Alzheimer Dad

Dad's been gone since 2003.  I had my brain aneurysm while he was dying in hospice in El Paso, my poor cranium unable to process his demise, his horrible illness of Alzheimers. He asked us to pull the plug long before he became non compos mentis, and he died slowly in the searing desert heat, with the nurses pushing tranquillizer suppositories on my sister and me, the tacit understanding being if we put my Dad down to hasten his end, they would  not  be in the way.  In fact they were trying to facilitate the experience.  He was such a good singer, but really didn't get where he could have gone, had he had better management. His girlfriend asked why he hadn't gone far on his own, after his group, the Encores broke up.  Had he had a good manager, a financier, a backer, he would have  done more. .  I can only analyze now. He decided to be a work a daddy, and worked as a sales guy and a wedding singer in order to bring in dough to buy houses, and swimming pools, and cars  and boats and months in summer camps and piano lessons and tap lessons and lavender bushes and doll houses, and acting schools and film schools, and university fees and interior decorators and horseback riding lessons.  He supported half of my mother's family at some time or another, Christmas gifts for the indigent members of the fold.  He loved politics, particularly populist politics.  He hated monarchs, but admired the rich, especially those who never had to work for their living.  His last girlfriend had been a trust fund baby, and he admired her family as much as they detested his.  He didn't value his working class roots as much as he could have.  He wanted my sister and I to live like rich kids, or his perception of what that was.  He sacrificed his career for his family, because the music industry was too iffy for his Depression Era values.  When he died, I had headaches that were due to the blood leaking in my head, which I had attributed to grief.  Only years later, during yoga class, was I able to leak thick viscous tears that had been deeply embedded in my tissue.  When I would try to cry when I had 50 staples in my skull, the pain would make me stop. I would lay in the cold little room and sob, and take aspirin, and attempt to get to the bathroom to pee or to the kitchen to eat directly from the refrigerator.   I moved the sofa into the dining room, and watched tv sideways for months following surgery.  Noone visited  me in my Staten Island isolation ward, and I ate ice cream, looked around the rooms seeing double, and practiced not dribbling liquids down the front of my chest.   One of my eyes had gone out of whack, owing to the pressure of the aneurysm on the optic nerver behind my  eye. I was dropping crumbs like a child or a senile senior.  I didn't give a shit.  I ignored my love interest, refusing his phone calls.  I gained weight.I figured I was supposed to die, only I had a teenaged boy at home, to raise, so I pushed on.  Happy Father's Day, Phil.  I miss you.