Another day, another visit.
I stopped yesterday afternoon to visit with my dad after skipping a couple of days. He’s been confined to a Honolulu nursing home since late 2008, suffering from a combination of dementia, Alzheimers, and less serious physical ailments. He will be 96 on December 7. There are good days and bad days. I would count yesterday among the latter.
I arrived at the nursing home just around 4 p.m. and was lucky to find several empty parking spaces in the small parking lot. There’s a routine. Lock the car, stop in the tiny elevator lobby downstairs for a few squirts of hand sanitizer from a dispenser mounted near the elevator, then hit the call button with my elbow, avoiding the still gooey fingers, ride up to the third floor, sign in the facility’s log book at the nurses’ station, check to see if he’s out in the common room, then head down the hall to the room my dad shares with three other men. He’s lucky to have a nice bed next to the window, which gives a little connection to the outside world.
I found him dressed in a t-shirt with a pocket (he insists on a pocket) and shorts, well worn running shoes with elastic laces, shuffling with tiny 6-inch baby steps behind his 4-wheel walker, heading out of his room towards the hall with a nursing assistant hovering at his elbow.
He says hello, but keeps moving, although it’s very slow going, even compared to his normal pace.
“Where are we headed?” I ask.
He gives the answer that I really don’t like to hear: “I’ve got to get downstairs, I’ve got two cars parked on the street and I’ve got to take care of them.”
While we’re moving slowly into the hall, I ask when he last saw the cars.
“I drove one this morning,” he replies quickly, “but I can’t remember where I parked.” Then he tells me that it was a very busy morning in Hana, with a lot of electrical work getting done. The story hung between us as he realized he couldn’t have driven to Hana, which is on the island of Maui, a plane ride away.
“I didn’t have my car there,” he backtracks, recovering some semblance of order.
The cars are an image that haunts him whenever he’s agitated, or perhaps the lingering image of driving off in his car gets him upset when compared to his current restricted routines and causes the agitation. I don’t know.
But if he tries to leave the third floor without being accompanied, alarms ring and the elevators automatically shut down. So they keep a close eye on him.
I distracted him by detouring off into one end of the large common area used for meals and recreational activities, steering him towards a chair at the table closest to the door. There were several picture books on the table, one a photo book about Hawaii, the other a collection of vintage cars. The table was unoccupied.
With a little encouragement, repositioning, and a bit of physical assistance, he abandons the walker and sort of falls into a chair. I pull another chair over to the table and sit down. A staffer brings over a small cup of juice and a spoonful of orange jello, and sets them in front of him. He says he’s not interested, then downs the juice in one go.
On this afternoon, I brought along five or six photos of events in Waikiki, probably all in the 1940s. One shows a group on the beach, diamond head in the background. All are wearing many flower lei. It looks like a winning team of canoe paddlers. It’s the kind of picture which, on a good day, he can tell you a lot about, who, when, why.
Yesterday he looked at it for a long time. Finally he pointed to the man on the far right.
“Rabbit,” he said simply.
I’m assuming he means that it’s a young Rabbit Kekai, one of the well known Waikiki beachboys.
“Whaley,” he said, pointing somewhere in the middle of the group. Ed Whaley was in that same cohort of Waikiki beachboys.
I try asking a follow-up question or two, attempting to dig out more from his memory. No answer. He looks at the picture some more. Nothing else comes.
At this point, another resident is steering his own walker towards our table. It’s the man who sleeps in the bed next to my dad. A curtain separates their beds into different worlds, but they still can’t help seeing each other frequently.
My dad looks up, asks: “Did you lose something?”
He didn’t get an immediate answer, so he repeated, “Did you lose someting?” His roommate was busy doing his own maneuver from walker to chair.
Once seated, the man then looked back, and replied in a loud, clear voice:
“Just my freedom!”
My father didn’t understand what he said.
“Your what?”
“My freedom!” Sharp. Emotional. Direct.
The echoes are still ringing in my ears. It was a very heavy moment, weighted down with unstated loss, fading memories, past lives that hang just out of reach like that word on the tip of your tongue that you can’t quite find at a crucial moment.
Luckily, my dad didn’t connect fully to it. But he has his own struggle going on. He wants to find his long-lost cars, but he lacks the freedom to do so. He also lacks the cars, which no longer exist, or a clear memory of what cars he is thinking about, but he doesn’t know that and it wouldn’t matter anyway, since he knows he just drove one that morning.
