at his age, I would be like him. When I was a little girl I so wanted to have a nightgown with lace edging on the sleeve-hems, but when I felt the constriction from the elastic bands in the ruffled cuffs, I found a scissors and cut the elastic off – I couldn’t stand the way it felt.

That first time when I suggested to him that he keep a spare key outside, he said he didn’t need it. I asked what he’d do if he locked himself out and with no hesitation he replied with a sneer,

“I’ll bust the door down.” He was true to his word.

I noticed he did not say he’d go across the street to ask the neighbors for help. He was close to 90-years-old at this point, and busting the door down continued to remain his best, his only solution. That’s the man we were dealing with.

The first time he locked himself out, he dragged the old paint-splattered, five-foot aluminum ladder from the garage in the backyard around to the open, kitchen-window in the front of the house. He was planning to climb through that window but it was a little more complicated than he anticipated. There was a flower box on the outside of the window he’d have to climb across, the window had a screen on it and it was a double-hung window with only about an 18 x 24 inch opening so he would have had to do some pretty fancy yoga to fit through it, and finally, the window was above the kitchen sink; that’s why he needed the ladder to reach it. If he’d been successful, and been able to somehow get through the window…he would have landed right in the sink. Maybe if he was sixteen, or thirty, or even fifty-years-old he could’ve pulled it off, but NOT at age NINETY. Luckily for all of us, he didn’t have a chance to get too far.

“Ellen, YOUR FATHER IS STANDING ON A LADDER OUTSIDE THE KITCHEN WINDOW. I think he’s locked out. Barry’s gonna go help him.” That’s the phone call my sister received from Pam. She and her husband Barry lived across the street from dad. These dear neighbors had a spare key to his house, and they weren’t the only neighbors that had been willing to take a key, “just in case”. Barry somehow got dad off the ladder; an act I wish I’d been able to witness. With the distraction of Barry seemingly appearing out of nowhere, dad never even noticed that he had an extra key.

The second time he locked himself out he took a different approach. Back in the 60’s he’d been involved in remodeling the screened-in porch at the rear of our house into a den. I’m sure that he’s the one who chose a hollow-core back door…less expensive, yes, but also less sturdy than a solid door. Forty or so years later, he had that fact stored away somewhere in his mind: the back door was hollow-core and therefore a door that he could bust down…with the right equipment.

Dad went into his garage and found an iron crowbar, and somehow dragged it to the back door. He weighed 116 pounds by this time in his life, so the real miracle is, he picked up the crowbar and bashed the backdoor at a height that allowed him to reach through the hole and unlock the door. We were, of course, worried about his safety and his judgment, but I have to admit we were also quite inspired by his will. Unstoppable.

My sister and I went through the garage after the “break-in”. We poked around through the layers of discards on the shelves and removed all the tools, and everything else we could imagine him using as a tool. Garages tend to be a kind of modern-day archaeological site and ours was no different. There were tools from when dad did the remodel in the 60’s, and I’m guessing that’s the category the crowbar fit into, there were wedding gifts from my mother’s parents circa 1947, that dad never liked but tolerated when my mother was alive, like a horribly tarnished, silver-plated champagne bucket which is about as unlike my parents’ life-style as you could ever imagine. There were a series of broken microwave ovens although the most recent one wasn’t actually broken…my sister just told dad she broke it so she could get it out before he burned the house down. He’d mistakenly used an aluminum pie-plate to heat food in and then entered the cooking time in hours instead of minutes. That was another very close call that also involved a phone call from Pam.

There was an old shed out behind the garage that I knew he didn’t go into any longer – at least that’s what he told me. He’d asked me to get something out of it recently, saying that the brick path was too uneven, now that the gnarled tree roots were as much above ground as below – said his eyesight just wasn’t good enough. Now that I think about it, maybe that was just a ploy to get us to put all the tools in one spot. Well, we put all the tools and would-be tools back there, way in the back behind a bunch of old window screens, thinking that now he would be safe.

