GUY’S GOTTA TALK ABOUT…Alzheimer’s #23: Catharsis and Lingering Thoughts

Dad’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s stayed hidden from everyone until I took over the medical administration of my parents in 2015. Once I found out, there was a deafening silence from most of the people I know even though virtually all of them would add, “My _____ had Alzheimer’s…” But there was little help, little beyond people sadly shaking heads. Or horror stories. Lots of those. Even the ones who knew about the disease seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Alzheimer’s Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this part of my blog…

You don’t have to read past this because it is, if I do say so, something of a downer. As I am writing this AFTER I wrote the words below, I realize that there was something cathartic about it…So if you DO read past this, don’t blame me for not warning you…

Yesterday afternoon, I drove past the senior residence where my parents spent the final years of their lives.

Amazingly, nothing had changed.

Amazing to me, but not to anyone else, because there are only a few of us for whom the entire world changed when Dad passed away almost 3 months ago.

I make jokes with my wife sometimes, saying, “Oh! I have to out to see Dad!” We both laugh, but deep down inside of me…I don’t feel anything.

My dad and I; in fact my parents and I, to be truthful, had an odd relationship. They were 1950s distant – not that they slept in different beds like Ozzie and Harriet or Ricky and Lucy Ricardo, but they ascribed to the 1950s dictum that you raise your kids then ignore them after they get married (except for obligatory seasonal family get-togethers and visits to see grandchildren).

At least that’s the way it was for me until my parents reached their declining years. I didn’t go shopping with my mom or to sporting events with my dad. We hadn’t shared those things while I was growing up, so we didn’t share those things when I was older. I rarely socialized with my parents outside of familial obligations…until their decline reached a point where they needed me to transport them and start to keep track of appointments and take them to the hospital and intervene in their medication dosing regimens.

By then, there was no time left to have fun. By then, I assumed the role of caretaker (though I have no idea if anyone other than my wife and daughter had any idea how invested I was in that. The answer was so deeply that my life became little more than work and parents.) Even when they moved to the senior care facility I started this essay with, and there were people there to care for them, I was constantly on call. After my mother passed away, I was literally on-call as I was the child who lived closest to the facility. For the two years following Mom’s passing, I went to the place at least once a week – to reset the TV, get groceries (even though they provided meals and snacks, Dad never wanted to depend on that. He always kept soda, milk, cereal, crackers, cookies, and candy…uh…handy.) Toward the end, the milk would sit until I had to throw out an untouched bottle and everything but the soda and candy went uneaten.

Honestly? I felt as if I were taking care of strangers and then a stranger. That made it even more uncomfortable when Dad would tell me that I was the only one he could count on; or that I was his only friend…

Why did it make me so uncomfortable? Because, horrible person that I am, I didn’t care anymore. It took my breath away when I realized that I actually may not have EVER cared. I’d felt misplaced in my family since adolescence; an outlier with little or no interest in the things that consumed the others. My family and I camped, wrote, biked, traveled, read, gardened, and not a single one of us ever joined a sports team – except my son ran track in eighth and ninth grade. We had no “equipment closet” (filled with smelly hockey equipment, usually!) because I couldn’t have cared LESS about sports. Religion was important  to me, too (it became important to my siblings later in their lives. It was important to me when I was a teenager and served to accentuate my weirdness. By the time I started college, I rarely spoke with any of them. I continued to live at home, drive to college, and work, but in every way, I was just a “lodger”.

And suddenly I found myself filling the role of intimate (in more ways than one…) for my parents. I may very well be processing that for a long, long time…

Image:  http://az616578.vo.msecnd.net/files/2016/06/25/6360242025150255191939281878_Alzheimer-disease-patients.jpg