Around eight, we left my parents’ house for Middle’s place. Middle has a great house with plenty of room, and she’s always kind about letting us stay with her when we visit.

After we put kids to bed, Middle wanted to talk about Mom and Dad. As you might suspect, I had some concerns as well. But what Middle wanted to talk about specifically: there is no official paperwork declaring Dad legally incompetent.

Middle is very by-the-numbers, and finds comfort in rules. She’d brought up this problem before many months ago, but I hadn’t fully grasped why it was bothering her.

After all, a person only had to speak to Dad for ninety seconds to grasp he wasn’t competent. And when my mother and Middle had fought on this topic previously, Mom had simply said she couldn’t bear to make Dad stand in front of a judge, where he would hear someone in authority strip him of basic human rights.

Plus, Mom had us sign very legalese looking papers that said if all three children stated one parent was mentally incompetent, then we (children) were to receive full control of their estates/bank accounts/medical decisions/etc.  Dad’s signature was down on the dotted line, dated back fifteen years ago, long before his diagnosis. Which, holy shit, that is a lot of trust to put in your kids.

Middle’s current distress: in the land of law & order, you need a specific form with all the right signatures and stamps to declare someone incompetent, not just some homemade, lawyer-approved note from your mother.

Middle’s specific concern was that if Mom died, we would have to put Dad in a home. In this scenario, if Dad didn’t want to go (and all evidence points to him not wanting to), we would need to call the sheriff to help transport him.

If we don’t have the exact legal papers showing that we have the authority to put Dad in a home, the sheriff might

a) refuse to help move Dad.

Or much more likely, given Dad’s level of functioning these days,

b) see that Dad falls into the legal category of ‘gravely disabled’ (unable to care for himself).

(Here Middle confessed to multiple nightmare scenarios that keep her mind occupied: Dad running out in the street naked, unwilling to follow her instructions to come home; Dad jumping out of her car, or grabbing the wheel, in an attempt to return home. Dad sobbing at learning he must move to residential, grabbing onto furniture to secure himself to the premises, fists swinging.)

Which would result in the sheriff taking legal custody of Dad and putting him on an involuntary psychiatric hold.

Upshot being that instead of going to the dementia wing of the residential program of our choice, Dad would likely end up in a state run mental hospital, until we could work the system to get him out.

This new spin on things lit a fire under my butt like you’d better believe. We needed that paper!

The second thing Middle brought up is that we need to put Dad on the wait list for some residential homes. Because apparently it is easier to defer if a spot comes available before you need it, than to get into a residential program when they’ve never heard of you and you need a spot pronto. And since slots open up when people die, it’s kind of hard to ballpark the length of a wait list.

Our conversation ran long past bedtime. Understandable. Middle is up here all by herself, watching all the near misses (Mom’s been to the E.R. twice in recent memory), trying to come up with an end-run around Mom’s absolute refusal to

a) get those papers

or

b) get Dad familiar with a residential home or other caregivers by say, sending him to daycare. What would Middle do with Dad, while also trying (in her nightmare scenario) to arrange hospital/funeral for Mom?

This is what Middle kept saying: “I have clients booked for three months out. So it would take that long before I could devote full time to sorting Dad out.”

What I heard, every time she said it: “It will take three months of full time work before we can get Dad into a residential program. Time I don’t have.”

Each time she said it, I felt more cold faced and ghoulish. Finally, I interrupted her, desperate to tell her this thing I didn’t want to have to tell her: “There is no way I can come up here for three months.”

In my defense, sometimes my sister thinks because my kids are older and my job hours more flexible than hers, I don’t actually have any real obligations.

“OK…that’s not what I said,” Middle said in the ‘here are the facts’ voice she uses with her small children.

But something in me still believes wholesale that what I misheard was the deeper underlying truth. If there is any kind of wait list at all for residential living, and Mom dies, and we have to go get a court order to declare Dad incompetent, someone will have to go over to that house and take care of him 24/7. It might be months. And it’s true my kids are older, my job hours more flexible.

I could only imagine the first few seconds of what staying with my dad, in that house, under the conditions of my mother’s grave illness or death would be like. But those seconds played out like a horror movie fun house, the kind where as you walk through the door, the floor rotates so that you can never get your balance, so you can never get either in or out.

Longtime readers will know this about my dad: He did not want this. All my life, he was adamant that if he couldn’t work, he wouldn’t want to be kept alive. He deeply believed his purpose on Earth was to be useful and to take care of other people. He was a doctor and he knew what the end of life looks like. He refused to visit his own parents on their deathbeds. He refused to do caretaking duties for his own mother, even when his sister begged him to come out and share the responsibilities. I don’t know how I can show you any more clearly through black and white letters on a screen how the father of my childhood would be livid to understand the position we have let ourselves get into.

It almost seemed supernatural, that place where the stitching of reality came apart between what Middle said and what I believed to be true. In it, I felt my Dad’s spirit so strongly. Which is weird to say, because he is not dead. But in that place, I started to understand what I needed to say to my mother to help my sister. But to tell you about that part, I have to first tell you about Saturday.

Up next time: Saturday.