Sudden Weight Loss Helps me Prepare

Yesterday, I fired up my action camera and filmed my dad during our daily visit. I’m glad I did, because I don’t know how many more conversations I’ll have with him.

My family is dysfunctional, so we have very few photos, movies, and videos compared to normal American families. I believe the last time my dad appeared in a home video was in about 1991. He was steering his yacht, and his sister was filming. He gave her the finger.

His sister’s family was also dysfunctional, but they were high-functioning, so none of them are felons or drug addicts, and they all married. My aunt beat her stepdaughter regularly, but she shot a lot of family photos and videos.

My camera is a 4K model. I don’t see the point. If I shot a 30-minute video in 4K, I would have to buy a new hard drive just to hold it. I filmed my dad in 1080p, and it was still way more detailed than it needed to be. You don’t really want to capture everything when you film old people. I think I’m going to shoot in 480p from now on. It’s more than adequate.

I asked him a few things about his family. I will never get to know these people the way I should have when I was young, and I have no one to pass the information on to, but I figured I might as well learn a few things while there was still time. Because dementia erases older memories last, he can still recall a lot about his relatives.

I wanted to prove my dad had changed. That’s the main reason why I filmed him. No one who knows him will believe the things I say about him unless they see video. He kept telling me how great I was and so forth, and he talked about Christianity and heaven. He is a new person. I had to document it.

Today, two interesting things happened. First, his cremation urn arrived via UPS. Second, I found out he had lost 28 pounds.

I ordered the urn from Amazon a couple of days ago. I did not want to find myself struggling to tie up loose ends after his death. I knew it would be smart to have it on hand in advance. Imagine having someone cremated and having to wait several days for the urn.

The Amazon ad calls it an urn, but it’s really a box. It’s nearly cubic, and the sides are cherry veneer. It looks perfect. I’m surprised to see how nice it is, given the low cost. It certainly looks better than the one my aunt got in 2014. It looked exactly like a beer cooler. That’s kind of appropriate, since my uncle used to make her get up to get him beer. She tore her finger open on a rocking boat in a heavy sea, and while we were headed for shore to get it stitched up, he told her to get him a Coors Light.

The urn makes me a little uncomfortable. I’ll have to decide where to store it. I don’t want to see it every day.

Now for the weight loss. My dad has been losing weight slowly for the past several years. Between our move in 2017 and December of 2018, he went from a pretty consistent 217 to 210. To most people, that wouldn’t mean much, but he was more sedentary than ever, and he ate a lot of ice cream, so he should have gained weight.

Today he weighed 182 pounds. Prior to this, I had never known him to be under 185. Back in the Seventies, he went on a diet and got down to 185. I remember, because it was a big deal to him.

Oddly, until he was weighed today, I didn’t realize he had lost weight. He still looks fairly heavy. He still has a spare tire. I don’t know what’s happening. I think he dropped a lot of muscle.

The cardiologist told me the weight loss could be an end-of-life phenomenon resulting from multiple illnesses, which she called “co-morbidities.” He has congestive heart failure and atrial fibrillation as well as dementia.

I did some Googling, and I came up with this term: “cachexia.” It means unintentional weight loss coupled with disease, more or less. It can be caused by a lack of appetite, but it also describes a condition in which you eat normally and still waste. It means your body doesn’t process food correctly any more; it stops rebuilding itself.

My dad’s appetite is fine. It’s not what it was 10 years ago (excessive), but he eats whatever they put on his plate. That means something else is happening.

It’s not cancer. When cancer patients lose weight, it’s because they can’t stand to eat.

The Internet says there is a cachexia variant called “cardiac cachexia.” People with congestive heart failure get it. Heart failure causes fluid to accumulate in the body, and this prevents nutrients from being absorbed. The fluid can cause swelling which masks the wasting.

Maybe that’s what’s happening.

This part of my dad’s life has been very turbulent for me. Things are changing quickly all the time. It’s not possible to assume a stance and hold it.

God has changed my dad’s personality tremendously over a period of a couple of weeks. My dad is giving me things I have been wishing for all my life. How can I want this new person to leave? On the other hand, my grief renews itself many times every day. I get reminders all the time, telling me he’s nearly gone. I take down the little notes I put up to help him remember things. I find and clean up little messes he made, for the very last time. I throw out things I know he’ll never use again.

Today I ordered a normal toilet seat for the master bath, to replace the elevated seat I installed a few weeks ago. I refuse to call it “my father’s bathroom.” I can’t allow myself to hold on like that.

I love my father, and I don’t want him to go, especially when we’re praying together and we’ve been delivered from frustration and anger, but I can’t live in this state for the rest of my life.

If my dad is in the final weeks, it’s all right. It’s not a crisis to be confronted and defeated. I feel like I should find him new doctors and come up with a strategy to make him gain weight and regain clarity, but then after my mother died, I kept feeling we should go get the body, revive her, and try something new. I didn’t seriously believe we should do that, but I had the feeling. It kept coming back for months after she was gone. I have an irrational resistance to giving up, and I know it’s irrational. There is nothing anyone can do.

It’s astounding to get so much help from God during this time. This could have gone much worse. I thought my dad would straight-arm God until the last minute, and I expected to suffer the whole time. I thought he would wait until he was breathing his last to repent. It has been nothing like that. We get together and talk about our love for each other, and we pray as a family. When my dad goes, I won’t have any lingering resentment to subdue. I will be as satisfied as a man with a father like mine can be.

My dad could have continued casting his burdens on me instead of God, but that has not happened. He has become gracious. How many adults can say that about their difficult parents? What a gift I’ve been given.

After he goes, I’ll have video to prove my story is true. Oral testimony is fine, but video is much more powerful.

I hope the end isn’t needlessly protracted. I don’t want to sit by his bed for three weeks, waiting for the familiar sound that says it’s over. He would be better off going in his sleep. I don’t have to be there to see it. I’ll catch up with him later.

My mother must be even happier than I am about his salvation. He’s leaving me in a cursed world, but she’s about to meet him again in heaven, and boy, is he improved.

I wish I could explain these things to him now, so he could have some understanding of what’s going on. It doesn’t matter, though. When I catch up with him, we will know everything we need to know, without saying a word.