As his judgment became more convoluted, as his behavior became more risky, we continued to increase the hours that the caregivers spent with him, which was no easy task. He fired them almost every day and told them to “Get out! Go home!” and worse, I’m sure. Those two young women were amazing with him – they really understood his nature; we learned a lot about dad from them. They’d get their things, leave by the front door, and then circle around to the backyard. They’d wait whatever amount of time they thought it would take for dad to forget that he’d fired them…and then just enter through the back door like nothing had happened.

When I heard they were doing this, of course I was impressed, and so grateful for their dedication and resilience – but I was also concerned for their safety. I reminded them just who they were dealing with: a proud, fierce, and rowdy old man who was bound to have who-knows-what hidden around the house to protect himself against potential intruders. At various times I’d found a baseball bat and a golf iron between the wall and his nightstand. I warned them that they had to make sure he knew they were in the house once they returned from their banishment. His hearing and eyesight were failing and it’d be dangerous for everyone, if he were surprised by their presence.

After this “break-in”, we knew we were running out of time. My father was a force of nature – he would not be controlled. But we kept trying. We began to look around at possible housing options and at the same time couldn’t imagine him living anywhere but his own home: it’s where he’d lived for a good chunk of his life…sixty years. But there were other reasons. Yes he was old and weak, but he was still quite healthy, physically. He walked a one-mile round trip back and forth to the donut shop once or twice a day, or three times if he forgot he’d already been. And he’s the guy that broke through a door with a crow bar at age ninety.

I didn’t realize how much of a problem his good health, physical strength, and shall we say, creative problem solving skills, were, until we started visiting various residences. First of all, the ratio of women to men in this population is skewed – women outlive men by a huge factor, so they’re primarily set up for dealing with women. As a general rule, women of his generation were not thinking about busting down doors or climbing through windows. Dad grew up in a destitute neighborhood in Detroit during the Depression, and literally had to fight to survive; he’d learned to try anything and everything to accomplish his goals. Those instincts were alive and well in his psyche.

He was also used to walking a lot, every day. Many of the residents were wheelchair bound, some bedridden. It was hard to imagine how they could handle dad. One of the most disappointing and frustrating parts of all of this was that not one residence ever said that they could not handle him. We were VERY honest with them about his behavior. They always told us they were capable of taking care of him, and keeping him safe. There’s no way they could accomplish this and I know now that the system is simply not able to handle someone like dad. We would have had to hire a caregiver to be with him all the time, on top of paying the fees that everyone else paid. We didn’t have that kind of money…but they never even suggested it. We began to see the chasm between what dad needed and what any of them could offer.

And then there was television. He and my mom had given up on TV years ago, and by now, his eyesight was so poor he really couldn’t see what was going on, anyway. Every once and a while I’d say, “Dad, the Dodgers are on tonight, wanna watch the game with me?” First he’d just say, “Are you kidding? The Dodgers stink!” which they did at the time. But finally he admitted that he couldn’t make out anything on the screen. Dementia made television even more bizarre, and sometimes he would describe to me what it looked like to him…and we’d have a good laugh, but it had not been a part of his routine for many years. He just wasn’t the sort of old man who would settle for sitting around watching TV all day. His younger brother at age 88, still loved watching his favorite shows, and he’d come over mid-day and turn them on as soon as he arrived; right away dad would holler, “Turn that crap off!”

Most of the housing situations we looked at assumed that people liked TV and they used it just as some parents use it – as a babysitter. There was no way that would work with dad. Each time my siblings and I would go on an excursion looking for some place to move him, we’d come back utterly discouraged…he just wasn’t at all like the kind of people they were aiming for. In statistical terms, dad was an “outlier”…he was way outside their “norm”. We loved that about dad…loved that he was his own person, and boy was he. But now, that was revealing itself to be a major problem.

