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.
