A prompt from Real Toads: dementia

go away, she said,

you’re no fun any more,

sometimes I think

you’re losing your mind!

  

mom, I said,

mom, please listen to me,

that’s exactly what’s happening,

dad is sick, and his mind is going.

From the movie Tangled.

  

she brushed me off

and wouldn’t listen.

  

they saw a doctor.

then a visiting nurse

came to test dad.

Alzheimer’s Disease, she said.

  

they saw another doctor,

who then tested mom.

Alzheimer’s Disease also,

the doctor said.

  

they brushed him off

and wouldn’t listen.

  

my brother had found

an apartment for them,

near his house, but

it couldn't work out.

  

my brother then found

assisted living for them,

but dad was kicked out

of there three times.

  

he brushed us all off

and just couldn’t listen.

  

  

This was the beginning of the end for our parents. When they moved into a care facility, they got wonderful care. The staff loved them, and there were lots of visitors, and plenty of activities.

But they were in different parts of the building. Mom had physical illnesses, plus mild Alzheimer's.
Dad was physically healthy, but he had more advanced Alzheimer's and also vascular dementia. Different problems, different needs, different units.
They missed one another terribly. Dad coped by imagining she was still with him. Mother put up a good front, but her heart was broken. He didn't recognize her any more. How could he? She lived in another part of the complex, so she couldn't be the wife who was still with him, in his mind.

It was so sad for everyone, except Dad of course, because he couldn't see that anything was wrong.
Mom died seven months later, of a combination of her physical problems plus a fall, and then pneumonia. And a broken heart.

Dad lived for two and a half more years, but the part of his brain that controlled his heart would forget to control it every now and then. He would be walking along, then suddenly fall straight down, like a tree, when his heart stopped. He had been a musician, a horn player, so he had good lungs. Every time his heart stopped, and then he fell, his excellent lungs would cause his heart to beat again. He never remembered these episodes. When shown his bandaged face and head, black eyes and bleeding nose, he said, "Pretty good, eh?" as if he'd survived 10 rounds with Ali.

Laurie's prompt for A Word with Laurie at the online writers' group Imaginary Garden with Real Toads definitely resonated with me: the word dementia. However, it frightened me, too, because it made me remember my parents' journey through the disease, in particular my father's, which lasted until he was no longer himself but was still a sweet old fella ("a real gentleman" the staff told us) whom we loved; and then it lasted until he was no longer that person, either. Finally, he needed complete care, like an ungainly infant.
I was with him when he died, when his lungs could no longer jump-start his heart. I was dozing in a chair beside his bed, listening for him to breathe, stop, breathe again, until the time came when he didn't breathe again.
When I think about Dad, I like to think about a conversation with my youngest brother, who surprised Dad, and delighted Mom, and horrified the rest of us, by being born when we were 21, 19, and 15. After Dad died, I said, "You know, Clint and I were just saying the other day, he was a really good dad," and Rob replied, "You're right, he really was."
Unconventional (eccentric even), full of ideas and the talents with which to express those ideas, he really was a really good dad.