An Answer and A Lesson

By McClaren Malcolm

When I had lunch with a friend the other day, she asked, “How’s your dad doing?”

“He died,” I answered. A smile spread across my face before I realized how I must appear. “Oh, Donna, I miss him, but I feel like cheering. He made it––and so did I.”

“What do you mean he made it and so did you?” 

I told her Dad’s story, and when I had finished, I found I’d learned even more in the telling than in the living of it.

It began innocently. Dad had been slowing down, and hadn’t had a physical in some time. Mother scheduled him a doctor’s appointment for a routine exam, and I went along for moral support.

The nurse asked him to get up on the examining table. When he had difficulty understanding her directions, she helped him up. “You’re doing fine, Mr. Peterson.”

He looked at her for a moment, and then smiled. Out of his droll wit he said, “If I’m doing so fine, what am I doing here?”

A few days later, the doctor called with the CAT scan report. “Mr. Peterson has half the brain mass of a normal male his age. My diagnosis is senile dementia, suspected Alzheimer’s Disease.”

If he said more that that, I didn’t hear because somewhere a steel door slammed. I swallowed hard. I knew little about Alzheimer’s; I did know there was no cure. I heard myself asking, “How much time does he have?”

“We don’t know, but you might find a care home for him soon.”

Our family had had its crises; my divorce, Dad’s bungled eye surgery.  And yet we were strong survivors. We could get from dark to light; but this! There would be no cheerful cards for him saying, “Hope you get well soon.”

This was not what I wanted for him. He should read his paper in the morning, discuss politics with me in the afternoon, fly kites with his grandchildren on weekends, dance with my mother on anniversaries.  Then some night in the far future, when he was ready, he would fall to sleep and not wake up.

Instead he was slipping away from me down the sliding sides of a sink hole, and I couldn’t reach him. I felt the knife-edge of pain and worse, no hope.

Dad moved to a care home. When he had good days it was hard to believe his diagnosis. It made it harder to hear his question, “When can I come home?”

Then I saw the bad days. Let me take you back.

As I enter his room, I think, who is he now? Dementia lurks in the back of his brain, it shortens his memory, short-circuits relationships, distorts his vision. He looks in the mirror and sees someone else, an older man, the man-in-the-wall. He talks to the man-in-the-wall. The man-in-the-wall lip-syncs what he says, and Dad doesn’t notice.

Who is he now when he reaches out to me? He looks up from his wheelchair, his face open, loving, even joyful. Dad wants to hear how I am, what I’m doing. He talks to me about Louie. What do I know about Louie? I tell him what he told me years ago when I found his brother Louie’s picture in a photo album.

“Louie looks like your brother Ed, Dad. He wanted to be a lawyer, and he was only sixteen when he collapsed and died from stroke at his school desk.”

“Oh,” he says. “He went so quick. I don’t remember him.”

“You were only six.”

“Don’t you remember him?” he asks me.

“I’m not your sister; I’m your daughter.”

He looks puzzled. “I don’t know about that,” he says.

Pain darts my eyes as I hold back tears. My heart knots like a charley horse. “I’m your daughter.” My words sound thick and lumpy. His blank eyes look away.

“Would you like some ice water, Dad?”  I emphasize his relational name, “Dad.”

“That would be nice” He settles into his chair with arms resting on his bubble tummy, his fingers interlaced.

I rush out of his room and down the hall. My tears flow freely. My tears belong here with the vegetable people, their wheelchairs scattered along the tunnel hall.

In a flood of feelings, I ask myself, why should a good man suffer indignities of pokes, prods, soiled diapers, public nudity? And how can I help when I recoil at the thought of touching his thorny hands and feet, or breathing the same heavy air he breathes, smelling the odious smells of Alzheimer’s seeping from him, the smells that no bathing can remove?

I raise a prayer. “What must happen before he can die? What must I learn before he can go? What is the answer? Tell me so I can do it and release him from his fatherly duties”---as though it were something so simple that I could control.

However, simplistic, that day I took responsibility for his release because I didn’t know what else to do. If I was to have some role in his passing, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t holding him up. If I had to learn a lesson, I wanted to get on with it. At the least I could try to make a bad situation better, to give my dad comfort in spite of my discomfort with his dying body. Quiet filled my inner spaces; I found a sad acceptance of my humanness, my limitations. 

Dad continued to surprise me with occasional lucid moments. On such an occasion, I was sitting in the dining room with Dad. Mother was there, wheeling others to the table, adjusting their bibs, and pouring coffee. Dad turned to me and said, “Look at her helping everyone. Who is going to take care of her?”

I reassured him that my husband and I would take care of her.

In another of his lucid moments, Mother and I were sitting on his bed; he was in his chair. He turned to us, his face beaming, and said, “This is an afternoon I will never forget, being with the most important people in the world, you two.”

Over the remaining months of his life, the answer to that desperate prayer came to me through the experience of just being there for both Mother and Dad. The answer was that there is suffering and that suffering is a gift, because when Dad could no longer walk, when he could no longer feed himself, or remember what he had to eat moments before, when his life was distilled to his very spirit, one thing remained: love. It all came down to love. Love was all he had to give and love was all he could receive. The greatest gift of all, and it was all we had.

He demonstrated that love once again in the week before he died. His caregiver was wheeling him outside, and she asked him, “Are you comfortable, Mr. Peterson?”

He responded, “Yes, I am. And are you all right?”

For four years he showed us how to live as he suffered and how to live as he died, a great spirit within an ordinary man.

On his last night, I stood at the foot of his bed. He was still, frozen in time, his mouth open to catch the next breath that did not come. His arms that had held me, the face that showed me acceptance had no importance for me now. His great spirit was gone. He had found a space to slip through escaping the brain-numbing loss of a wife’s face, the confusion of scooping up food from his plate and dumping it in his coffee, the lost connectedness of opening his mouth when he was asked to close his eyes.

When the mortician had removed his body from the room, Mother went to the closet and pulled out his favorite blue sweater, his red socks. She asked, “Would you like these?” She held them out to me; they were full of his clinging odor. As naturally as anything I have ever done, I reached for them, their odor of illness now my dad’s essence.  I pulled on the sweater and sat in his chair while I pulled on his red socks, a remnant of an embrace, but an embrace just the same. A daughter had learned her lesson, and a dad was done with his work.

[McClaren Malcolm’s An Answer and A Lesson is a departure from her usual writing of histories and award-winning short stories. During her dad’s descent into dementia she hoped for, searched for, some good lurking within the despair she felt. Following her journey may help readers to an understanding of the awful toll demanded of Alzheimer’s patients and their families; however, Malcolm’s approach of courage and perseverance brings her a love for her dad deeper and wider than she had known before. Suffering became a great teacher. She resides in Venice, Florida, with her beloved husband and their cats, Ping & Pong.]