Apu's epitaph: The old Hungarian who went to Heaven for an Olde English 800

Me, Jennifer and Apu on the final road trip.

Editor's note: I wrote this the morning my father died. It's been some years now. The avowed socialist, anticommunist freedom fighter and Hungarian patriot was a stubborn sort. I still get sentimental thinking about him.

My dad was 71 when he died. He called me one night 2 1/2 years earlier saying the SS (the Shutzstaffel, the Nazi paramilitary corps) were on his doorstep with guns and were going to take him to the camps. My dad, Imre Antal Nemeth, had a Jewish mother and had been hidden in Hungary during World War II. He was raised Catholic and squirreled away with his maternal grandparents in a tiny village on the Croatian border. 

The SS Nazi  soldier reference was my first real clue we had any Jewish heritage. Then his friend Steve a month later called to say I had to do something. Luckily, Jennifer, my daughter, drove from Bellingham, Wash. to Seattle every night and slept over and went back to work (two hours each way). She spent weekends with him, too. She took leave for the final weeks, continuing for five or six. But he had clearly lost his mind. She could no longer distract his crazy plans with a cookie.

He was just months from retiring after decades welding big steel girders for commercial buildings as a union ironworker. Most people called him Red. Nobody could prononce his real name. He gave it to me, too. That's why I'm called Mike.

I flew up to Seattle and in three hours loaded up six boxes of his stuff and told him to get in his little Ford Escape. "You're coming with me," I said. He had been eating rotting meat, had nearly burned his house down and was seeing imaginary people. And he was angry others couldn't see it. He almost killed a woman in a car accident, so Jennifer had taken his keys. He berated her something awful, but she is tough. 

After I got him to Clovis, Calif., where I live, I tried to keep him at my house, but he flew into a rage and tried to beat me up. I stayed up all night the first night after driving 17 hours (he tried to escape once at a gas station). I had to keep him in the house. I put on double locking deadbolts that next day. 

For the first couple of months, he lived OK in assisted care at $1,500 a month. Then he ran off twice, once when it was 107 degrees. He found his way to an Indian casino. We found him a second time confused and sun burned. He had wandered near my house. Three cop agencies were out looking for him. He was the first ever to escape from the facility's memory care center, sneaking out a window and scaling an 8-foot gate. Dogs tracked him for nearly a dozen miles of weird wandering.

Jennifer, her husband Zac, my sister Julie and her husband Stu cleaned up his house. Jennifer sold or discarded his massive collection of junk, and we put the old Seattle house on the market after a substantial remodel by a Hungarian real estate agent and an amazing guy from Mexico. 

I spent many, many nights and every Saturday with my father and cooked him Hungarian food. I took him to 5:30 p.m. mass. He loved Kmart and Walmart. Aargh! I did whatever he wanted those days. My sons could barely stand being near him. He became even more self centered and insulted me constantly. He had Lewy Body Disease, which is a form of dementia with Parkinson's-type deterioration of function and major hallucinations. He routinely believed the Nazis were performing experiments on him in the "basement," three flights down. He was in a one-story facility built on slab. His condition went in cycles. He'd deteriorate then stabilize. 

The last time I took him out was in November 2009. He freaked out in a Fresno Target and started screaming at me, yelling to anybody who would listen that I was killing him and for people to save him. It was one of the strangest experiences of my life. It attracted perhaps a hundred people. The manager understood however and tried to help with a wheelchair. Apu couldn't walk without my help at that point. But he kept screaming. He refused to sit in the wheelchair. That would show weakness. He wasn't weak, and he didn't like people telling him what to do.

So, with my wife Peggy's help, I basically threw him over my shoulder and walked him out. I was afraid somebody would call the cops. He was heavy. I staggered past the rows of cars. I had to stuff him in the car and hold him in a head lock as he tried to kick out the windows. Peggy drove. He's an ex ironworker and was still strong as hell.

He forgot all about it a couple hours later. The pie his chief caretaker fed him likely rebooted his short-term memory.

I didn't. I ignored him for about three weeks. I wanted to kill him. (He often ordered me to toss him over a big cliff.)

Then he deteriorated again. And again. And again. Three weeks ago, he tried to choke one of his attendants at the really nice facility where he lived, a sweet small woman named Lucy. He rose up out of his wheelchair in a rage, grabbed her around the neck and then fell on her. She was OK. He never got up again. It was like that was all he had. He still tried to punch the attendants when they changed him in his last days.

 
But through it all, he had his good days and was charming and kind. He made friends with many of the residents and they loved him. All of them believe there's a conspiracy at one level or another. They would commiserate.

He died in May 2010. I was with him all night. I told him stories to pass the time. He looked comatose, all twisted by the disease and skinny as a concentration camp survivor. But he seemed to know I was there. He used to call me his brother Csaba. He was mad at Csaba. Of course I was Csaba. I betrayed him. Took him away from his home, the only place he felt safe after he had to leave Budapest after the 1956 Hungarian revolution. He had been a marked man who could never return.

So I told him this story. I made it up. I figured I could do it and nobody would care. Then I started to believe it, too. I said Kerestapu, my godfather and his best friend, was up in Heaven. "He has an Olde English 800 in each hand and an ugly whore on each arm," I said. "He says the weather's fine."

Apu couldn't talk. But he laughed. It was a small chuckle, but he did it every time I told that story. So I told various versions over and over and over. The whores got uglier, the beer more plentiful. Janos Szigeti, my godfather, would have approved. He died years earlier of cancer. Apu was by his bedside.

As much a pain in the ass as he was, I still miss him. I tear up writing this. A bazdmeg. Now I see him in the mirror. My sister likes to point that out. And I wrote my first novel about him and his SS soldier. I'll finish editing that soon. My son has some points he wants me to clarify.