Fathers & Mothers

It’s Christmas Eve and I am missing my dad.

Really, the only notable fact there is the Christmas Eve part. I miss my dad every day. Sometimes it’s a fleeting thought that I wish I could talk about a work problem with him, sometimes it’s a pain in my chest, an actual physical pressure that weighs me down and I feel like I can’t breathe through the gravity of it all.

I visited Dad yesterday. The visits are always difficult, of course. Usually because I leave still missing my dad as much as I ever did. One of the hardest things about his Alzheimers for me has been how impossible it seems at times to really connect with him. Mostly he knows who I am, mostly he knows I am Julie, his daughter. But it feels like a shallow kind of knowledge, with all the gravity and history of our relationship somehow untethered from how he defines me. I am Julie, his daughter, but I am not sure he always knows what that means.

Yesterday we walked outside a little, chatted about the usual — the weather, how the boys are doing, how is my mother. It got cold and we went inside and sat on the couch. I made a comment about my grandmother, his mother. And my dad began to cry. To cry. My father. He didn’t understand, he said. He knew he was losing some memory, but he didn’t know why, and it was weird, he said, to hear me talk about his mother. I tried to be calm, to maintain my composure as I thought “Oh my god, oh my god, I upset him, he is upset and it is my fault and I need to figure out a way to fix this right now.” But I couldn’t think of anything that might comfort someone who was, like I was, just missing their parent. So I talked about her some more, and eventually he started talking about his daughters. How much he loved them, how much fun they were. He turned to me and looked at me and took my hand and said “I really love you, Julie.” And I felt like he was really all THERE, for that moment, and I began to cry, too. For everything that Alzheimers is slowly taking away. Not from me so much, but from my father. He misses us, too. He is losing us just as surely as we are losing him. There is nothing any of us can do, I thought, there is no stopping this horrible descent, but for now, we are here and that is all there is.

I put my head on his shoulder, and we clasped hands, and we cried together.

I had to help my dad dress this weekend.

 I don't think my heart ever broke more. 

I took the boys to see him Friday evening and when we got there he was in his room in just boxers. I knocked on the door and he answered, and his face was so apprehensive and scared, like he didn't know what to expect. He saw it was me and I saw he had no pants so I said "Hey, we are going to go wait in the dining room, why don't you put on some pants and meet us there?" I corralled the boys to the table (a few feet away) and I heard him calling my name. I went into his room and he was sitting on the edge of the bed. He asked me "I don't know what I am supposed to do here. I need pants or something?"

So I grabbed his pants. They were on the floor, tangled up in his shoes like he had taken his pants off before he took his shoes off.  I untangled everything and helped him get them on. He tried to zip the zipper before he pulled them up and then tried to buckle the belt before he buttoned or zipped them. And he kept asking me what was happening and where were we going. When he stood up, he suddenly grabbed me and put his head on my shoulder and just hugged me. Then he kissed my cheek and said he loved me. And then he said "I was wondering. Will there ever be a time when I won't be in a place like this?"  

And a little part of me died inside.  

There are so many days I just feel like I can't handle this. At all.

Too many feelings

I am so fucking tired of Alzheimer's disease. I fucking hate it. HATE. I just had to sit through a healthy eating course at work, which is fine, but they kept mentioning Alz as something diet could prevent. And frankly, I have done a lot of research, and that's just not true a lot of the time, and it pissed me off in a "why are you blaming the victim here?" kind of way. Dad liked ice cream and so he earned it? Fuck you. (And yeah, I get that's not what they are saying rationally, but irrationally it pissed me off.) I am tired of worrying about whether or not I am going to get it, and put my kids through this bullshit. Or my sisters. I shit you not, I considered staying with Cliff because I was so afraid of that. I still am. Every time I get a word on the tip of my tongue but can't quite get it or forget a street name, I think about it. Every time.  

Looking at places for my dad is killing me. I keep imagining him, at bedtime, wondering why he is there and not at home, looking for my mother, wondering why we left him there.  

I am just so, so angry. And there's no one to be angry AT. That's the hard part.