Denial? Check. Anger? Check. Fear? Check. Grief? Check. Acceptance?

Denial? Check. Anger? Check. Fear? Check. Grief? Check. Acceptance?

Last weekend I went to North Carolina, ostensibly to see Dad. The main reason was because I had not been down there since the holidays. The secondary reason was to attend a meeting with a financial planner. The tertiary reason was actually to visit my father. This hierarchy is a little embarrassing to admit, but there you have it. I feel as if I am not able to maintain a decent grasp on the reality of the situation my parents inhabit unless I am actually face to face with it myself on a regular basis. That is what brings me down each time.

Being face to face with my father is a different matter. Last visit, back in the supposedly joyous days of late December, our interaction was very limited. At some points my father’s eyes were blank – I am sad to say that they reminded me of the eyes of a goat, which you can look into but see no sense of recognition or intelligence or awareness. Of course, my father displays all of these characteristics, at times, but that blank look caused an existential shudder somewhere deep inside each time I saw it.

Until I found myself looking into that void exhibited by my father’s heretofore windows to the soul, I believed I had been through the first four stages of personal loss. I thought I had actually made significant headway in the grieving department, as discussed in a prior entry, and was well on my way to acceptance. Even when I left Fox Hollow in the waning days of 2007 I believed this.

During my latest visit, though, my father’s eyes never clouded over. He stared off into space sometimes, but he appeared to be contemplating something, somehow, somewhere. I picked up a digital photo frame in his room, the type that runs a slideshow of pictures, and held it in front of Dad and narrated the photos to him. Perhaps the interval was too short for him to grasp the context of the photos, but he meekly looked at them and listened to me and gave no real indication that he recognized most of what he was seeing. Most of the time. The way he did indicate to me he recognized the pictures for what they were was by crying – and they were not tears of joy. I think when his mind recognized something, when the image was strong enough to rouse his memory, it made him sad rather than happy. Whatever joy was associated with the people or places in the image was overridden by the sense of loss he must have been feeling. When the photos were of my family traipsing around Europe, he meekly stared, but when the photos were from his old house on the water by the Gulf of Mexico his eyes teared up and he was sad.

My father is definitely in the Grief stage of his illness. There is a lot written on the stages and eventually people are hopeful that they will reach Acceptance of their fate. I do not see how the brain afflicted by Alzheimer’s can ever reach that state. The confusion inherent in the disease works against any semblance of serenity. The uncertainty imposed by the damage to the memory leads to self-doubt and frustration. With that backdrop, it seems highly unlikely that an Alzheimer’s patient will ever be afforded the self-awareness to reach the acceptance of their disease and impending death. Hence, until the brain is nearly completely shot and the body is simply operating at only the most basic level, the Alzheimer’s patient must be caught in the Grief stage. So much is lost to them, both realized and unrealized, that the sense of loss must be overwhelming – loss of freedom, loss of places and people they know, loss of vocabulary, loss of memory, loss of awareness. When the recognition of this loss trickles into their consciousness, it must be depressing. Agonizingly so.

The caregivers from AOS, helping out at Fox Hollow, had mentioned this crying tendency for the past several months, but my father had not exhibited this response in front of me before. I assumed it was because of my naturally buoyant personality that the tears had not flowed before, but perhaps I overestimate my effervescence. When I try to consciously empathize with my father, imagining the situation in which he is trapped, I find myself wanting to cry as well. Although he has family and friends in attendance and there is a regular supply of (no-sugar) cookies, he has lost most of what he held dear in the world. His own abilities, mental and physical, have abandoned him, and there is no way back for him. There is no hope of recovering his life by working hard or analytically planning a strategy that will end-run his illness. It is a damn sad situation. And he is sad. And he has a right to be. And if he finds a way to acceptance, he is a much much better man than me.