Heeeey, WTH? You're Amurican now. What are you doing back in O'Canadia?
Four weeks ago my 90-year-old dad came down with pneumonia. I came to Vancouver to help him get out of the hospital. First, however, I had to spend 14 days in mandatory self-isolation (solitary confinement in a hotel room). On the first day out of quarantine, they let me see my dad once. He recognized me, tracked me with his eyes, tried to talk to me, and squeezed my hand when I asked him to. Unfortunately, things got worse from there.
A week later he was unconscious in palliative care, and after six days of that he passed away last night. The good thing about palliative care is that he was back in the same nursing home he left, which meant I got to see my mom, too. (They have a compassion exception for people in palliative care.) No one had told my mom what was going on, and with her semi-dementia, she hadn't asked anyone where my dad had been for weeks. After I had some real conversations with her, even though largely one-sided, I decided (with agreement from my brother and her doctor) that she needed to know. Wednesday night I let her say good-bye to her husband of 67 years, and Thursday night he passed away. This morning I had her say good-bye one more time before he was taken away.
She cried a river yesterday and today, was given a sedative, and slept most of the day. This evening I brought her Indian food for dinner. As I babbled on in her near silence, I mentioned that I hadn't had a chance to see Dad's local relatives in the weeks I had been here. In her first really coherent sentence she said, "This has been a stressful time for both of us." After that we had a real conversation, and she had some good laughs, especially when I told her about the one time my wife got truly drunk, on Veuve Clicquot, at the wedding of a friend in Pittsburg. All the crying seems to have released something that was enhancing her dementia. I'll be here a couple of weeks more, consoling her and cleaning up loose ends.
Love knows no borders.
However, the U.S Immigration Service does. I was able to get into Canada on my Canadian passport, but I don't yet have a U.S. passport. Worse, I sent in my naturalization certificate with my passport application before I learned about my dad's pneumonia, so I don't have any original proof of my citizenship. I came up here not knowing how the hell I was going to get back into the USA. Fortunately, there is a way. It turns out there is a law saying that they can't refuse a U.S. citizen admission to the U.S. However, there is another law saying you can't get on an airplane to the U.S. without a real passport. Hence, I'm going to have to have someone drive me to the border, walk across with my "enhanced" Arizona driver's license for ID, and get to a plane from there. I'll be back in Arizona in a couple of weeks. I hope the COVID and the wildfires have calmed down by then.
Thanks for asking.