The Dad Story Project

 


Encouraging fathers, one heart at a time

Peter’s Blog

I’m actually right-side up in this photo, it’s our yard that’s upside-down (which explains why my hat doesn’t fall off).

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March 2024
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S. Peter Lewis

Christian, husband, father, friend, and founder of The Dad Story Project

My string of days

  • I BECAME A SON:
    23443 days ago
  • the father of a son:
    14343 days ago
  • the father of a daughter:
    11461 days ago
  • a grandfather:
    3930 days ago

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Shouting into the fog

Shouting into the fog

EDITOR’S NOTE: This site has been all but dormant for months now because I just haven’t taken the time to update anything. My dad was diagnosed with dementia last winter (although we’d suspected it for years) and the floodgates of trouble opened up. I won’t go into details, but the tentacles of delusion, deception, and deceit go way beyond the diagnosis, and my sister and I and the rest of our family are all trying to pick up the pieces. And my 90 year-old dad is right in the middle of the mess, but he doesn’t even understand that there is a mess. Anyway, I wrote this back in May, and am only getting to publish it now. This has been, and will continue to be, one of the greatest challenges I have ever faced as a son, but I am determined to love, honor, and serve my dad more than ever. More to come…


Each morning I awake and sit up and swing my feet over the side of the bed and stomp them onto the floor and rub the sleep from my eyes and stand up and stare into the horrible face of dementia. It was the last thing I was thinking about when I shut my eyes last night. It will haunt me throughout the day. It’s my new favorite thing to pray about. “God, please help us.”

Confusion. Short-term memory loss. Poor judgment. Losing things. Inappropriate relationships. Losing track of time. Losing thoughts in mid-sentence. Paranoia. Anger. Standing in a room and not sure why. Resentment. Denial. The same questions repeated. Over and over and over and…over again. Doctor’s appointments. Court hearings. Attorneys (at three-hundred dollars an hour). Difficult phone calls. Loss of control. Exploitation. Distrust of people that have always been trustworthy. Can’t do simple math. Can’t draw the correct time on a piece of paper with a blank clock on it. Can’t remember the five things that they said they would ask about twenty minutes ago.

“Do you remember meeting with me last week?” Of course not.

“What did you have for breakfast?” No clue.

Pain. Loneliness. Despair would be an appropriate emotion, but it’s impossible to remember to feel that. It sometimes takes a reminder to get appropriately mad again. And mad at what? Oh, right.  

This has officially only been going on for months, but anyone looking in through the cracked window to the outside world would have seen the signs years ago. At first it was just written off as “eccentric,” as in “Oh, he’s always been a bit odd. He’s just clowning around.”

“What was your dog’s name when you were little?”

“There was a dog?”

“Hahahahaha.”

They call it atypical frontal lobe dementia and it is an equal-opportunity hideous thing. Anyone can get it. Doesn’t matter if you are rich, have advanced degrees, live in The Hamptons, and are adored by everyone. It may be caused by an interruption in blood flow, or maybe something else brings it on; it’s hard to keep everything straight. You might get it. You might not.

They say it can’t be fixed. Can’t really even be managed. There are drugs to take the anxiety edge off and keep the paranoia away; but that just blunts the tip of the nasty sword that is slicing away at the frontal lobe. Capillary by capillary shut off like so many valves. And that being done atypically. What does that even mean, atypical? What would be typical? I tell you what, typical sure ain’t normal, because normal is in some locked room and who knows where the key went.

Keys can just go places all on their own, you know.

“There was a dog?”

Each day worst than the last. The dimming spiral into grayness. If it weren’t for God, it would be hopeless. But He always brings hope. Yes, even in the swirling fog of atypical-I-hate-this-horrid-thing, God still brings hope.

Practically speaking, I know how this will end. There will be a day when most of the earthly efforts can stop. We can and will keep praying and hoping, but we will be able to stop doing without feeling bad about it. And it may well happen with a phone call and a few shouted words, because he’s so deaf.

“Hi Dad. It’s Peter…Peter Lewis…I’m your son…

Don’t let them wonder

Don’t let them wonder

Editor’s Note: During my early drive to work one recent morning I asked God for wisdom and strength, for the courage to do right no matter what, and for help carrying a very heavy load. When I arrived at my office, there was this poem in my in-box from my precious daughter, Amanda. It’s a bit cryptic if you don’t know what our family is going through, but it’s about my relationship with my dad (falling apart because of his illness) and my relationship with Amanda (the best father-daughter relationship in the history of the world). I burst into tears at the last line. I love her so.


For all the kids who were left wondering, who turn into parents. People give & receive love differently, your child may not be fluent in how you choose to express it. Don’t leave any doubt, words don’t need translating. Tell them every day, until they get so sick of hearing it they just say “I know.” I grew up knowing, I didn’t realize how profound that was until I was older, surrounded by broken adults who never knew. —Amanda Lewis

You say you don’t know what to do, what to say.
Your heart is too heavy, so it starts to pray.

He refuses to listen.
Your heart aches & your eyes glisten.
This man you call father,
Now can’t be bothered.

You wish to speak.
But you are tired and he is weak.
You wish to be heard.
But his memory is foggy & his perspective has blurred.

