Today wasn't as bad, sort of. We had a rough night because he kept getting up and eating anything he could get his hands on in the kitchen. Not a terrible thing, but since we caught him drinking hard liquor straight out of the bottle a few nights ago, I didn't know what he would try to eat or do if left unattended. I slept with my secret baby monitor in my room so I could get up when he did. It worked pretty well, until he yelled at me to stop watching him while he ate. Then I just waited in the living room until he went back to bed. One time when he got up, he ate 3 bananas in a row before I took the rest of the bunch. The next time, he ate 3 tomatoes, as if they were apples. The next time, he ate the remaining 2 tomatoes. Very bizarre.

He was in better spirits today and talking and smiling a little more. He also didn't seem to have as much trouble getting out of a chair. I did, however, start limiting how much we were feeding him by watering down his soup and adding milk to his eggs so that they looked like more food than it really was. I also tried to talk to him today about getting some exercise, because it's going to be harder for my stepmom to help him if he gets both weaker and heavier at the same time. He said he understood, but also refused to exercise or go for a short walk in the driveway with me. Sigh.

I arranged for a hospice referral and they're coming tomorrow at 11. My stepmom is heartbroken - she didn't realize it would come down to this so quickly. We warned the hospice coordinator that my dad is very resistant to outside (or inside, for that matter) help and they said they would send someone with experience with people like him. I hope this works out well...

One thing I'm puzzled about... so, I was able to engage him in short conversations this evening, which is nice. He seemed to be willing to answer questions but... I don't have any. I can imagine that after he is gone, I will think of a ton of things that I will have wished I had asked him, but at the moment, I am drawing a blank. I mean, I do wish I knew more about my mom and my childhood, but his memory of those days has been questionable over the last few years. And his version of history can be quite hurtful, so I'm almost afraid to hear what he remembers.

For my 35th birthday, for example, he wrote me a very long letter. It started out sweet enough - congratulating me for hitting a milestone like that, etc, then turned to a recount of my life from the day I was born. On the first page, I thought, "huh, maybe this won't be so bad after all!" and I kept reading. I was sorry by the middle of page 2. It turned into how stubborn I was as a child, and how much I hurt my mom by being so difficult. He had plenty of stories concocted about how I did certain "bad" things, but as far as I recall, some of those things were my brother's actions, not mine. The worst is when he got to the part about when my mom died. His facts were completely twisted around, and he spent a page and a half describing how I was out on a date when she died and all she wanted was to see me one last time. Now, she died a few days after my 15th birthday, at 5am on a Tuesday, and I certainly was not out on a date at that age or at that time. I don't know why he is remembering it like that. It really, really hurt that his memory of me is one that is so far from the truth. I confirmed it with my brother in case my own mind had played tricks on me, and although he is 2 years younger, he also remembers my version of her death.

So I don't know what to ask him. I do have questions, but I'm afraid to hear the answers because they are very likely to reinforce his negative opinion of me and it just seems pointless if it's not the truth anyway. Not to mention that he doesn't seem to want to talk much these days.

It's a strange conundrum. My stepmom and I watched a movie last night that hit very close to home. I don't recall the name of it, but the story was about a woman on her deathbed and two sisters trying to interpret her stories told while she was dreaming out loud. It seemed so similar to what I'm going through, but at the same time, I don't see it possible to get that kind of closure the way the two daughters did in the movie. And even more strangely is that I'm basically ok with that -- I'm just worried about possibly regretting it later.