AAR – TDY Dad’s House

Dad is in long-term care. He will never return to the home he shared with his wife, my mother, for the last 20+ years.

Last week was a hard trip to say goodbye. He was in good spirits and doing “ok”. He is not nearly as sharp as he was a couple of years ago. He has had one major cardio event, and they think he is having mini-strokes.

He remembers that his wife is dead, then 5 minutes later starts asking if we have talked to her recently and know how she is doing.

He remembers her going into the basement at our family goodbye to mom. That was about 6 months ago. He does not remember her ever coming back upstairs.

He has conflated an event with my eldest daughter and his wife to think mom borrowed some money from him to buy a car and left him.

It is easier for him to believe that she left him, than that she is dead. I wish I could believe she was still alive.

But that is boring stuff.

The more interesting part was that we were tasked with helping to clear the house. My youngest coordinated with “The Cousins” to make sure all the grandchildren got a fair share and what they wanted. When we arrived on Wed., they were there.

They went into a search and divide mission, which was cool to see. What was even better was the lack of anxiety or conflict between any of them.

After the work was done, I had the pleasure of working with one of my nephews. He is interested in picking up his first EDC pistol. He is very down on “small” pistols. That was until I showed him the P398 to show him that it works very well as a pocket pistol.

That started to change his mind, but then he got to try the 1911 for size. That he liked, even though he felt it was a bit heavier.

He got to look over and handle the AR15 platform.

The conversation then turned to Mom and Dad’s views on guns.

Dad was never “anti-gun”. After he was exposed to CNN and the constant Republican’s are bad rhetoric, he changed his opinion from “2A” to “you don’t need a …”. At the end, he was no longer pro-2A and felt that universal background checks, LCM, and “assault weapon” bans were ok.

He never pushed back on me about my very PRO 2A opinions. It was something we didn’t discuss when he was able to discuss.

One of my tasks is to evaluate and rescue every piece of data he has on his computer. This meant collecting all the external drives, the main desktop computer, the two husks, the external drives, the USB cards. I think I have all of that.

In the process, I was down under his desk taking things apart, and I turned and looked at the mid-shelf of his desk.

I’m looking at the back strap of a Glock like pistol.

To say I was a bit surprised would be a serious understatement.

I take the pistol and bring it out to inspect, automaticity going through the clearing operation.

The slide doesn’t run. There is no safety keeping the slide from moving. The weight is wrong.

I drop the mag and only then realize it is a BB gun.

0.177 steel balls.

Mom hated the squirrels in the bird feeders. She must have gotten tired of the lack of results from airsoft and upgraded to this thing.

The next time somebody says, “It was only a BB gun.”, I will remember this instant. There is no way in hell I would have let a bad guy point that thing at me. There was no way to know it was “just a BB gun” from the muzzle end at 5 feet.