THIS IS GETTING OLD

Yesterday I visited, sort of, my dad at the assisted living facility next to the McDonald’s and across from the mall in Kingston’s west end. He often insists that I should rescue him, get him “the hell away from this place” and take him “home”. But recently I drove him past the Amherstview house where he lived for nearly forty-five years, until 2024 when my mother died and his living alone was unsafe, and he shows no sign of recognizing that house. Dementia wraps him up a little tighter every day.

I don’t care much for my dad. His recent mild, mostly polite, and sometimes even grateful costume, is unfamiliar to me, and I bristle when he puts it on. I’d rather he prove, for the duration of this bleach- and sick-scented end-game, that he’s still the same intensely self-centred, careless man I know so well. It’s just easier that way.

I’m not sure he recognized me immediately yesterday. I could see that he has to rifle through a collection of names. It was if a cop had marched me in front of him: Is this the man? Eventually he decided, Yes, that’s him, and we began again.

I checked the state of his room and then watched him eat from the hallway outside the dining room. He’d already forgotten I was there. The food here is awful and he struggled with it, then looked for an age at his hands in his lap, turning them this way and that, like something he was considering at a garage sale. When he got to his feet a staff member eased him into a wheelchair and backed him through the doorway to the shaded outdoor patio that gives onto the suburbs and, in the distance, the scarlet sign for the fish and chip shop.

I drove downtown and bought myself lunch at Saigon Delights. I sat near the window, where the wi-fi is stronger. A delivery truck pulled up and the driver loaded a cart with waxed boxes of bok chow, a flat of pale bean sprouts. He hauled it up the steps backwards and through the door. The routine, the technique, was exactly what I had seen them do with my dad an hour earlier. There is, I realized ruefully and for the umpteenth time, no getting away from him.