Floating

I feel lately as if I am just floating in the ether. Not really a part of my life or my family's life, detached and floating. Occasionally I touch down for a moment of connection, of reality and the float up again into the amorphous space that surrounds me. Here are some of the things I have managed to touch upon:

• My father calling for people from his past in the wee hours of the morning. Not frightened, often just calling "Hallo!"
• My mother weeping with the understanding that her children may be saying goodbye to their father for the last time.
• My siblings, laughing over a bit of family history and then brought back to reality by a sobering cough from the other room.
• My completely unresponsive father when I said one day that all his children would be here the next day. Then seeing him the next day insisting on being dressed, forcing himself to stay awake until my brother made it through a storm from California at 3 a.m. He heard me.
• My children enjoying their science lab while I was able to enjoy an hour with a dear friend who let me babble on and on incoherently in a Starbucks.
• My doctor, two hours behind schedule, listening to my every word and telling me it was OK to let myself go while my father let himself go. But that it was not OK to only be able to sleep with the help of Tylenol p.m. Me relishing the relief from her acupuncture.
• My brother complaining about the quarter mile inside the grocery store we had to walk from the meat to the wine.
• The sight of my mother having her pedicure on a treat spa visit with my sister. Completely relaxed, composed and happy.
• Me understanding deeply, for the first time, that Mark and I will not likely see the 60 years of marriage my parents have lived through.
• The bizarre experience of all four siblings showing up at the local fitness center at the same time to sweat off the grief and anxiety. It must be genetic. We paid a guest fee for the privilege.

It goes on, these brief landings on earth to witness the world around me. Then I am back in the fog. Floating to the next touch down point. I do and do and do. But all I do is touch the surface and disappear. This can't go on forever.

But this ether can be seducing. I haven't summoned the courage for more than a cursory glance at my email in over a week. My father has been dying for seven weeks now. He managed until a week ago to have more lucid moments than not. Now he is in his own hell of incomprehension and hallucination. His brain was so important to him. And to us. He held on to it for so long and now it seems that the Parkinsons has taken the one thing left to him. His increasingly vocal worry since his diagnosis has turned into his whole life. Worry over the weather, his finances (where there is no need to worry), the condition of the house (where there is, but all fixable), his worry over my mother (again, founded in reality), his lab (long since dismantled).

We have much wind tonight and I know Dad will be shaking the bed rails, wanting to check out the damage. I had the aide move the electrical source for his bed to the outlet service by the generator - we had a minor tornado there in August and witnessed only a flicker of the lights. It will likely be a bad night for my father. And a bad night for me in the ether.