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drank from horns and cauterized their own lopped -off limbs, a tradition which kept everything in Order: tools, feelings, women, children, people, color. Father, I finally asked for your love. I was stunned in the silence while you struggled like a child attempting to play a violin. I hugged you awkwardly. For this, I had come home. Sections of your colon and stomach had been removed, your knee replaced, 13 times under the knife, you said. You were repeating yourself, mixing up the punchlines, the characters were limping in your stories. Organs, children, memory then mother. Trumped by death and Alzheimer's: gone your house, your independence, and we placed you in a Senior's home on some Pennsylvania mtn. too far for your few living friends to visit and begrudingly returned to our own worlds. In time we moved you to a 28d home closer to what used to be home: Alzheimer's advanced swfflly and anywhere was foreign. When all the money drained away into intensive care we could only situate you in the County Home: clean, sparse, desolate, the end of the road where you ruminated for the last 7 years of your life, mumbling incoherently about escape; eventual elopement with nurses, your future jobs as Head Chef at the State University, German Professor, and then President of the Universe. We named your experience Alzheimer's: an old man in diapers whizzing ceaselessly in his wheelchair in the bare-boned Theatre of Purgatory. |