Sitting in the backyard with his eyes closed, dad would feel the sun on his face and listen to the sweet song of the Mourning doves – it was his oasis – and a respite from the increasing confusion that he faced whenever he went out into the world. Both his brothers spent the last years of their lives in apartments. He could never imagine that. Dad loved his home; he loved everything about it. It was his old friend, and now that mom was gone, it had become his closest old friend.

We knew this.

Once again he’d locked himself out. This time Pam’s voice on the other end of the line was frantic. She said she “just happened” to look out their kitchen window to see my father reaching his hand THROUGH a BROKEN WINDOW to let himself in at the front door. Her angel of a husband ran over and by the time he’d arrived, dad had already opened the front door. There was not a scratch on him. The hammer that he used to break the window lay eerily on the porch at the edge of the door, below the jagged window. Broken glass was strewn about, and inside, shards glittered all across his beloved couch. Barry carefully removed all the glass and taped up the window. We were running out of time. All three of us kids knew it. His caregivers knew it. Our neighbors knew it. Did dad know?

He must have been alone…where was his caregiver, we wondered? On this particular day, dad had already fired her several times by the early afternoon. Los Angeles was having a horrible heat wave and she couldn’t bear the thought of going around to the backyard again, which was in full sun that time of day. She instead walked around the corner to the drugstore where it was air conditioned, and got something cold to drink. She was not gone long – but long enough. She’d left him unsupervised…but what could she do? He’d already kicked her out too many times and it was over 100 degrees outside. Our homemade eldercare-system was unraveling.

When we heard the whole story, we knew that once again, one of dad’s angels had been looking out for him. He could have been injured, he could have slit his wrist and bled to death. We got the message LOUD AND CLEAR. Maybe you’re thinking this is the message we got: we had to move him out of his house – but that was still inconceivable to us. Instead, we concluded that we had to come up with a system that insured that his caregivers were present 24 hours a day. With hindsight I can’t believe that we didn’t see this as the last straw, but moving him out of his house continued to be a haunting image that seemed impossible.

We were able to cobble together a 24-hour presence of caregivers. It was a daunting job for those dedicated young women and for my sister who at that point was in charge. After my four-year stint in Los Angeles I distanced myself from the day-to-day activities that filled dad’s life. I became an on-call consultant for my siblings while they sorted out how to make sure he was safe and living as good a life as he could. My sister did an amazing job, and, did it while she lived out of town. Even though she had a full-time job she was on the phone day and night, she became an expert at texting when it was still a somewhat new form of communication and we spent many hours on the phone, trouble-shooting problems as they erupted. And that’s just what it was like – we were trying to control an active volcano.

One day it did become clear. Finally. Dad had just turned 94 and was on one of his daily walks. He never allowed any of us to walk with him: not the caregivers, not his kids. He’d bark at us, curse at us to GET THE HELL AWAY. At this point in his life, the only time he was by himself, the only time he retained any sense of his independence was when he went for a walk, and the walks were even more important to him now that the caregivers were there day and night. I completely understood – he wanted some privacy…some alone time. But he wasn’t safe by himself – so the caregivers followed him. Because his hearing was pretty bad and his eyesight was worse, they just followed right behind him. There was enough traffic noise added in, and it took so much of his concentration to focus on where he was going, he never did catch them at it.

He was crossing a busy street, caught his toe on the curb as he was stepping back up onto the sidewalk, and fell. And oh he was lucky, we were lucky: no broken bones, fairly minimal bruising and a scrape to his forehead which bled profusely as head wounds are known to do, but no concussion. His caregiver was at her wit’s end. She knew how close they’d come to a tragedy, and she said she just couldn’t do it any longer. It was too much of a risk: for dad, for her…for everyone.

