Seejay- I can totally relate to your father doing dangerous things. My sister loved to cook, but towards the end of her living with us, I couldn't allow her to do it. Several times she would start cooking, then sit on her computer and post away on social media sites, meanwhile, dinner would be burning on the stove. One of my children was home at the time and was able to get the burning pot off the stove and the entire house was filled with smoke- meanwhile, she didn't even notice or smell the burning pot!
Another time, I let her cook while I was there- she was mixing odd ingredients together, then when she taste tested it, said it was gross and said she had no idea what was in it, but it was gross and she threw it away. The next time- she drained the potatoes and put them back on the stove and started mashing them, with the burner still on high, and almost burned the potato masher's cord! When I told her to take it off the stove because she would not only burn the potatoes but that the potato masher was about to catch fire, she claimed she did this all the time and to stop harping on her (she never did that before). So many different scenarios I could give. Her short term memory was shot, at best. She lost her cell phone for a couple of months, but whenever her kids would try to call her, she would tell them on FB in a private message that her battery was dead and she didn't get the call. It turns out, she put it in a purse that she never used (it was a gift that she hated, but she refused to throw it out) and had no idea how it got there.
She would buy some of her own food that she enjoyed and eat it all, such as an entire cake, then say that we ate it on her. She was really angry and belligerent, claiming we were liars, yet she would eat anything and everything of ours without issue, and it was fine and dandy, even if I bought something special for my kid- she would eat it all before they had a chance to have some, and then she would deny eating it even though we saw her eating it! One time, she bought coconut ice cream- a huge tub of it and ate it all. Then freaked out on us, saying we were pigs, how dare we not leave her any. None of us like coconut ice cream- as a matter of fact, we all hate coconut ice cream and I can honesty say, it's the one thing the entire family agrees on in terms of ice cream, but yep, we were accused of being liars and eating all of it. A lot of battles with her was with food, of all things. I had to get a second refrigerator because she kept loading up our first one with food sometimes she wouldn't even open- yet if we tried to throw it away because it was past the expiration date, she would literally freak out on us. Unless it was completely moldy, we could not throw it away.
She wasn't at a point yet where she would talk about people that didn't exist like my grandmother did, but she was confusing the past and present a lot. Stating things as facts when they didn't happen. Adding details from another story.
Seeing that I was her primary caretaker those years, she would get real angry if I went out with my husband or did something with one of my children. She constantly clung to me, had to be with me all the time, and if I went to take a shower downstairs, she would panic and ask my family where I was, even though I was still in the house and she had just talked to me moments before. This is why none of this makes sense to me. If his wife was with him daily, I would imagine it would have affected him terribly if she died on that road trip. It would throw his whole world off balance within an hour or two, at least.
