We rarely saw Robert in our neighborhood, and then we heard from Philip that his son stopped by to drop off some groceries or give us a new blood pressure monitor. Because of his father’s words, we thought Robert was a decent and good guy.
Recently, Philip started having serious memory problems, so it happened that he could get lost in our neighborhood and call his son. Then one day he got lost on his way back from the clinic, slipped, fell down the stairs, and got a huge bruise on his forehead. After that, Robert got worried and began to see more and more of us at our doorstep. We thought he was taking care of my father, taking him to the hospitals.
Philip himself never went outside for no reason or alone anymore, so he rarely got a chance to ask us anything in person. Robert wasn’t much of a talker, he didn’t talk about his father’s diagnosis, but it was clear that it was something serious, because he had moved in with his father permanently with his suitcases. He had a family of his own, a small child, but he traded them for his father. That was probably the reason for most of the fighting, and the fact that Philip had become absent-minded. I personally heard Robert yell at him for finding an iron somewhere and turning it on and burning a hole in the ironing board itself. And once the firemen came to our house because Philip had put his cell phone in the microwave and started a fire.
Robert was angry at his father, he thought he was doing it on purpose, and Philip started saying nasty things about his son to himself. He was always standing at the window, looking out at the neighbors and complaining about Robert through the mosquito net, saying that he was taking all his pension, trying to put diapers on his father, feeding him almost from the spoon. And Philip makes it sound like he’s bullying his son, not helping him.
I can’t say exactly who is to blame and who isn’t, but I think Philip has health problems and his son is taking care of him. Yes, the guy’s patience is not of steel, sometimes he snaps, but I don’t know how I would react either, if my parents were doing nasty things to me or going under themselves so I would clean up afterwards… Robert is just good for not complaining to anyone, he puts up with his father himself. And Philip is a sick, ungrateful man, if he has the conscience to badmouth his son when he moved in with his wife and child to take care of his father.
