Dying or Not

I have read that older folks often die around the holidays. I have not written for a month due to the “holiday” season in December and the many distractions it brings. Not the least of the distractions was my father and the several times we were told that he was near death. At times it appears the hospice people are crying wolf, with each and every decline in health regarded as a harbinger of his demise, but he has physically rallied on these occasions, his body staving off the insults of pneumonia and low blood sugar and low blood pressure and medication withdrawal.

In one sense, this is exasperating. After all, we have removed the “life prolonging” medications from his regimen because we do not wish him to reach a fully vegetative state, basically allowing his body to fail along with his mind. This is in accordance with his strict guidance on the matter, made clear to us years ago. Although I do not wish my father to die on any given day, I know he, the he I knew for my entire life until very recently, did not relish the thought of living on in a severely diminished mental capacity. Although there are occasional glimpses of his personality, the Alzheimer’s disease has progressed more rapidly than anyone expected or the doctors could explain. The simple rapidity of his degradation by the disease has been staggering to us, and perhaps the overarching impression of his illness. Things happen fast. Dad did always want things to move quickly, though, so maybe his innate impatience has hastened his demise.

In a different sense, we are not quite ready to say our final goodbyes to our father. I feel like I will not have a chance to really connect verbally with him again – he does not know who I am anymore. There are the occasional moments of lucidity, but I am afraid these are occurring less and less all the time. And I do not seem to be there when they occur. Or they occur because there is a woman in the room but I am not a woman, so there you have it. So I feel like a lot of my grieving has already taken place. I am sure there will be more, but I have moved beyond denial and anger, and, although I still am depressed by it all, I am in that acceptance mode now. My father will die, and, I believe, soon. But he has always been a bit confounding, so I am not putting any money down on a particular month.

I was down in Pinehurst early in December, with my three children and our dog. My father was pleased to see the kids initially, and we chatted about nothing in particular, or particularly intelligible, our first night there. After that, though, there was not much real interaction, and my father was very unresponsive, even when I brought in my Labrador at the same time as Sandy the care-giver brought hers. Two big black dogs would have gotten quite a response from him a month earlier. I did not see my father again until shortly after Christmas. He had caught pneumonia, rebounded, and hung on during the interim, but he was truly vacant sometimes while I was there. Again, over a matter of weeks, his baseline mental health had declined perceptibly. Alzheimer’s is not very subtle.