You need answers to hard questions, such as: “You’ve hurt me & you don’t know your family… Do you even care?”
But you’re greeted by silence & a confused stare.
He then mumbles how “You’ve got it all wrong…”
He says you’re ill-informed & goes on & on.

He is the father & you are the child,
Your claim is invalid & you remain unreconciled.
The long winded lecture then turns into some maintenance “project.”
It always ends this way in retrospect.

You come back home.
And collapse into the couch with a groan.
Defeated, you speak quietly through your hands.
I wait patiently for you to start so I can understand.

“…I hope Your father never becomes like him–a man who strives to hold onto nothing but ego & wealth at the expense of his family. I hope that’s something you never have to see.”

He looks so deflated.
His heart is heavily weighted.
I suddenly notice he’s got more laugh lines around his eyes, and how we have the same chin.
People often tell me we share the same grin.

His silent doubts & unanswered questions leave him falling apart.
My hero who always fixed my “ouchies” now sits with a bruised & heavy heart.
Because his dad never said “I love you” enough.
And I don’t know what to say, because mine never stopped.

Goodnight upside down

The man heard ringing and folded his book and set it down on the arm of the couch and stood wearily and walked across the room and lifted the phone from its cradle and put it to his ear and said hello and heard the deep familiar voice.

Happy birthday, young man.

Hey, thanks, dad.

You’re what, fifty-five today, right? That’s a speed-limit age.

Yup. That’s right. Pretty much forgot about it until somebody said somethin’ at work.

Just another day, right?

Yeah, no big deal.

Still, though, fifty-five sure is something…

The younger man stood in the middle of his living room and listened as the woodstove chewed through a piece of red oak while he talked to the older man about what sons and fathers talk about mostly when birthdays aren’t a big deal.

So, how much snow’d you get up there in Maine?

Not two feet, but not much less, and more comin’.

Here too, and I sure hate weather that you have to move around.

Yeah, no kidding. I wanted a heated driveway for my birthday, but my wife got me a cordless shovel instead.

And the younger man had to say the little joke twice because his father was as deaf as a mollusk; and it seemed even funnier when shouted so they both laughed loudly when it was clearly out in the air.

Fifty-five, gosh, the father said. And the son could hear and feel in the ensuing silence all those years hanging in the air and he knew his father was thinking that if he had a son who was fifty-five then he surely must be creeping up on some kind of ancient himself. And the pause continued while they both thought hard about the implications of that.

And then they had one of those quick conversations without any context or waypoints that two people can have only if their synapses are somehow intertwined across two lives and two hearts and two memory banks and four states and the line is clear and the timing is perfect.

Hey, do you remember…?

Yes! Of course I do!

But what was the last one?

Picture of kitty!

Oh yes, that’s right.

And the son turned and walked slowly through his old house while he and his father reminisced about a nightly ritual that was over five decades old yet seemed to have last occurred just last Tuesday.

Each evening, with a wink and a smile, the father would announce bedtime and grab his little son up and toss him over his shoulder and hold him by his squirmy little ankles and the boy would dangle upside down and hang on to little fistfulls of flannel shirt as they walked through the house toward the bedroom. Every few steps the father would stop and spin the boy around and the boy would behold something inverted and bid it good night. There were five stations between the living room and the boy’s bedroom, and they were simple and wonderful.

Night-night thing on the wall! (The boy didn’t know what a trivet was, but that’s what it was.)

Night-night light switch.

Night-night thermostat.

Night-night smoke detector.

Night-Night picture of kitty.

And then the father would swing the boy off his shoulder as a farmer swings a bag of grain and plop him down in his bed and tuck him in and kiss him and tell him he loved him and turn off the light and walk quietly out and close the door, almost but not quite all the way.

As they talked and remembered, the fifty-five year old man padded through his own house, his fingers sweeping lightly across his own trivet, light switch, and thermostat, and glancing up at his own smoke detector. He felt himself bouncing on his father’s shoulder. Saw the world go by, jiggling and upside down. Felt the bristles of his father’s twelve-hour beard against his cheek. Heard the loving whisper in his ear. Saw the door left open just a crack.

Late that night, as he lay in bed holding his wife’s hand, the birthday boy stared up toward the ceiling through the January blackness and thought about the five magical stations of his childhood home and realized that one was missing from his middle-aged home. He mentioned it softly into the darkness.

We really need to find a picture of a kitty to hang on the wall.

His wife stirred and whispered why.

It would just be so nice, and we already have the other things.

  

A poem for mom

A poem for mom

Yes, I realize this is called the dad story project, but this was too precious to dismiss on a gender technicality. My daughter Amanda wrote this little poem for her mom (who just happens to be my wife, Karen, which is always handy). You work for decades to give your kids a good life, and you wonder if they appreciate it. Yes, they do. Thanks, Mandy.


 

I asked my mother, tears pouring my eyes, “How many times can a heart survive being broken?”
She smiled softly, patting my hair and said, “Until the day it no longer has to. After all, why would it keep letting people break it if it found the one that holds its pieces together?”

My mom.
She always smells like lavender.
She holds me close as my heart trails down my face & splatters on the kitchen floor.

My mom.
All she offers is comfort.
And there is nothing I need more.

Here’s the link to the site where the poem was published.

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