Dad with his friend Jose
This post is my belated and longer than expected response to the “Obamacare Decision.” Belated because my father died in June and I was too busy grieving to weigh in on anything, let alone politics. Longer than expected because really, this post is more about my dad than it is about healthcare.
The bottom line is that the Government run healthcare changed my father’s life, and because of this, it changed ours. For the better.
In June the blogosphere was abuzz about “ObamaCare” even though Mitt Romney could arguably be called the Grandfather of the Health Insurance Mandate. Shouldn’t we be calling it Obamneycare? Nah. We should call it the 1989 Heritage Foundation Personal Responsibility Mandate, because that’s where it was originally cooked up. That some folks deem the requirement that one BUY a product with one’s OWN MONEY “socialist,” when it’s clearly fascist diktat, is a testament to the sorry state of the public school system, which apparently no longer teaches history or civics. In other news, the next big social problem – homelessness – will be solved when Congress passes a bill mandating everyone buy a house. Wait for it!
But I couldn’t be bothered to blog about “Obamneycare” or the Supreme Court decision, because my Dad was missing. Again.
Some may wonder how our family ever let things deteriorate to the point where a family member can disappear and we don’t call the cops, especially when the missing person is mentally ill. But when solitary, immovable obstinance is THE defining character of the person’s mental illness, one just rolls with it, and after awhile it starts to feel normal. Such was life with my father.
Dad wasn’t always obstinant and solitary, at least in my memory. Mom said he’d had an “emotional break” when he was in the Air Force, but when I was very young he was in a good place mentally, and he was a good dad. He was brilliant – a ’70s computer programmer – and kind and caring, good to animals (we had cats, and for awhile a lamb named Suzanne) and saw to my intellectual development at an early age. He taught me how to write when I was barely three.
I have good memories of lying on the driveway next to Dad on a hot summer night where he explained the planets and constellations. He said I should go to the Air Force Academy and become a lawyer. Those were happy times. I still have the stuffed animals he brought home from his business trips when I was just a baby: Pitiful Pooch, Teddy and Piggy.
1937?
Unfortunately by the time my sister was born my father was emotionally fragile and rapidly going downhill. She never got to know the dad that I once knew. All she knew was catatonia and mental hospitals, divorce and alcoholism, unemployment and homelessness. By then for both of us, visiting Dad on weekends meant captivity in his van while he drove around the Minnesota and Wisconsin countryside looking at birds and saying strange things. He loved birds. In the end it was a bird that killed him, but I’m getting ahead of the story.
When I was in college my dad, by then in his late forties or early fifties, disappeared for 3 years. I think he was just driving around, crashing on sofas, or sleeping in his car. At least he was wildlife-spotting on the Iron Range where he grew up, his world of big bossy immigrant families, iron mines, corn and cattle farms, and Anabaptist austerity. He had run away to join the Air Force to get away from his childhood, but he was, like his father, a solitary farmer-woodsman at heart.
Dad’s model airplane, displayed at his memorial service
At some point Social Services got a hold of him and things got more stable after that. Dad got an apartment, health insurance from the VA, an anti-depressant prescription and a disability check. He picked up an old hobby, building and flying model airplanes. He also got a bird or two or three: The last one was a cockateil named Jose. A few years later he qualified for Social Security and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief because he could afford the independence and solitude that he craved.
Still, he didn’t tell us about his early 1990’s heart bypass until his second operation, because “they made him call.” He was a terrible communicator. In fact, a few years later we didn’t find out grandma had died until after the funeral. Looking back on the situation I think a big part of my father’s mental difficulties came from not enough oxygen getting to his brain. He also had multiple undiagnosed food allergies that contributed to his depression, plus he developed Bird Lung from his pets. Since I know what oxygen deprivation feels like, I more easily can forgive him today for all the crazy stuff that he did or did not do back then, or said or did not say.
As he got older it was just simple things that caused us to lose contact: He lost his hearing aid and couldn’t hear the phone ring. He kicked the phone cord out of the wall and didn’t bother to plug it back in. I made sure to visit him every time I went home to Minnesota. Had I known in college that once I moved to new Jersey I’d only see my dad a handful of times before he died, would I have visited more often? Most certainly yes.
