Lately, I’ve been thinking we should hang a “___ days without __________” board in our kitchen to keep track of my father’s increasingly erratic behaviour. Today, for instance, the message could be “27 days without a bite being taken out of a tomato.“
Gisela, the Web Goddess who is living with my family, grows tomatoes in our backyard. Much of this summer’s harvest lies on counters in the kitchen waiting to be added to salads or made into sauce. One morning, she noticed that overnight a bite had been taken out of one of her tomatoes. A single bite. One bite was all whoever did it needed to discover that they really didn’t want to eat a whole tomato. By process of elimination (the bite was too big to have been made by one of Gisela’s cats, who, in any case, had never been on any of the tables or counters in the kitchen), the midnight tomato biter (who will be a character in a future comic, although I haven’t decided if they’ll be a hero or a villain) turned out to be dad.
We lost several good tomatoes that week. Their loss will be mourned. Then, my father’s attention apparently turned to other matters. Like pants.
17 days without walking around the house without clothes
Although we were mortified by it when it first started happening, my father coming downstairs without pants would turn out to be relatively benign. Coming downstairs without pants and underwear – a progression that we should have anticipated, but didn’t – was a lot more awkward.
The first person he encountered would hustle him back to his room and encourage him to put on the absent garments. (Sometimes, to shake things up, he would come down without a shirt. Those were good days.) I thought we might add our names and how often we had to help my dad to the message board; it wasn’t a competition, of course, just to…keep track. Out of curiosity. But my brother Philip would have won hands down (to better pull up somebody else’s pants), so there didn’t seem to be a point.
In an earlier phase of the Alzheimer’s, we had difficulty convincing my father that the clothes in his room were his. (I’m still not sure whom he thought the clothes belonged to, or why anybody would substitute them for his clothes. Some conspiracy theories really aren’t worth the effort needed to debunk them.) This could have been that. Or, it could have been my father forgetting the social contract that people shouldn’t subject others to views of their private bits. Impossible to know.
You don’t think about the social niceties until other people forget them.
Then, there were the…wet patches on the carpet in the upstairs hallway. Again, probably not the cats, who seemed pathologically enamoured of their litter box. But, if not the cats, then who would – no. It couldn’t be…could it?
3 days without dropping his adult diaper and peeing on the carpet
It could. Oh, it very much could.
Picture the scene. It is four in the morning. An 86 year-old man walks down the stairs. He walks through the kitchen – could he be hungry? His eating has been erratic – it’s possible. But no, he stops on the other side of dining room door, exposes himself and waters the carpet.
Now, to be fair, it was early in the morning, and my dad was groggy and incoherent; he clearly did not know what he was doing. Still, nobody in the house knows how to get pee out of carpet (for some reason, my suggestion that we sprinkle it with kitty litter did not go over well). Advice is appreciated.
When you have Alzheimer’s, dignity (that little voice in your head that advises you to take pride in your life, to respect yourself) loses all meaning. When you watch the deterioration of somebody you love who has Alzheimer’s, when you see how easy it is to suppress the little voice in your head that advises you to take pride in your life, to respect yourself, it makes you wonder how fragile the social construction known as dignity really is.
0 days without finding shit smeared on the toilet seat
Oh, yeah. Dignity? Definitely overblown.