This was the turning point for me: the place that finally enabled me to see that even though I knew it would absolutely crush dad to move him out of his home, the possibility that catering to his needs…desires…dreams, might cause injury or even death to someone else, be it his caregiver, or a pedestrian or driver trying to avoid hitting him…I couldn’t reconcile that possibility. We knew it was time and it was a sickening feeling for us, his three children. Any of the choices left to us were at best, heart wrenching. All the solutions were going to have bad outcomes. I knew this. It’s the first time in my life that I could not see any light…

This was it. We had to move him. He wasn’t safe there. He was dangerous to himself and to others. And we knew we’d been lucky…we had a good run. And we knew our luck could run out at any minute.

Years before, as it came to me that I had to move to Los Angeles to help my parents out…I had grand and noble intentions. I’d been assisting elders in many different ways for years up north where I lived. During a serious illness, probably in somewhat of a state of delirium, I just knew it was time for me to be with my parents. Intellectually this was a completely insane idea: I had a semi-estranged relationship with my father and a somewhat distant one with my mother. It was not my intellect that was standing in front of me pointing a long and firm finger to the south: it was my heart. What a mess. My intellect had plenty to say about this; “are you OUT OF YOUR MIND?????” “Los Angeles?” “Your father?”

I wanted to believe that our culture would/could somehow come together to make soft, safe landing places for our elders. That somehow I could be their village. If I had been able to think clearly about it I would have known that wasn’t possible, but a grand debate was raging at full volume in my head which took up so much space in my consciousness; I didn’t have room for clear thinking. I just went. It’s a good thing I did. It remains the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life and being my father’s daughter, I’ve done a lot of hard things. It was also a miraculous time in my life; my mother and I bonded in a most beautiful and tender way and – my father and I came to a state of grace that I absolutely could never have imagined possible, while he was still alive. A miracle.

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it’s too much

We sat on the couch next to each other, the couch that had been his home-base every evening when he came home from work, and now at age 94 and after sixty years, it was where my father spent most all of his waking hours. The couch had been his couch…mom and we three kids had to make due with the loveseat and whatever other seating was available, so it was with some sense of honor and a bit of trepidation that I found myself there with him.

The weather was uncharacteristically gentle; soft early-afternoon light came through the three windows just above my father’s small world, there on that sofa. It was warm enough that the front door was open and cool enough that there was no need for air conditioning. A quiet breeze inhaled and exhaled through the screen door. My brother and sister were off running errands, so we had this time to ourselves. We sat there and for some reason, we were silent.

I had arrived in Los Angeles the day before, joining my brother and sister at dad’s house. He was no fool – even if he did have dementia – he knew we were up to something. It was rare that the three of us showed up at the same time, and the truth is we just weren’t very good liars. Each of us in our own way was so heartbroken about the truth of why we were there; we probably didn’t do a very good job of hiding our grief.

What we were up to was that we had come to move dad out of his home and into assisted living, but not any assisted living. We had to move him into a place that was “secure”, meaning a place where basically, he’d be a prisoner. He was no longer able to make decisions that didn’t put him or others at risk. Many who’d walked this way before had told us that because of his dementia, it was a bad idea to tell him ahead of time. The time for that conversation was long past, and we had tried to have it with him. Whenever we brought it up, he’d slip out of the whole thing effortlessly, like an Aikido master getting out of a wrist-hold before anyone knew what had happened. He was adamant: he was going to stay in his house and he was going to be fine and he didn’t need any help, especially not from his children: end of conversation. Well, the time had arrived. It was time for him to move, he was not able to stay in his home and be safe and it wasn’t only his safety that we were talking about. He was a strong, healthy, stubborn and wily old man and his problem solving skills were getting more and more dangerous.

The week before I arrived in Los Angeles I was pacing back and forth, around and around in my mind – how could we NOT tell him? How could I not tell him? How could I show up at his house with this plan all ready to go, and not be honest with him? The thought of it made me sick to my stomach. I knew what that house meant to him, I knew what his independence meant to him, even though we’d already slowly but surely gotten him to allow caregivers first to visit every day and finally more recently actually stay with him around the clock. Between the incredible creativity of two dedicated young women, and with help from each of his kids, we’d been able to extend the time he was in his home – but that time was over. We all knew it.

