The Beginning

It was a typical day in the office, at the time I was an Anglican pastor. A call came through, secretary announced that it was my dad. My Dad and I had a long-standing lunch date, he would go buy two Reuben sandwiches, and we would eat at his conference table. But this was afternoon, and we did not have dinner plans. I picked up the phone and after the usual pleasantries, Dad asked me to come to his office immediately. There are but a few things that cause me to drop everything right now, this was definitely one of them. I zipped out of my office with little more than “I’ll be back”.

I got to Dad’s office, to find him sitting at the conference table, but instead of lunch, he had bills spread out all over the table. I sat down and asked what was up. Dad looked at me and said “I can’t do this”. Confused, I said “can’t do what”? These bills he replied, I can’t figure them out. Still a bit confused, I looked at a few of them. They were regular bills, with amounts owed and due dates. It flashed in my mind that he might be broke, but just a month earlier we had a very serious conversation about me leaving the Anglican church and converting to Catholicism, a move that would require me to give up my means of salary, and he showed me his brokerage account, and told me that though he could not pay me much, or for long, but he had enough to help me through what I was planning. I knew he had money to pay these bills. As I looked back at dad after viewing the bills, he was frustrated, he said “I just can’t get them all to add up”! What’s more is the doctor believes that I have a brain tumor, I know he is right because I can feel it! (FYI for those here to read of dementia…he did not have a brain tumor, he had the beginning signs of dementia)

I looked at my father, gathered the bills, and told him that this would all be taken care of. He seemed to be OK after a time, so I went back to work. On the way I called my wife. Stephanie had been looking for a job, I told her she just found one. That day I became a property manager and Stephanie became a bookkeeper.

This blog is written in hopes that it might be of help to those in a similar situations. I don’t expect everyone would read the entirety of my story, but I hope that a few of the entries might give insight to various circumstances and events that arose as I walked with dad through his last years. Some of it is good, some bad, and yes, some of it is just ugly. I will not use names of people and organizations, as this is not meant to be a hit piece, I mean to warn others of what this life is like, not to put anyone on notice or worse out of business. What follows in written form is 7 years of experience.