General Discussion

Because I have gotten burned out on it. My father is still around but his personality is completely different. The person he is now is someone I wouldn't care to be around or deal with at all. It is so bad that his younger sister kind of looks at him as not being her brother anymore. She would drive to see him -- 16 hours, round trip -- only to have him refuse to even roll over in bed and acknowledge her.

He complained about the food in the senior living center where he resided, so she took him out to good restaurants. He wouldn't even finish the food he ordered and refused to acknowledge it having any worth or thank her for making the effort. I was constantly apologizing to staff for his behavior, only to have my sister come in later and treat them with suspicion because she took my father's delusional complaints to heart.

On occasion, I would be privy to what he told others about his children when he forgot who he was talking to, how he derided us for abandoning him. All that even though I was looking in on him every other day, going out and shopping for him and bringing things to him even though I battle mobility issues myself. I neglected aspects of my own life to go with him to all his doctor appointments and manage his health care and it didn't faze him.

He is utterly incapable of gratitude in his current state. Nothing and no one makes him happy even though he is surrounded by those in worse shape than him. In an ER unit one night -- he went in due to a possible UTI -- he started raising hell because the personnel beyond the door he tried to hail were ignoring him.

"These are the sorriest people in the world," he spat.

"Dad, you hear that noise, that rhythmic machine across the hall? That is a machine giving CPR to someone who just arrived by ambulance because they're having a major heart attack," I said. "That is what everyone is focusing on right now." It quieted him for a couple of minutes at least.

It might be easier to deal if I could remind myself that he was always there for us when we were growing up. But he wasn't. He left our home when I was about 8 years old. He wasn't a textbook deadbeat dad, but he wasn't far from it. We saw him a couple of times a year, sometimes with one of his girlfriends in tow and that was it. He was always behind in child support payments even though he had a college degree and my mentally ill mother with just a high school diploma was trying to raise two kids at a time when women had just been allowed to have their own credit cards.

Later in life, he started feeling guilty about his absence and tried to make it up. We tried to forgive him but it doesn't change the fact he wasn't cut out to be a father.