As I prepared to make the heartbreaking journey I took to talking it all out with him, in my mind. It wasn’t even a conscious decision; it was just all I could do. I told him everything…why, where he would be living, what it was like, the good, the bad…everything. Over and over that week I begged anyone who was listening to somehow help this stubborn old man know that we were plain out of options.

Someone walked by the house talking, loudly of course, on their cell phone, and interrupted our reverie there on the couch. Out of that immense silence came this from my father,

“So how much are you getting for the house?”

He’d been a realtor thirty years before. “We’re not selling it dad. It’s your house.”

We sat for a few moments and then,

“How much do you think you could get for it?”

“Realtors do drop off their business cards all the time, but it’s your house. Do you want to sell it?”

“How much do you think we could get for it?”

“We haven’t talked to anyone, but I think the last assessment was about $600,000…isn’t that insane?”

He let out one of his long, slow whistles. He and mom bought it in 1947 for $14,000.

“That’s a lot of money. What are you going to do with it?”

“It’s your house, dad. If you sold it, what would you do with the money?”

“If we sold it, would I still live here?”

“No……if we sold it, you’d have to live somewhere else.”

“Where would I live?”

I could not believe we were having this conversation. I had to keep telling myself, “Just follow his lead.”

“Well…we’d find a good place for you to live.”

He shook his head slowly. His whole body shifted. It was a small, subtle movement, but he had just slumped.

Again he shook his head and said, “It’s too much.”

“The house?”

“It’s too much.”

In that moment I saw that my father, now almost blind from macular degeneration and with poor hearing although he thought it was just fine, surveyed his home, his kingdom, in the same way that bats see in the dark. Somehow he used a kind of echolocation to monitor the comings and goings and now, even though he didn’t have to actually get up and walk around to do it – it was still too much. As a young man he’d developed a whole routine that he went through every single night before he went to bed. He’d start with latching the chain on the front door, and then he’d turn off the front-porch light. Then came the swish of the curtains closing, next he’d pull the shades down. Moving into the kitchen he’d turn off the light, then head down two steps into the den that he’d had a hand in remodeling in the ‘60’s. He’d lock the back door, check that all the windows were closed and pull the curtains. Turning off the living room lights as he passed them, he made his way to his bedroom. Every night for most of his adult life he’d made sure we were all safe, and now, even thinking about it…it was “too much”.

“It’s a lot to take care of isn’t it?” He nodded slowly in agreement.

Somehow it had happened. I’d been able to tell him the truth. He knew it was time. I knew he did. And even though by the next day, well, honestly in 15 minutes, he would forget all of what we’d said, I knew that somewhere in his heart he’d heard that truth, and, he was ready. I also knew that he forgave me, forgave us, and still, I knew that next day was going to be the most excruciating day of my life, of all our lives. I was right. About everything.

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no stopping him

My dad was the first resident in ten years to escape from the “secure” assisted living complex that we’d moved him to a month or so after his 94th birthday. My sister and I had taken a preliminary tour of the place and then my brother joined us for a more detailed inspection before meeting with the Director. Aside from standard requirements about staffing, livability, etc., we were looking for places where dad could make an escape; because we knew him, we knew that he’d try.

He was a fighter…here’s what he used to say about death, although he’d never use that word: “I’m gonna fight it to the end” he’d snarl. And he did. Underneath this story of the man who broke the ten-year record, is woven the tattered fabric of our collective heartbreak: a glimpse of what life is like for millions of our elders…many of whom can’t or won’t attempt an escape like my father…they’ll just quietly waste away, right before our eyes.

