No App for That

The five of us sat in our homes on opposite sides of the country looking at a screen.  I set up the sibling zoom meeting for the purpose of discussing our aging father’s care. Three of us live in the Philadelphia area, and two live in Las Vegas near our father. Debbe spoke first. “He’s getting difficult to manage—confused a lot. He said he saw mom in his hallway the other night. I had to remind him that she went to heaven. Debbie lives next door to dad and bears the brunt of responsibility.

“What do you need Deb?” my sister, Terry who lives a few towns over from me, asked. Debbie said that at that time, it would be nice if we could ease the meal burden. We decided to set up a schedule and agreed to send Dad food a couple of times per week. Satisfied, we planned to meet in two weeks and asked her to keep us updated with any changes.

              I called Debbie the next day to ask her feelings about the zoom call. “I’m just worried. I can’t keep up with him. He is refusing to give up driving but was in two fender benders in the past month. I heard my sisters’ words, but they did not register. Dad always drives. He is the one who picks me up at the airport when I when I visit—blasting Frank Sinatra, while passing the Vegas strip, on our way to his house. He drove from Philadelphia to Vegas, when he moved there twenty-eight years ago, while everyone else flew. I wasn’t yet able to process his quick decline. I listened to my sister vent, and hoped it wasn’t as bad as she was saying.

              I realized, in the following video call, that the initial zoom call two weeks prior was the first time the five of us had been together in over a decade. I was grateful for the digital space that allowed me and my siblings to connect. Even though it was a virtual room, it felt good to be together. After the proper amount of small talk, my brother in Vegas asked Debbie how things were going. She expressed to the group that he got the official dementia diagnosis and explained her concern about his driving. “He won’t give up his keys—said he has been driving for seventy years, and those minor accidents weren’t his fault." My East Coast brother argued that it didn’t matter if Dad didn’t want to give up his keys, because driving with his dementia diagnosis, is against the law. So, after seven decades behind the wheel, my sister told him that he could no longer drive and tucked away his keys.

              Before the meeting ended, we checked in about the meal schedule. I had been using my Uber Eats App, because it was easy, and fast. All I had to do was set the App to the Zip Code in Las Vegas and send him a cheesesteak, from a local restaurant. My sister said Dad was so excited when he unwrapped the cheesesteak, because he thought he was on Oregon Avenue in South Philadelphia. There was no reason to explain that he was three thousand miles from his old stomping grounds, so my sister let him have his moment.

              Two weeks ago, marked a year since our sibling zoom meetings began. My sister sent a text on our group chat, saying that dad was in the hospital. “Do you need me to come?” I asked.

 “Yes.” She replied.

I clicked on the Frontier Airlines app to the right of my Uber Eats App and found a discounted ticket to Las Vegas for the following week. The morning that I left, I clicked on my Uber app and a car appeared in front of my house within ten minutes to drive me to the airport.

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My father had the first television on his block growing up in South Philadelphia. He used to tell the story, about when all his neighbors loaded into his parent’s “Parlor,” to watch the little black and white screen. After the show, he would jump in his 56 Chevy, and drive to my sixteen-year-old mother’s house a few blocks away.  She never knew he was coming because no cell phones existed. They walked to the corner store to get their cheese and the other corner store for their produce. They pulled out a paper map when they went on a trip. They looked up at the way the clouds formed. They kissed under the stars, and they lived in color, they felt the wind, heard the sounds, smelled the smells with full attention.

Me and my siblings grew up in the seventies and eighties, without computers, and cell phones. But unlike my father, we learned to rely on these devices in our early adulthood. We became dependent on technology very quickly. When I sat with my father last week, he asked me if I was the divorced wife of his buddy from the Army Reserves. He was in the Reserves during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was about to say that I wasn’t but realized that it didn’t matter. Instead, I turned off the T.V., shut down my phone, and sat with him. “Tell me about your buddy, Dad.”