April 29, 2012: He Doesn't Belong to Us Anymore

April: Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
It was a grey day, last Friday, with that rolling April wind that comes on like it's made of silk ribbons of warm and cold air.  The kind of day that seems poised on an edge, ever changing, tempestuous.  Appropriate since it mirrors the way I feel about visiting my father in the Home.  I love him dearly, and I realized quite some time ago, that he was maybe the only real hero I ever knew.  But to visit him now, to see him as he is, it wrenches me.  I don't think I'm being egotistical or unfair to my family by thinking that my father was one of the special ones.  Born third of seven, he seems to have been  an accessible man to all of his brothers and sisters.  They all had reasons for thinking they had a special connection with him, in that way that people confirm the existence of love by certain memories, callbacks to emotional times, shared moments.  He didn't stand out in a crowd, he didn't draw attention to himself, he smiled at you and laughed with you.  But now, there isn't much he can do for himself.  He can't talk, can't remember how to take care of his personal hygiene, and can't survive on his own.  Alzheimer's doesn't hurt you, it takes you away.

Opening the door to the Home is like falling down the rabbit hole.  Old men and women walk around the house trying to connect with place, with each other, with the images they see.  They speak to the caretakers, to visitors, and to each other, but they say nonsensical things.  Some are obsessively complimentary, some are overtly crude and racist.  Some call out for help.  It is an amalgam of damaged humanity.  A slice of primeval mind... men and women lost in a haze of dreams and memories.  In order to relate I try to imagine that feeling I have of trying to remember the name of an actor or book that escapes me... desperate to make the right connection, searching for that name that's on the tip of my tongue... endless.  I have a theory that they are all in a memory loop, having old conversations, speaking to their families, enjoying the life they had again.  My father has garnered praise for being quiet.  The caretakers ask me if he's always been quiet, and my mother says he was, but in my mind I can only think of all the times he's spoken, a lifetime of laughter and conversation.

He seems to have had problems letting them help him with his personal hygiene, which has forced them to use drugs to sedate him a little.  Although they shave his face, brush his teeth, and give him a haircut, he seems to have a permanent tuft of hair coming out of his nose, and it's always a mess.  Towards the end of his time at our home, he would spend way too much time brushing his two front teeth, up and down for 15 minutes at at time.  We've had to buy him new shoes with velcro because he took all his shoestrings out and lost them.  If there is a napkin on the table or a piece of paper he picks it up and tries to arrange it, or fold it, always keeping his hands busy.  When he stands in front of a mirror he can't connect the man in the image with himself, so he becomes obsessed with his reflection and tries to talk to it, threatens it, moves his hands trying to figure out how the man in front of him can mirror his actions.  He can only walk in short, stunted steps, seemingly afraid to stride confidently forward.  Just thinking about him, and the way he is now, seems to scatter my own mind.  I've tried three different times to write about my father and it always seems to fall short of my ambitions.  I always end up trailing off, unsatisfied with the results of my attempts to describe my feelings for him.  It's so difficult to decipher these new rules.  So hard to translate in the spaces we're allotted.  If I had more time, if I could spend years on it, I could come up with a definite answer to the riddle Alzheimer's sets upon us.  But all I can do is describe the broken pieces, try to untangle this web one strand at a time.

My mother met me at the Home last Friday, but I was early so I sat down with him, tried to coax some kind of greeting out of him, some small talk, only to come up empty.  So while we waited I picked up a newspaper and told him about the Detroit Tigers and the Mud Hens... I read him some of the headlines and talked about current events, and this seemed to engage him.  He perked up and listened, trying to remember the names of people in the news, watching me talk.  Perhaps this is something I can indulge in with him.  Maybe he doesn't need to tell me things anymore.  Maybe I should tell him things.  When my mom showed up she brought him his new shoes and we took him out to dinner.  We went to Rudy's and had some chili dogs and fries, and since the weather was bad we took him back.  There wasn't much we could do for him that day.  We took him back into the house and he simply fell in line with the rest of the residents, walking behind them into the dining room to eat dinner.  Mom and I watched him walk away, decided we might as well go, and walked out.  As we left my mom said to me, "He doesn't belong to us anymore, he belongs to them."  All I could do was put my arms around her and let her cry a bit.  I think she's been on the edge of breakdown for the past few years.  When she feels down, she must have that sick feeling in her stomach, that seemingly black empty hole that leads to real heartache.  She begins to cry then pulls back, avoiding a debilitating, paralyzing, three day sob.  After all she has to drive home.