Dad was just plain tough: he was the eldest of the four children still at home, who lost their father to tuberculosis when dad was eleven. They lived in dire poverty in Detroit during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. At age ninety-four, my father was strong and relatively healthy despite the fact that he had dementia, incontinence, was mostly blind from macular degeneration, and fairly deaf, although he didn’t think he was. With all these seeming infirmities, his daily routine right up to the day before we moved him from his home of sixty-one years, included walking one-mile, round trip, to the donut shop once or twice a day, or three times when he’d forget he’d already been there earlier. He was stubborn, cantankerous and basically unstoppable. It had gotten to the point where we could no longer find a way for him to remain in his home and be assured of his safety. That’s before we realized that no one could really give that kind of assurance, even when they said they could.

After our reconnaissance of the assisted-care facility, we met with the Director of the complex and told him we’d found two places that we thought were weak, as far as security went. Already he was eyeing us with a particular kind of look. We described a place in the backyard where the hilly landscaping was so close to the concrete-block fence, we knew dad would drag a metal patio chair to the fence and climb right over it. You should have seen the Director’s face when we told him of the problem. He assured us that no one had escaped in ten years, that they had a “state of the art” alarm system, and that dad would be safe. Next we told him that we’d found a gate that didn’t have a lock on it and dad would jiggle it until he figured out how to open it. Again the director made his assurances. He still wasn’t getting the picture, so we gave him examples of dad’s problem-solving technique, knowing that dad’s new problem to solve would be how to get out of there.

My father had refused to leave a house key hidden somewhere outside his home because he was afraid of an intruder finding the key and getting into his house, and truthfully he wouldn’t have remembered the key when he needed it, anyway. When I asked dad what he’d do if he locked himself out, he said with a bit of a growl, “I’ll just kick the door in”: this from a man in his nineties.

The day finally came when he did lock himself out. The back door was a lightweight, inexpensive hollow-core door and at first he tried to kick it in, but weighing only about 115 pounds fully dressed including his shoes…he just couldn’t bust the door down. That didn’t stop him: he wandered around in his garage and found a crowbar, somehow dragged it to the back door and smashed a hole in it. Then he reached his hand through and unlocked it.

The next time he locked himself out, my sister got a call from the neighbor across the street saying that she had just happened to look out their window to witness dad standing on a 5-foot aluminum ladder just about to climb in through his kitchen window. Luckily her husband was able to interrupt dad’s attempt, which if successful would have landed him right in the kitchen sink.

His third “problem-solving technique” was the proverbial last straw. After the crowbar and ladder incidents we scoured the garage and removed all the tools that we could find, along with anything else that seemed like something dad might hurt himself with. The next time he locked himself out, even after our precautions, somewhere he found a hammer and used it to break the window next to the front door, reached through the broken window and again, let himself in. The same neighbor just happened to see dad reaching his hand through the window and called us. Miraculously, he was not injured.

We knew, as soon as we heard about this last episode, that we had to move him out of his house. We’d been walking a fine line for months by then, trying to find a safe way that he could stay in his home, and with the help of some loving, dedicated caregivers, we had come up with many creative solutions for taking care of this rowdy old man. Even in our frustration and concern for his safety, we all loved that dad simply would not give up.

After hearing our stories, the Director realized that maybe it wasn’t just that we were overly protective children, but it seemed like he still thought we were exaggerating, and maybe nuts. One more time, he repeated his line that no one had escaped in ten years and that they’d take good care of him.

Dad wasted no time and began casing the joint the very next day after his arrival. He took the easiest route – forget climbing the fence. Here’s how he worked it: on the morning after he arrived, the first thing he did was simply try to get out the front door, over and over. Every time he pushed on the door, the alarm would go off. The employees got to know him quickly, knew they needed to keep an eye on him, but they weren’t prepared for quite such a rascal. He spent most of his time that first day, in the lobby, and noticed that sometimes the front door was locked but other times it was unlocked, to allow guests to come and go.