Late April I was on the phone with him, trying to talk him out of a road trip, because frankly he was a menace on the road and really needed to give up his license. Couldn’t he take the train instead? He responded in the usual manner: Play deaf and yammer away about birds or some suchwhat. When I shouted so loud and insistently that at least he get a cell phone just in case he van broke down, he promised to look into it. Also called “Yessing them to death.”
Weeks passed. No call, no answer. This time it felt different: I was having visions of my father as a young man, the way I saw him when I was three years old. To me that was a sign that things were near or at the End and I knew I needed to do something. By then I’d gotten used to checking up on him by way of the apartment management and did so. He finally called, and shared with me the fact that he’d recently been confined to a wheel chair with an oxygen tank and couldn’t go on his road trip. Could I come out in July and drive him to the family reunion? For the moment at least, the bad news was the good news: Being confined to a wheelchair meant he wouldn’t be driving anymore.
I found the social worker who took care of the residents at his apartment and long story short, it took me and my sister two weeks and three or four social workers to find an open bed at a nursing home that accepted Social Security and medical assistance. My mother, her husband, and my dad’s sister and her husband were all very helpful in our absence, especially when it came to Dad’s apartment. During those two weeks Dad was in a private nursing care facility that did not accept insurance. Jen and her kids flew out and I made arrangements to come out in July, which was a bad call on my part because Dad didn’t have that kind of time. That’s Jen holding dad’s hand below.
But before that, Dad and I had one last phone call. He did most of the talking, and I did not bother to interject with my opinions, or correct his misperceptions, because really, there was no point to it. He just wanted to get it all out. He assured me that there was no reason to worry, that he was getting the best care in the world, and that he was happy and looking forward to being with his father again, because he could talk to “all of them” now.
“I know,” he said, “Because I know your background, that “pagan” stuff that you do, that I don’t need to explain these things to you.”
That’s when I knew he was having intermittent out-of-body experiences and visiting the people he loved. “You understand these things. I know you’ll be okay and that you know I’m okay.” I said yes.
The Veterans Administration hospital at One Veterans Way, Minneapolis MN. A third of the nation’s 24 million veterans get their health care from the VA.
The next day Dad became grumpy that things weren’t going his way. I understand his meeting with his caseworkers was, um, interesting. I knew it was his M.O. to mentally “check out” when he percieved people – especially women – trying to control him. He’d barely gotten settled into his new nursing home situation before a nervous medic called me in the middle of the night with bad test results. I agreed with his recommendation and had him transferred to the VA.
Dad with the grandkids
I didn’t freak out when Spooky heard a man’s footsteps in the house the morning before the day that my father died. I knew we had to get to Minnesota soon and was just trying to make professional arrangements for the cats, because there were too many litterboxes to ask a friend to take care of. On June 24, a Sunday, for some strange reason Spooky and I decided to watch a movie before breakfast. We never did that before. What person in their right mind would do anything before breakfast on a weekend? The movie was called A Wedding for Bella. The plot involved a couple trying to pull off a wedding before the family matriarch died. The couple failed: She died before the wedding and that’s when I knew we weren’t going to make it to Minnesota in time to see Dad alive, let alone for him to see me and Spooky get married. I ran to the bathroom and cried and cried.
Spooky wanted to come to Minnesota with Bunny and me, but since we couldn’t find a pet sitter he reluctantly stayed behind. Dad died while Bunny and I were at the airport waiting for our flight, so we had to say our goodbyes at the morgue. I knew that waxy popsicle was not my father. His body was an empty shell that failed my father when he was but a young man, a defective vehicle that had deprived him of most of what he valued. He was happy to shuck it off, so why was it so hard for me to say goodbye to it?
Dad’s memorial cake
Of course, as every adult whose had to attend to the affairs of a recently deceased loved one, that was not the end of it. There was an apartment to clean, accounts to close, headstones to pay for and final arrangements to make. We’ll be driving out there next week to attend a family gathering in my Dad’s honor. We’re going to put his ashes in on of his planes and . . . We’ll think of something.