What seems to me the real crime here is how young he is.  He's sixty five and my mother is almost sixty two.  The golden years have been ripped away from them.  Their plans to travel and enjoy their retirement are over, and it appears to me like he won't be able to even be there for my wedding.  If we have children, he won't know them other than the times we bring the baby to him.  My future wife will never know the man he was and her family will never know him.  It is a kind of tragedy.  I always knew that one day my parents would both be gone from this world, and as we've aged I've become more and more philosophical about it, but I always thought we'd have more time, more memories to make.  But it's a bit of a blessing, too, because I can see now, how short life really is, how beautiful is this world and this time, how much of it I've wasted, and how I don't want to waste anymore.  My future life has always seemed like a distant horizon, I could see it and I knew I was moving toward it, but always it was undefined, vague and blurred.  Now I am careening toward it, actively chasing it, desperate to live a good life.  It's what he always wanted for me.  Until we meet again...  

April 8, 2012: Copper Colored Tungsten Carbide

Perhaps it's always been this way.  Perhaps throughout the vast generations of men and women loving each other and following that grand old ritual of courtship, flowing into the promise of engagement, then fulfilling the sacrament of marriage, men and women have always struggled with the disparate nature of their excitement for the impending ceremony.  The timing, the levels of anxiety, that search in the other's eyes for the light of acknowledgement... the agreement of the weight of the occasion to be undertaken... this does not always occur simultaneously.  It cannot be faked either.  Insincerity in a relationship is quickly discovered by the lover as she or he sees the slight look away, the withdrawn muscle, the aura of falseness.  No one should dare to try to sell that lie, to fake enthusiasm, because it is quickly resented, and trust is a hard thing to earn.

Since early May of 2011, when I asked for Anna's hand in a beautiful restaurant in the Renaissance Center overlooking the blue Detroit River, she has poured over details in magazines and on the internet.  She has searched through examples of other weddings, cataloged countless ideas from glossy pictures of models in dresses, flowers, centerpieces, locations, and all the other untold minutiae that goes into putting together a wedding.  I've watched her agonize, trying to reconcile the vision of the wedding she's always dreamed of with the desire to satisfy the needs of friends and family who will grace us with their presence.  She has had to do all this while at the same time keeping up with an enormous work load.  At times she has been overwhelmed.  At times she has been overjoyed.  She began counting down, marking each second day of each month with a smile and the question, "You know what today is...?"  Up until recently, the best I could do was muster a smile, laugh and say, "Six months until our wedding day."  I simply couldn't match her excitement.  While the vision was being layered like warm blankets on a cold bed, I sat in the background wondering how she could invest so much into an event that seemed so distant, a light on the horizon.  For me, I've held my excitement in reserve, because it would make the waiting so agonizing, almost unbearable.  Time, months... weeks... days, would drag until, like her, I would be burned out, wishing only for an end to the wait, for the day to arrive.

For her, each new task she has accomplished has been a joyful occasion.  Booking rooms, arranging for the flowers, finding a location, buying a dress, these things have been torches on the path leading to a distant hillside, at the tail end of a summer, under the warm afternoon light, in front of hundreds of friends and family, by my side.  Trying not to dwell on that day has been like sailing against the wind, and I know I have been of little help to her.  The fact is she knows what she wants.  She knows how the room should look, how the ceremony should go, what kind of menu she wants to offer, what kind of music she wants to hear, and she knows how to go about getting it.  I've listened, offered alternatives, helped her in her considerations, but the truth is all her ideas are well thought out and along the same lines as mine.  While I've played a role, it has been minor, and I've been fairly stress free for all this time, able to carry on with other things while this long year and a half has dragged on.  Until this weekend.

May 4 will mark the year anniversary of my marriage proposal to Anna.  We will celebrate by returning to that restaurant for a meal.  There will be four months left, a third of a year, of this seemingly endless stretch of time until the day we are married.  That knowledge has begun to seep through to me.  I see now that there are many small details that need to be dealt with, and the overall painting of the wedding needs to be shaded and detailed.  These kinds of details can't be done alone, and now the things she needs from me are being more defined.  The role is changing.

On Saturday, we went to a mall, to a Men's Warehouse in order to be fitted for a tuxedo for a friend's wedding I will be attending in November.  While we were there we visited a jewelry store in order to find out what size ring I needed so we could order it online.  We were simply looking to find out the size ring I needed because we had a pretty good idea what kind of ring I wanted.  However, like many surprises life offers us, we found a fantastic copper colored tungsten carbide ring that simply jumped out at me, like it was waiting there the whole time.  Perhaps this is the one thing that gives men a feeling comparable to a woman finding her dress.  Anna watched me with a knowing smile as I danced to the music in the mall, and swayed in that golden light that seems to shine on true believers.  I was, and am, in the trance of love, and the agony of waiting has become very real to me.

Maybe this is the way of things.  Maybe this staggering of excitement is part of the ritual, ordained for the purpose of infusing new life and new energy into the couple when the hardship of anticipation is most keen, allowing the one who is working the hardest a moment of relief, a re-freshening, so that the work can get done, and the hopeful feelings of a lifetime can be invigorated.  Until we meet again...