I tried to squeeze past the moment, again seeking distraction by passing the old Waikiki photo across the table, and the other man takes it, holds in in its fingers, feels the texture, looks at it carefully. Appreciating the moment. He takes it all in, then passes it back. I offer other photos, one at a time, reminding my father in the process that he had already looked at each of them. It works, for now. Freedom is perhaps forgotten, at least in this brief moment.
Soon I have to excuse myself and let myself out of the room, off the floor, out of the building, to our car, waiting where I left it in the parking lot, leaving them there at the table, together with their thoughts.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
it makes me wonder, if i were in your dad’s situation, what sort of thing i would fixate on when agitated…
My father lives in a home and is less functional than your father. He reacts well to pictures of his great grandchildren. And he has told me that he had lunch at his old college, which is hundreds of miles from the home. When winter moves in, his spirits drop. So your father has another advantage, which is sunshine all the time.
Michael Sullivan wrote me about you. He and I are from Brownwood, Texas, though we have never met. I really appreciate your writings. You express the hospital visit better than a lot of things I have read on same subject. Often from those I know in this sort of situation, the caregiver hurts the most. We can’t really know where the patient is. We can guess but that is about all. Your dad is fortunate to have you. Grace and Peace. Britt in San Angelo, TX USA
Every Father should have a son like you, every Son should have a Father like yours. As painful as it is you are so very lucky to have him still and your Mom as well.
Your purpose, I suppose, is to visit as you do and receive the good days and the not so good ones, you are doing the right thing.
Heartbreaking story. But you are there for your dad, and at some level I believe he knows it, even on the not so good days.
Two quick things to share with you about Alzheimers.
A friend of mine was in his early 60s and suffering from the disease. Like your dad, he usually forgot things but occasionally had moments of clarity. One day I took him down to see a boat I was buying and asked him (a former marine surveyor) to inspect it. For about two hours he remembered and identified everything, and gave a brilliant report and analysis. But shortly after we left the boat his mind went away again. Fascinating, the things that can trigger memory.
The other thing I remember is his attitude. Shortly after learning that he had Alzheimers, he told me “There are two good things about Alzheimers: you’re always making new friends, and you get to hide your own Easter eggs.”
What a great attitude for someone who’d just learned what he had and what his future held.
Best of luck to you and yours, Ian, from a daily reader of your blog.
Your love, your compassion and your pain were so eloquently rendered for us in those words. Your life with your father is a wealth of sharing and I felt it. God bless you being there.
I lost two relatives to Alzheimers, so I can share your experiences. My grandmother was 95 on one of our memorable visits to the nursing home. Shad a cold tray of food, including some peaches in heavy syrup. She asked if I wanted to take some home, like she had done so many years for all of us when we had dinner at her little country house, so to humor her, I said yes. She said, “I’ll wrap it up,” then took a big handful of the peaches and stuffed them down the front pocket of my shirt. I later left, dripping with syrup. It was sad, but also funny, and it gave my daughters a fond memory of a sweet lady whose mind was flawed but whose generosity was never diminished, even by such a dread disease. Good luck to you and your dad.
Ian, I check in at your blog once in a while after being introduced to it by Bonnie, your sister. Although not having a specific interest in Hawaiian politics, my wife and I do enjoy bits and pieces, including your animal pictures; we are also cat people.
My father, who managed to break away from the farm during the depression and start on the road that led to a PhD in agriculture, suffered from dementia. As to whether or not it was Alzheimers or not, we do not know. Your account of your Dad, whom I met a couple years ago, is so very poignant; it offered me the opportunity to mentally revisit my Dad, now gone for several years. Thank You!
Gene
Elgin, Illinois USA
You know after reading your various interactions with your dad it sounds exactly like, in a way, he’s experiencing what happens in one of those common dreams where you’re back in school and know you have a big test and can’t find the room or haven’t studies- or forgot your pants- or other things like that … or even the ones where you’re in what should be a familiar city but you can’t remember where you are or how to get somewhere or where you parked your car or if you even have one… that kind of thing. I don’t know what it means but the parallels appear to be there.
Hang in there and value these days you have to kind of tie up all these loose ends while you still have him. I never got to do that with my dad- even though he was 83 when he died and he had been disoriented for a few years before that I had to do all that after he was gone and couldn’t ask any questions to organize things, both physical objects and my memories.
You are exactly right, and I’ve commented on this before. It’s like a strange anxiety dream when you’re awake. I dream about the class that I can’t find, decades after my last class. My dad’s waking dreams have the same character. As you say, I don’t know what this all means. But we cope.
I’m in remission from cancer now. If it comes back, I probably won’t have to worry about ever reaching the stage of dementia myself. I wonder if it is better to go while fully connected to the outside world, or while slowly making the transition to the next one?