Losing Dad, Finding Us...

"Is this your house, Shinae?"

"Yes, Dad."

"Have you lived here long?"

"For about a year."

"And this is the first time I've been here, right?"

"No, Dad. You've been here lots of times."

"Oh."

And then, unlike all those other times when he would fight back at Mom's sometimes gentle, but often understandably exasperated corrections these days - she's the one who lives with him and cares for him 24/7 - he just looked off into the distance for a moment and chuckled at himself.

Not from humor, but from realization and a defeat much greater than that momentary glance and chuckle would let on.

He probably told her he loved her with matchsticks that night... :)

And it was the first time in a long time that I, despite my own lack of empathy for a while now, could see past the ravages of disease in my dad's eyes - now often red, almost filmy, oddly shaped by his stroke from years ago and more recent diabetes related complications, and then almost paralyzed of expression from an artless surgery or two to try to correct them - and recognize emotion with which I could relate. Humility, fear, sadness, loss...

And then what I can always recognize in his voice, gratitude. That I'm not fighting, nor yelling, nor being exhausted and annoyed. Like he often perceives my mom to be when she has to tell him for the enth time that his thoughts, perceptions, memories - his mind - are just WRONG.

No resistance, no disbelief, no argument, no fight. Just, "Oh."

But I'm not the woman who's been working for years, sometimes against hope and often against better sense to keep him not only alive, but healthy.

I'm not the one who has to make him take multiple doses of medication every day that he probably wouldn't even remember or care to take himself even if he were of sound mind. I'm not the one who has to give insulin injections to an unwilling (and, quite frankly, a big baby of a -) subject. I'm not the one who cooks all his meals, trying to ensure that they're healthy, only to have him complain that he'd rather eat any number of other things that seem almost designed to exacerbate one of his many conditions - diabetes, high blood pressure, a heart condition I can't even name at the moment, and all the comorbid shit that comes with them.

I'm not the woman who has to watch the man she married fall apart physically and mentally, feeling that the weight of his health and survival is on my shoulders. I'm not the one who has to bear his remembering one moment how he used to tell her he loved her when they first met by spelling out "I-L-Y" with matchsticks (they barely spoke one another's languages then), and then forgetting what he had for lunch 20 minutes ago, or that he'd even eaten, the next.

That this decay has been taking place over two decades sometimes seems even crueler because it's that much time, and that gradual a decline, that makes you think, hope, even believe some days, that it's not really happening.

But it is.

And at some point, without me realizing it, while it was robbing Dad of his mobility, autonomy, and dignity, and my mother of her husband, it was also robbing me of my ability to remember him in the present what he was like at all before it all started. At some point, the moments of inconvenience, exasperation, and misunderstanding, and their cloudy aftereffects on our family atmosphere began to outweigh and overshadow even the good moments with him in the present.

But somewhere inside I know that there is a gift in Dad's dementia, like there always is in the sad, difficult, and painful lessons in life.

I suspect it has something to do with forgiveness, empathy, compassion, gratitude, priorities, and ultimately, love.

For Dad as he loses himself to it, for Us as we lose him to it, at least in this life.

Time to choose better moments and better memories to matter.

We'll get there.

shinae