By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My dad on voicemail is an unmitigated pleasure. He hears my recorded voice and assumes he has license to rant.

Today’s tirade involves autonomy, self-determination, and control. I’m hoodwinked by my dad’s facile use of language into thinking he is not demented.

But if he were still rational, he wouldn’t refuse to be evaluated for a walker. Nor would he insist on shuffling around holding onto walls and my 100-pound arthritic mother.

What happens to you if there isn’t a wall? I ask. It’s dangerous; you’re going to break a hip and take mom down with you. He assures me that in the absence of walls, he can always grab onto a car door handle. That’s brilliant. Maybe my dad is onto something that gerontologists have not considered. Picture a BMW handle as an assistive device.

All I can imagine is him sprawled on a sidewalk. And all he can imagine is walking around in a world where there always is a wall or a car door readily accessible. Maybe this is an inadvertent commentary on the current smallness of his life.

The craziest thing is that by grabbing walls for balance, my dad’s not fooling anyone. As I told my friend Fran the other day, no one’s going to see my dad walking and mistake him for Jim Thorpe. They might, however, confuse him for Lurch.

But the worst thing is I can think about is people seeing us together and saying Boy, that poor man could really use some help. And then: why doesn’t his damned daughter get him evaluated for a walker?

When my dad finally meets me to go for the evaluation he needs so Medicare will cover his walker, he tells me that if I continue to try to run his life, he won’t speak to me anymore. What a stroke of luck that would be, I want to tell him. I know the kindest thing for me to do at this point would be to say nothing, but I don’t do that. A thirty-five year history of trying to get the last word dies hard. You need me more than I need you, I remind him. Strange — to this, my dad, who in his younger years could launch a full-blown argument with a gnat, says nothing.

The thing is my dad always told me when it was time for him to step back, he would do it. At 88, he’s doesn’t believe that time is now. Don’t I have the right to make my own decisions, he asks. It’s a dicey thing, this call for agency; he has the desire to do for himself but not the cognitive goods to do so. A few years ago, he was building Excel spreadsheets for me, interpreting instructions on tax forms that I was too lazy to read and reinstalling door stoppers in my house that had come loose from the walls. Last year, he came to my house for a party and in the crowd forgot how to navigate from the first floor bathroom to the garage.

He doesn’t take too kindly to the prescription, or prescriptive, I issued earlier this morning. No more supermarket trips if he doesn’t agree to use a walker. He informs me that if I try to stop him from going to the supermarket to pick up the cookies he wants, I am guilty of elder abuse. Really? As we navigate the halls of his assisted living facility, I ask him why he insists upon throwing around terms like that. That’s when he tells me to “fuck off”. So much for stepping back.

The other day, my parents went out for dinner with friends and for two days afterward, my father couldn’t find his wallet. I offered to call the restaurant where they had been. Neither of my parents could remember its name.

I’ve been thinking a lot about aging — and mostly how to avoid it. This week I even scheduled an appointment with a plastic surgeon to talk about the rings around my eyes and the lines around my chin. The surgeon told me I’d get the results I wanted with an upper quadrant facelift. He advertised that thanks to a procedure that wouldn’t even involve an overnight hospital stay, I’d emerge woken up, refreshed. It sounds like for the same $10,000 I’d pay, I could go on a great vacation. Once I told my friends if I ever thought about plastic surgery, it was time to enroll me in another graduate program. In the end, I thanked the surgeon, went home, and threw away the paperwork.

After all when I see my parents, I know it’s not my face I’m worried about.