Our own profile in courage

OK.  Tell me if you ever heard of this before.  Ever. 

In your history of observing your own aging parents or the parents of friends, or even elderly strangers, I challenge you to match this story for courage.  Find a better role model and tell me all about him or her. 

In your own experience, can you remember an older adult who took care of himself and his family by relieving them of the struggle during the inevitable transition from independence to any sort of assisted living?

I’ll bet not.

What we hear over time is the familiar story of a proud and independent person who finds himself in a situation he knew was coming, but never wanted to be.  And in spite of the inevitability of the circumstance, that person will engage in an emotional battle with himself and his family, resisting the changes mandated by the passage of time and the impermanence of flesh and bone.

We hear of strong-willed and intelligent people abandoning their own stated principles.  After a lifetime of claiming the right to self-determination, they oblige saddened and distraught family members to step in and make the clear choices for them that, barring dementia, they could make themselves.

Rather than making their own decision to hand over the car keys, for example, they will continue to drive after accidents and near-misses and the admonitions of physicians present evidence enough of the need for change.  They tussle and brawl and hang on to the thing they know they must let go.  In so doing they force their family members into the roles of conspirators and thieves. 

But not my father-in-law, Mr. Lloyd B. Plath, aged 95. 

A year ago he fell in his beloved home up on the hill in Danville. 

This was his home on Kuss Road just below the historic Eugene O’Neill residence.  The home his wife of 55 years designed and he built.  The home where he raised three children and loved multiple pets.  The home with stairs to get in and stairs to get out and stairs between levels inside.  The one with a sweeping view of the San Ramon Valley and Mt. Diablo where he’d been living alone since his wife died in 1998.

He tried to get up and fell again.  He lay on the floor for sometime recovering his strength and thinking about the phase of life that had come to meet him that morning.

Then he did get up.

He called his sons and said, “I think it’s time for me to sell this house and move into some place more reasonable.”

Wow.  What brought this on?  Sure we had all been thinking about those stairs and those levels and the life he’d led in that house.  But we hadn’t broached the subject straight on.  We had only tiptoed around the idea.

“Oh, I had a fall this morning.”

He wouldn’t hear of living with any of us “kids,” so we sold the big house.  We moved him to the flatlands and a one level apartment on the ground floor.  He adapted just like that.  Chuckled and insisted he liked it.  Enjoyed his new neighbors and their comings and goings.  They quickly found affection for him too.

In March he mentioned his long-time friend got a great deal on a place with some jazzy amenities.  He got all his meals and laundry and housecleaning services.  Medical attention.  It was pretty nice Lloyd said.  We knew he had never been much for planning meals or shopping or cleaning or serving himself.

Lots of stuff going on in that place, Lloyd said; people to meet.  No kidding.  We looked at that place and a couple others like it.

Then he fell in his new apartment.  And he fell again.

It is hard to see him diminished.  He is wobbly and cannot walk much at all.  His eyesight is failing, maybe due to a small stroke.

We know what all this means.  As does he.  So he told us to get him set up in assisted living.  And we did - because he told us to.


He remains in charge of his life.  We are his loving and humbled servants.


I only hope when it’s my turn I will be so brave.

Love letter to Byron Farquhar

We cleaned out the desk of Byron Farquhar today.

Byron Farquhar, man of mystery.

You can learn a lot about a person from the contents of his desk.

As might be expected, in that beautiful burl wood roll top, we found office supplies – multiple boxes of American Standard staples (no stapler, by the way), paper clips, pencil leads, funky pink parallelogram erasers, carbon paper (!), batteries, Diamond strike-on-the-box matches, and a small canister of crushed red pepper.  OK…

In the file drawer, bottom left, we found documents cached long past the recommended ‘save until’ date per the IRS’s mandate:  Bank statements and W-2’s from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.

Photos of colleagues atop empty picture frames.  Nesting dolls?!  Rubber bands linked, perhaps the product of a meditative mind.  Boxes of business cards from each stop along his progression up the ranks in his professional life.

Then, in the top right hand drawer, at-the-ready, glasses.  No, not reading glasses.  Not even old prescription bifocals kept in case the new ones were lost or stepped on.  No.  These are plastic frames without lenses but sporting a rubber nose complete with fluffy black moustache.

Now we’re getting down to the real Byron Farquhar.

It’s a pseudonym, of course.

Byron Farquhar exists only in the mind of a 94-year-old born on April Fool’s day – my facetious father-in-law, Lloyd Plath.

He first called himself Byron Farquhar when he set about unraveling the puzzle of how he wound up on so many mailing lists when he had subscribed to only one magazine – Forbes.

His sleuthing compounded the problem, getting him onto duplicate streams of multiple mail-order solicitations, the first in his own name and the second sent to the attention of the illusive Mr. Farquhar.

Lloyd never trusted Forbes after that.  At the flea market he found a framed picture of a chimpanzee studying the New York Times and hung it next to his massive desk – his new financial advisor.

I first met him in Tulsa when my husband and I were courting.  We took him and my future mother-in-law to an outdoor arena for a live musical performance of “Oklahoma!”  The master of ceremonies informed the audience that senators from around the country were in attendance that evening and asked them to stand and be acknowledged. 

To my amazement Lloyd stood and accepted the round of applause graciously even though he never was a senator from anywhere. 

After I became a Plath, people started to ask me if I am related to Sylvia Plath, the well-known award-winning, if ill-fated author.  Once this happened at a party when I was standing next to Lloyd.  He said yes, I was, by virtue of my marriage into the family.  He said that Sylvia was his cousin and he went on to recount an anecdote from their childhood times together, playing in the kitchen.  A recollection made melancholy, he said, by her choice of exits.

I began retelling the stories of my famous cousin-by-marriage, until I learned from Lloyd’s flabbergasted wife one day that this too, was another of his pranks.

The good news is that we have the roll top desk now not because Lloyd Plath has passed away, but because he decided to move.

He decided.

He called us and his other offspring and their spouses and insisted that we come and collect all the things that he’d made us claim years ago when his wife of 57 years passed away. 

They just won’t fit in his new apartment, he said.  It’s a one bedroom affair on the ground floor of a fresh new complex in his tiny, picturesque town.  No more stairs.

He figured it was time to make a change since he took a fall and banged up his knees. 

He gave us the gift of making this decision himself, no matter how stress-laden or painful it must have been.  He’s always been, and remains, his own man. 

So we brought home the desk and the glasses, but not the portrait of the chimp. 


Lloyd wants to live long enough so that on April Fool’s Day, 2020, he can send that picture to Willard Scott for display on a Smucker’s jar labeled:  “Byron Farquhar, 100 years old.”