If the devil is in the details, I have a close personal relationship with him these days. With all the hithering-and-thithering which has taken place, and the emotional tax that has been levied at the toll booth of Dad’s illness, I’m beginning to suspect I need my own personal assistant.

I wrote about this before, my not having nearly enough hands to do what needs doing, but this might reach to a deeper necessity. If I want extra hands to help with the laundry, I need an extra brain to keep the bills paid on time, my son properly fed, and actual conversations to be spoken with the person I know as my husband. Grunting is about all that happens around here these days.

And last night, when I wrote this essay in my head while staring at the ceiling, wishing I was doing what I should have been doing which was sleeping, the essay was much pithier. Maybe that’s because I was wide awake then, unlike now when I’m just barely functioning. Or maybe it’s because you always think you’re more clever when you’re staring at the ceiling in the dark. Or maybe I’ve forgotten the pithy part and can only remember the rather pedestrian fact that I’m spent, a hull, a little shell of the person formerly known as me.

•   •   •

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Dad has a renewed sense of purpose.

Having become fed up with being plugged up with The Curse of the Opioids, he’s weaned himself off of the painkillers for a week now. He decided, in his stoic and stubborn way, that what he was experiencing was “not a pain problem, but a mobility problem.” And in framing his problem in a different light, he’s managed to take himself off the pain killers completely.

Which is great for me on the one hand–Dad was rewarding me with all kinds of interesting information about his innards. (“It was so bad I had to resort to the Big E,” he told me one afternoon while riding in a packed elevator after a radiation treatment. It took me a minute to figure out what he was talking about, and then it came to me in a flash of rather vivid insight.) But on the other hand, I’m faced with the whirling dervish that has replaced Dopey Pop.

Now, Dopey Pop was fun at parties but he wasn’t really Dad. So I can appreciate his desire to reclaim his brain and the fury of activity it’s capable of when not clouded by oxycodone. But now he’s got a mission, and apparently this mission is to save my brother and I the trouble of dealing with his effects after he’s gone.

He’s got a list in his head that seems to be growing exponentially of the things that need to be resolved before he dies. Most of it is pretty reasonable, really. He wants to send more books and more art to people who he’s hand-picked them for; better, he says, for him to do it since he knows where he wants them to go than making us do it later on when we’re already dealing with his death. Very pragmatic.

And the book he wrote with his friend Michael, which they’ve spent the last seven (eight? ten?) years writing, he wants to see printed up. A few copies, just for his nearest and dearest. I understand this: a thing doesn’t become real until you hold it in your hands. And I would like to hold it in my hands too; I just wish he wasn’t feeling the pressure of his own deadline (hah!) to make it happen.

But at last, he wants to part with his mighty collection of art books, send them on to a girls’ school back East which has been a party to his beneficence over the years with other donations. But this is the big one: the Whole Banana. The Big Enchilada. The Mighty Library of Moone. He’s ready to bid his unbelievable collection of books farewell, adieu, sayonara.

Dad is a collector. He’s always collected things, from the imminently practical (he’s had the same woven grass trivets since I was an early teen–god knows what little societies of bacteria have ended there, mighty civilizations of single-celled organisms rising and falling like tiny Roman Empires over the course of the trivet’s life) to the nostalgic but absurd (the plastic hippo-squeaky bird combo that adorned his birthday cake one year; if he could have, he would have saved the balloon I popped to round out his greeting: “Hippo Birdie, Pop!”). He has every DVD  (and now BluRay disks as well) that struck his fancy from the respectably arty to the wonderfully tasteless; he should have invested in Amazon stock so addicted was he to their service. At least he would have seen quarterly dividends.

But the books. Good lord, the books! Stacked floor to ceiling, there were so many that they actually MADE WALLS in his last house in Denver. He’s always needed multiple rooms to house all his books; his current home is the first house he ever had which provided ample enough space to create a proper library. As he’s chipped away at the collection by handing off perfect tomes to their perfect new owners, one still strains to see the spaces the old books vacated. It looks unchanged, timeless, an Alexandria come to life in Dad’s basement.

He has a lot of books.

And now he wants to pass all of them on.

“I’ll keep a couple,” he says. “Just a few things to look at.” I can’t imagine what the  criteria in the selection process might be to pare down his selection to the Holy Few Books, but it’s going to be a rigorous competition. I mean, the quantity alone is too much to fathom–how can you go from a couple thousand to “a few things to look at?” What makes the cut? How does one evaluate the few things to look at when he’s seeing them from within spitting distance to the unwelcome end zone? This is like the Ultimate Five Perfect Books for a Deserted Island Challenge and I cannot imagine what the last books standing will be.

He might be employing a touch of hyperbole, too. Once faced with the sorting, he may come to discover too many lost loves to bid farewell to all of them. He’ll find that flirty little number about some painter and think, “Well, this one is just so…oh, you know. Well, you can stay. What the hell.” And then he’ll come across another one, and think, “Ah, this one. I remember when…” and he’ll slip it quietly into the stack of “The Few.” Pretty soon the stack will be teetering.

But maybe not. Maybe his resolve is such that those books are going to be packed up by a bunch of professional movers, loaded into a moving truck and shipped off to their new home. His basement will return to a life of basement-y blandness again, and my Dad will be standing in the middle of it more naked than the Emperor.

Maybe he’s just that set on winding up his affairs before we do.

•   •   •

I’m scrambling to put these thoughts together out of the soup of my sleep deprived brain, as bad as the fog of oxycodone. But Dad has already put his mark on the day. He’s gone to and from the grocery store, picked up a version of the book he wrote to read it again, sorted more stacks of art to destroy or give away, the piles of his Personal Best getting smaller as he whittles down what he considers to be of value in the Museum of Dad’s Life Work. He’s jurying his own Retrospective again, choosing the best of the best.

I might just have to slip a little oxycodone into his lunch when he’s not looking.

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