Guy's Gotta Talk -- About DIABETES; breast cancer, Azheimer's: Encouragement (In Suffering, Pain, and Witnessing Both…) #10: What Could POSSIBLY Be Funny About Alzheimer’s???

Sunday, March 1, 2020

Encouragement (In Suffering, Pain, and Witnessing Both…) #10: What Could POSSIBLY Be Funny About Alzheimer’s???

The older I get, the more suffering and pain I’ve experienced; and the more of both I stand witness to. From my wife’s (and many, many of our friends and coworkers) battle against breast cancer; to my dad’s (and the parents of many of our friends and coworkers) process as he fades away as this complex disease breaks the connections between more and more memories, I have become not only frustrated with suffering, pain, and having to watch both, I have been witness to the suffering and pain among the students I serve as a school counselor. I have become angry and sometimes paralyzed. This is my attempt to lift myself from the occasional stifling grief that darkens my days…

OK, while looking for encouragement for people who are dealing with a parent or grandparent or a partner who’s been diagnosed or is showing signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s, I guess I was thinking of sober, considered wisdom.

I was NOT thinking about the humorous side of Alzheimer’s.

That there are people who CAN think this way is a testament to their ability to draw on a source of strength I was unable to with Dad’s Alzheimer’s descent.

With my wife and daughter in particular, we were able to draw strength from the humor of her struggle against breast cancer, joining others with what you could call “gallows humor” (definition: (aka, black humor) “a comic style that makes light of subject matter that is generally considered taboo, particularly subjects that are normally considered serious or painful to discuss.”

I was never able to find the “funny” side of Alzheimer’s. It was far too grim; too immediate for me. I dreaded walking into his room and have him ask the question, “Have you seen your mom?”

Or worse…

“I have to tell you some news,” he said one day.

“What’s wrong, Dad?” I asked, freezing at the door. He lived in the memory care unit of a large retirement community. What could have happened?

“It’s your mother,” he said, his voice dark and grave.

I rolled my eyes. My mother, his wife, had died two years earlier. His Alzheimer’s prevented him from recalling her death because it was too recent. I didn’t have to brace myself, so I started into his apartment. He said suddenly, “I think your mother left me for another man.”

That was a new one and because I’d been dealing with him for so long, I paused before I said, “Oh, she wanted me to tell you that she’s going shopping for the day with the OWLs.” They were a group of women my mom had known for decades. They had traveled together, gone to the wedding of their respective children together; they’d even gone to the funeral of one of the OWLs several months before Mom died.

Dad accepted that with relief, and we moved on. It wasn’t the last time he went through that, and I know to HIM, it was a real terror.

At any rate, it never occurred to me that we could laugh at the horrendous disease. The poster below was the one on the page that I linked below that made me laugh: