Now that I am watching Mom go through this, I wonder sometimes how it impacted Daddy. He was just 61 when he retired from teaching. He was head of the science department and found he was forgetting meetings and names. I can remember he would write notes to himself as reminders when I was growing up much as I have always done but the forgetting at that time in his life was different.
The year Daddy retired was the same year that my daughter Jessie was born. Daddy was already a big part of life to my oldest daughter, Brandy, because I spent a lot of time visiting Mom and Dad from the time she was born. When Jessie came along, Daddy not only had his little three year old granddaughter following him around but he was carrying an infant on his arm too.
My little family moved to Montana that year and Dad and Mom helped us move. I think he just wanted to be sure that his daughter and his little ones were settled in. I sometimes think if he hadn’t liked what he found out there, he would have packed us up and taken us home. We settled in well though and Daddy liked the little town so after their time helping us, they took a train ride home. We spent two years out there and wrote letters back and forth with Mom and Daddy every week. They visited with my sister and her children a year after we moved and then came back a year later to move us back home. While I enjoyed my time out there and learned a lot, I really missed being close to Mom and Dad and the rest of my family. I was so happy to get back home!
My daughters quickly took up their special relationship with Daddy when we returned. Daddy was the family babysitter, taking care of not only my little ones but my sister’s and sometimes those of my brothers. Mom and Daddy would take care of two or six or more grandchildren at one time. Daddy always said once you got past two, it didn’t matter how many you had!
It was a great time for the kids and while they had a lot of freedom on the farm, they had that firm and loving guidance of Grandma and Grandpa.
As time passed the kids grew older and my two were quite often alone with Mom and Dad. At some point, I remember having to pack lunches for them because they said that Grandpa would put peanut butter on a cracker for them but then scrape it off before giving it to them. By the time my girls were 11 and 8 – 8 years after Daddy’s retirement – it was obvious that it was time for them to take care of themselves at home rather than go to Mom and Dad’s. Within a year, Daddy went to the nursing home and two years later he died.
During those years I was so caught up in my own life that, while I knew what was happening, it didn’t have the same impact on me as it did with the girls. He was everything to them and they watched as they lost him little by little to Alzheimer’s.
He was (and still is) "my guy". I for some reason always thought of him as mine, just mine. I think when you are little and someone treats you so special, everyday, you tend to feel that way. I really did feel like I stood above the rest of the crowd. Funny, I bet that everyone felt that way :-)
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