All in all however, I have only good things to say about my recent experience with so-called “Government Healthcare.” The staff at the VA were efficient, professional and kind, and even the newbies and the volunteers were helpful. This competence is contrasted with the staff at the two privately run nursing homes we did business with, who were more like the Keystone Kops, kind but utterly clueless. The place that took medical assistance couldn’t answer our questions, didn’t know where he was, who his social worker was going to be, couldn’t locate his personal effects until at least a week after he died, and even then we had to make two trips. The “good” nursing home, the one that didn’t take insurance, returned my call 2 weeks after I tried to find out how much it would cost, only to be told they had no record of my father ever having been there. Then they sent my sister a bill.
The VA knew what it was doing. They gave my father dignity in death and I’ll always be grateful for that. In a way you could say my father’s whole adult life is a testament to what public assistance and so-called “Government entitlements” can do for individuals and families. I wouldn’t want to live an America that didn’t have them.
Jen scatters Dad’s ashes at the bird sanctuary he loved
The FBI complaint alleges that in October 2011, the fellow Crump sourced the raw materials to make ricin and said he and his buds were going to make 10 pounds of it and disperse it in various cities. He discussed having a “bucket list” of government officials, business leaders and members of the media who needed to be “taken out” . . . because that would solve . . . uh . . . what problem exactly? I didn’t get that part. Maybe I need another drink.
Then pour yourself another because it gets even better: All four suspects reportedly retired from government agencies or contractors. These Geriatric jihadis all used to work for the government and are all now pissed off at all those government employees! You see it’s all those OTHER government employees, destroying the Constitution. Apparently they suffer no cognitive dissonance from this. They don’t realize that, following their own logic they are part of their own problem and could’ve saved everyone the trouble by sniffing some ricin.
Now it’s time to add a handful of crazypills to your bourbon chaser: The man who inspired this terrorist cell is
In both movies the Crown faction wins, and at the end we are relieved to discover each protagonist is not really dead despite the fact that he probably should be. Let that be a lesson to the Krauts, I suppose. Then again the Crown financed both movies, so there is likely more than a little bias to them. These two movies could mark the survival of, and triumph over, an epic assault on British-American social values and means of exchange, but as the Cherman faction says, ‘Fur uns ist der Krieg niemals vorbei.’ This war will never be over. 
Anyway, back to the noseless thing. What does it mean? I can’ only venture a guess. Remember this guy? It’s the modern Peter Pan, the magical boy who didn’t want to grow up. Fearing the aging process is arguably a proxy for fearing death, and that’s the small thread I’m grabbing to drag him into my essay. Jackson used his talents to achieve his idea of “perfection” but the more he tried the worse things got. Inwardly focused, Jackson slid down a spiral of self-loathing as he 
Meanwhile Voldemort and Schmidt attempt to mold the world into their personal utopias, societies of greatness where they would live as gods walking on earth. Not surprisingly, with the exception of their homogeneous minions, the world is repelled and fights back. Consequently Voldemort’s and Schmidt’s resentments, stemming from their hatred of the difference between the way they thought the world ought to be and the way the world really is, degenerate into murderous rage. Each embarks upon a deadly rampage against the very people they tried to lead to paradise.
The movies’ antagonists are not inwardly focused like Michael Jackson, because that would have made for two really boring movies. Instead, Voldemort and Schmidt are outwardly focused: They project their rage at anyone or anything that irks them, including their own soldiers, and set out to destroy worlds that do not bend to their demands. They want to watch the world burn – hell, they want to set it on fire – so they may rebuild new worlds in their own images. In that sense both Voldemort and Schmidt resemble Marxist idealogues. Marxist revolutionaries don’t want to “change” society; they want to destroy the old order to create a utopia. 
Beware the agent provacateurs. No, not 
The stakes are really high here. This is a bankster faction war, with an “enemy within” as perceived by the present Powers, with double and triple agents working at cross purposes to one another. We’re in the middle of an End Game. Wannabe anarchists, if you think you can figure out who’s who in this clusterfuck, you’re delusional. You can’t tell the black hats from the white, so be really, really, really careful about picking sides. If you do pick sides, just know that someday you may despair that you picked the wrong one.
I only wish there were more, not less, 
Lettera di Corsa
Lettera di Corsa 