No One To Fix It: More Adventures

Another email came today with news from Alzheimer’s Land.

“When I came into the kitchen, he was standing over the dog dishes trying to figure out what to feed them.  In the microwave was a dinner plate filled with bacon, broken eggs on top and Italian Sweet Cream, all kind of half cooked together.  Out on the counter was another plate with dried up eggs, I guess, and I don’t know what else.  He was just standing there looking lost, and I don’t know how long he had been standing like that.

When I asked him if he was O.K., he said something like the system wasn’t working.  He had that far-away look in his eyes.  It breaks my heart.  The dogs were happy to eat the mess in the one plate.  Then in the lower oven where he keeps his instant oatmeal warm during the week, was another concoction of eggs, oatmeal and Coffeemate, again.

Now he’s just sitting outside with his head down and his eyes closed, holding his glasses.  I almost called 911 before.  I don’t know what I should do.  Just wait and see if he comes out of it, or what.”

My mother doesn’t want to be told that this is her new normal, and that my dad won’t ever come out of it.
I’m supposed to tell her what to do.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Adventures In Alzheimer’s Land

“Growing old is a giant exercise in getting smaller. Not just your body, but your very life and ability to participate in it, shrink in lock-step with the size of the print on your numerous prescription bottles.”

This year when we stopped to visit my mom and dad in Reno en route to our annual Lake Tahoe beach vacation, it became immediately clear that my aging parents are entering a new phase of life, and therefore, so am I. My father’s war with Alzheimer’s is nearing its final few battles. And my mother’s diminishing ability to manage it along with her own failing health, means that for me, their only living adult relation, the beach will have to wait.

There’s such a selfish, shameful component to everything I feel — about spending my vacation with doctors, attorneys, bankers, contractors, cell phone companies — instead of reading a book in the shade of a giant evergreen on the shores of my childhood memories. And about all the hundreds of heart-breaking and time-stealing things that I will have to do over the next months and years — at the expense of my other family, my job, my health, my sense of well-being.

I don’t like my children seeing their grandfather like this. I don’t like the way they look at me or the questions they inevitably ask: Is this going to happen to you, mom? To us? They’ve heard me speak sternly, even harshly to both my parents as I try to temporarily take over everything they used to do for themselves and recreate a smaller form of it, something they might still be able to handle. Because I don’t want to be totally in charge of their lives yet. I still have quite a bit of my own that needs careful tending.

So is there a harsher, more punishing word for guilt? Even that would not begin to express what I feel as I drive away at the end of the week, after patching up my parents as best I can for now, leaving my father clutching his dog, muttering in his recliner, and my mom sobbing as she waves herself back into what is left of her existence.

It’s not that I didn’t see this coming. But I am still dreadfully, woefully and resentfully blind-sided.