THE POWER OF A SPONGE BATH

“Never underestimate the power of a sponge bath.”

So said my lifelong friend Steve Abelman after I had related to him the story of my dad’s love affair at the age of 84 with a woman half his age.

To say I was caught off guard by my dad’s late life romance is my understatement of the year. After all, my dad had never once given me the impression of being susceptible to romantic inclinations, and rarely even seemed capable of displaying any affection at all. He is a crusty WWII vet who wants things done his way, makes no attempt to follow social protocol and niceties, and gives the impression that people are expendable and a burden to him. (My dad got into a fight with his only sister when they were in college and they never spoke again. Now that’s a FAMILY feud.) Add to this mix the fact that Marilyn, his love interest, is a short, rotund, pie-faced woman whose too tight clothes left no roll of fat to the imagination. Marilyn also has that attitude of entitlement that can be repulsive even when worn by the young and beautiful. A looker, she ain’t. A manipulator, apparently she is.

I originally hired Marilyn to care for my mom who had mid-stage Alzheimer’s disease at the time. Marilyn was to take over the caretaking duties that my dad had valiantly performed for 3 years, which efforts led to his falling ill and being hospitalized. Upon my dad’s release, he too came under Marilyn’s care, though really, I think spell would be the more accurate term. Within weeks, I could sense a shift in my dad’s demeanor and attitude and it wasn’t long before he expressed a desire to “help” his new family with money. RuhRow. Despite my parents still being married and living together, apparently my dad, with an unknown amount of encouragement from Marilyn, was making plans to move in with her and at some point get married. MARRIED! My dad WAS IN LOVE WITH this repulsive troll of a woman and wanted to toss aside his sick wife of 50+ years (MY MOM!) to be with her. My dad, in LOVE?? It simply couldn’t be; I had never once heard him even use the word in a sentence let alone express his love for another person. Yet here he was, at the age of 84 telling me as matter of factly as if he were ordering a corned beef sandwich on rye at Pumpernik's, that he was in love with Marilyn and wanted to marry her. HUH!?

Now don’t get me wrong; deep down I’m really a softie and have had my moments of romance, both good and bad. I recognize the crazy like qualities and behavior that can result when one falls in love and have done some really stupid, and in hindsight, pathetic things while in the throws thereof. But having gone through that stage of life and now being settled fairly comfortably in middle age, I had developed the belief that I and most others were much less susceptible to again falling victim to acting like an idiot in love. Obviously I was wrong since the person I probably had heretofore considered the LEAST likely to fall in love was now IN LOVE.

So what happened you might wonder; was there a happy ending? Um, no. Things got kinda ugly at this point. I stepped in and had my parents declared incompetent and incapable of handling their own affairs, and I essentially took control of their lives. While my mom didn’t understand what was transpiring, my dad was understandably a bit peeved. So much in fact that he stated he’d like to have me killed in front of a roomful of people including the probate judge deciding his immediate fate. (It was not a great strategic manuever on my dad's part, but like I said, he was peeved, and had found himself at an incapacitation hearing for a very good reason.)I also filed criminal charges against Marilyn and did my best to run her out of my parents’ lives.

Looking back on what has transpired, it’s still impossible to know if I did the right thing or acted selfishly in denying my dad a last chance at love. For while I lorded over my parents with the self-satisfying belief that I was doing the right thing, my poor dad was heart-broken and pining away for his lost love. After all, despite the complications created from my dad’s new affair, love comes sparingly, if at all, especially late in life and, as they say, it’s what makes the world go round. Maybe in my haste to keep my dad from giving away my parents’ estate (and my inheritance!), I lost sight of the fact that being in love is something to cherish and perhaps was actually a rare gift to my dad after a very loveless and painful life. Maybe. Though the fallout from this series of events has proven to be very painful and disturbing to my father and I on many levels, I can't help but recognize that there is a very (obvious) life-affirming lesson to be learned here. Its one that has to do with both aging and love and surprises in life:



If you don’t have any kids, they won’t ever meddle in your affairs.