Although he did not completely understand how it all worked, the next day, he made a point to stand around and schmooze with the receptionist, while keeping an eye on that front door traffic. Subtly, he edged toward the door until an opportune moment arrived when there were four or five guests coming and going and dad simply blended himself into that little crowd and walked out with them. Luckily the receptionist realized what had happened right away, and dad only made it about 20 feet from the front door before one of the staff escorted him back inside. So, just two days after we moved him in, my sister got a call saying that he had escaped. Luckily he didn’t get far…he just got out. When my sister phoned with the news, she and I both responded in kind: we cheered. He did it! He broke their blasted ten-year record! But the elation was short lived…we knew he was not safe out on the streets and we knew he would keep trying.

Of course we were pissed off at Mr. Director for not believing us in the first place. We were also secretly quite proud of dad for being, well, for being that fighter that made it so hard for all three of us kids to get along with him, but in this case: “Way to go, dad.”

The next day when we went to visit him, he was right there in the lobby, scoping everything out again, no doubt looking for his next escape opportunity. We walked in, and I could tell that he recognized us, but he didn’t make any effort at a greeting. He was leaning on the reception counter with one elbow, looking intently down one of the long hallways. I went over to him and said, “Dad, aren’t ya gonna say hello to us?” “Shhh!” he whispered loudly, and nodded down the hall, not wanting to draw any attention by pointing with his long, thin finger. “See that guy rolling that cart? Shhh! Don’t let him know we’re looking at him. He cleans up around here. I know him. He’s a pretty good guy. See that garbage can on his cart? He must roll that cart outside to dump it somewhere, don’t ya think? I’m thinkin’ I can just climb into that garbage can and hide in it, and then when he rolls it out, I’ll just jump out and take off! Wha’ d’ya think?”

Even as I was concerned for dad’s safety, I loved that he was still not giving up. It was so much who he was. My brother, sister and I later on that day joked that clearly dad had watched the movie, The Great Escape, too many times. He wasn’t giving in. Not just yet anyway.

What we learned was that Assisted Care facilities are not really set up for patients like dad. Much later I learned that he would be classified as “ambulatory with goal-directed wandering”. I laughed out loud when I first heard that term: “goal-directed wandering”. “Goal-directed”…that was dad, for sure. Most residents were unstable on their feet at best, or, used a walker, were in a wheel chair or bedridden: translation – easy to control. And, truthfully, the great majority of the residents were women, who, in a gross generalization, were from a generation of women not inclined to plan out escapes.

We ended up moving dad, trying two other facilities…each time smaller. Over and over we’d tell them how dad was. Each time they’d give us that look, the one that said we were just over-protective children, and that we shouldn’t worry – they’d take good care of him. But they couldn’t. He was too much of a handful for any of them. He needed constant attention because he was strong and healthy – and he was always on the move, when he wasn’t asleep. They couldn’t keep a close enough eye on him – they weren’t used to having to keep track of a man who actually moved around on his own, and they didn’t have the staff to handle someone so active. We couldn’t afford to hire a private caregiver that would be solely responsible for him and sadly, there was even less of a chance that he was going to consistently take directions from any of his children. I could see the writing on the wall.

As there is an ending to each of our lives, his life ended according to his own particular style. In his uncanny way of sensing when there was a possibility of escape, he got up and wandered to a door during a few moments when someone in the third, and much smaller residence that we’d placed him in, had forgotten to reset the door alarm. He wandered outside, enjoying the freedom and fresh air that he so loved…and fell. He broke his hip and when they x-rayed it, the doctor said that the joint had completely shattered…he would never walk again.

He left his mark on the hospital in those first days. While heavily sedated with pain medication, he was approached by what appeared to him to be strangers who were about to mess with him and he kicked not one, but two nurses in a row, with his good leg: a fighter to the end. Less than two weeks from the day of his fall, when on some level, he knew that it was finally, truly time to go, he went so quickly that the caregiver that was sitting with him didn’t even have time to call for medical help. Even with death, in the same way we’d known him to be in every situation, when dad made his mind up to do something; there was no stopping him.