My dad passed away from Earth a little over a year ago. Today would’ve been his 89th birthday. I am one of four Zeanwick’s left on this planet. It includes: my cousin, a dad; his ex; and his son, a musician. (I don’t know how many of my ancestors were left in Poland after WWII.) My dad was allowed to die peacefully of old age, as he wanted, and I did my best to have made that possible for him, Walter William Zeanwick.
Late in life, my dad was devastated by the loss of two of his two children, especially since they had died just a few years apart. His son, Walter Jr., died of a seizure; his daughter of cancer; his wife, of broken heart syndrome. It was technically sepsis over an internal wound over which she refused medical attention, the main pump of life too depressed from the loss of her children to do anything about it.
I knew my dad was close to dying when he came down with dementia. I say “he came down with,” because it started like a terrible cold with eight months of frustrations and pathologically paranoid accusations. Then he called 911 and complained of chest pains. He was taken to Osceola Regional Medical Center, a fine hospital, and his doctor confronted me with the bad news. “He needs 27/7 care.” he added, “Can you do that?”
I couldn’t.
My dad was a simple man, as is usually the case with people born during the Great American Depression. He was born to Jewish parents in Muskegon, Michigan. As a dad, he worked all the time. He was a gardener too, mowing almost every week, and a home improvement amateur with some real skills. How he was able to live so long isn’t so much a mystery as it was a testament to living well by eating fresh fruits and vegetables all his life, which is, I suspect, why he was so tall.
“Doc,” I said, “His size alone would cause me a problem. I couldn’t get him off the ground if he fell, which he has done!” He thought a minute then offered to hold him at a local rehab center until I could find a suitable arrangement for him.
After some searching, I put him in a “nursing” home. It was more like an assisted-living facility filled with nursing assistants, or some such thing, but they “cured” his cold. (I must commend them: The Club at Haines City.) While they didn’t cure his dementia, they helped him become less paranoid in his new world at the facility, and they facilitated his move to be more like himself, a man with purpose.
“It’s tough to grow old,” my dad would say, and, yes it was tough on multiple levels. Psychologically, it was tough for him to remember that he was a widow, because my mother’s death was so traumatic for him. Physically, he was cruising The Club with a walker but he still had a habit of falling. He fell within a few hours of arriving at their facility. Socially, he had to make new friends, and he had to straighten out his thinking that I had put him in some two-story hotel, and other crazy thoughts.
Before The Club
He had days where he would call my aunt and tell her that “your sister and I are done” while explaining that my mother had divorced him. My mother had been dead for two years but my dad somehow couldn’t fathom that. He told me that he was prepared for life but not death. This death thing was a sinister ghost scaring the beeJesus out of him.
The worst aspect of dementia is that the victim is aware that they don’t know, but they have no control over it. Imagine flinging yourself off the roof of a building. For the split-second you know you will die, you are also aware that there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s dementia.
I realized that I was dealing with dementia when I laughed at one of his crazy thoughts. On one of those bad days, my dad told me that someone had come into his house and stolen his cookies. He was dead serious but I didn’t know that. Indeed, someone had stolen his figurative cookies, is what I thought. But they weren’t figurative, they were real. He had simply hidden them from himself … in his toolbox of all places.
Dementia is not a funny disease but people with dementia will say and do funny things. Someone stealing his cookies then returning them, he said. Someone stealing his bed sheets, then returning them. Someone trying to break into his house, trying to break into his mailbox, which was on lock and key. Locks with toothpicks in the key hole, I found. A kitchen cabinet door broken from his frustration.
When he came down with dementia, my dad had grown not to trust me or anyone for that matter. He was like a kid stuck in a haunted house, the paranoia intense.
The Honeymoon’s Over
The first few months at The Club, my dad began with good interactions with all of the residents, but after just five months there, the honeymoon was over. My dad believed he was in a hospital and wanted to go home, wishing he were dead, telling me I’m evil, and all sorts of other dementia-logic. He went from Mr. Hyde just few months back to his Dr. Jekyll persona, and back and forth, and so on.
All these years I’ve known my known my dad, I didn’t know he suffered from nightmares. The doctor prescribed Trazadone and that helped for the most part. It helped him get a good night sleep. That actually helped for a few weeks but the Dr. Jekyll side of his personality became loud and clear when he verbally sniped the kitchen staff for making him wait a few minutes longer for his dinner.
The good night sleeps and his increasing familiarity with his surroundings all helped, but not forever. Now, he was complaining of boredom since he felt there was nothing to do at the facility. Not true. But that really wasn’t his complaint. What he wanted was to be useful again. That’s what frustrated him the most.
A Purpose in Life
No matter what they tell you, palliative care is hospice care. It’s the beginning of our last stage of life on Earth. The purpose is to ease one into one’s own passing. My dad began his program in February 2023.
Nurses would come in dressed in their purple Vitas uniforms and take care of him. A physical therapist got him to exercise several times a week, which seemed to give him some meaning in his life. Then, he fell in love and something wonderful happened to him.
One day, the stuff of life came to him when another resident, I’ll call Babe, got caught showing him her goodies. He was caught “participating” and therein he was newly named Lover Boy. The reason? He was the only male in the facility with a full head of hair, lucky him, but it caught the eye of other babes at The Club.
He fell in love again in his last years of life. I have found that to have loved once in life is a miracle for many, but to have loved twice? Now, that was a seriously good life.
But, my father could not understand why there was a no-touching policy at The Club, and made it known by shuffling in a marching fashion right into the nurses’ station, sitting down with a thud, and demanding, “Why am I not allowed to touch anybody!?” It caught the only nurse in the office at the time by surprise but she wasn’t unprepared.
“It’s policy, Walter.” she said adding, “No one is even allowed the walk around hand-in-hand unless they’re married.”
He understood marriage. It’s what he had for 60 years with his one and only wife. With the answer sufficing his stress over the topic. He got up, slipped into his walker and left the nurse alone.
The Self-Starving Phase
I went to visit my dad one day about lunchtime and noticed that he had only finished half of his food. That was unlike him. We had always said that he had a tapeworm in him. Not anymore.
He didn’t even finish his coffee, the thing that kept him chugging all his days. Sausage links, pickles, peanut brittle: His favorite stuff, he didn’t eat anymore. And, he spoke softly, so much so I could barely hear him. He was becoming and did eventually become frail, skinny, his legs like the pictures we see of starving children.
The staff referred to his increasing fragility as his decline or that he was sundowning. Vitas, the most wonderful hospice care agency, called me twice a week to let me know their take on his progress. It was always positive with a chance of sudden death. Hospice began to remove unnecessary pills, like the aspirin and the lisinopril. They also left the DNR bracelet on him that he earned when he last visited the hospital.
It was a slow motion passing, that is, a slow motion arrival on death’s door. My dad passed in his sleep, exactly as he wanted.
His Departure
Walter W. Zeanwick died on July 10, 2024. He will be most remembered for his value of images. He was an amateur photographer with a large collection of family images. He also learned how to colorize the images, which was instantly popular to do when the technology first came out. To see some of them, click on the The Zeanwick Family button above.
Below is what I wrote about my dad shortly after he passed away.
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