The other day my Dad woke up and said with a smile, “Marci, why did you spin our bed around and rearrange our room last night?”
“I didn’t spin your bed or move your furniture last night,” I answered softly, making his oatmeal the way he likes it with lot’s of brown sugar and raisins.
“The hell you didn’t!” he said with a laugh.
My Mom looked at me with her big brown eyes and nodded. “Marci, our room looked totally different this morning.” And she’s not even sick.
“Hmmm, I wonder why you think that?” I said, giving them some orange juice and turning up Sinatra so they could sing along.
So here’s my Top Ten Favorite Hallucinations:
- Calling me outside to look at the cowboy hat in the sky.
- Showing me with great delight the apes swinging on the ceiling fans, then pointing at Henry and saying’s the biggest ape of all.
- Hearing his Father’s voice. “Did my Dad just call for me? (He died in 1974.)
- Telling us about the time he caught a bear by the neck and beat the shit out of it.
- Watching Grease with my sister and thinking the Pink Ladies and the T-Birds were in the house throwing their bras around and causing a ruckus.
- Trying to stuff a blanket in his pocket because it needed to be there.
- Tickets coming out of the ceiling.
- Singing “The Rain in Spain” from My Fair Lady in the back seat of the car and when I turned around, he was holding Henry’s Harry Potter wand to his nose and saying he was Pinocchio and poking my mom in the front seat with it.
- Putting on my Mom’s rhinestone shirt, slacks, and sneakers to go to bed.
- As we drive out of the driveway, he says, “This place looks just like Marci’s place.”
The doctors aren’t sure what’s making my Dad hallucinate. Is it the move across the country? Is it Delirium? Dementia? Has the cancer entered his brain? No one knows exactly, but I’ll take every bit of humor and spend every moment possible with my Dad’s best gift to the world: laughter.
