At the age of 86, my father, Bernard (Bernie to many of us, Berns to a particularly cheeky friend) is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Because my mother’s father died of Alzheimer’s, we thought we knew what to expect.
What can I say? We were younger then.
At six in the morning, my dad comes down from his bedroom to the kitchen to have breakfast: toast with butter and jam (cut in two pieces), two eggs and coffee with flavoured creamer. Then, he goes back to his room. Around noon, he comes down from his bedroom to have breakfast (eggs, toast and coffee), then goes back to his room. At about six in the evening, he comes down to the kitchen to have eggs, toast and coffee.
This makes it sound like my father has a routine, but he does not. He is just as likely to come down to the kitchen at two in the morning and hope somebody who is awake will make him breakfast. Fortunately for him, owing to the sleep patterns of various people in the house, the diner is open 24/7. True, the diner only serves one meal; fortunately, it’s really popular with the clientele!
Dad always has the same meal because, no matter what time of day it is, it is always morning. He is enjoying the eternal breakfast of the spotless mind.
Every two or three days, my brother, who does the shopping for the family, has to go out to replenish the breakfast food. For some reason, the diner never seems to be able to keep jumbo eggs in stock for very long.
Alzheimer’s involves the development of plaque in the brain which interferes with the signals between neurons. You slowly start to lose your short term memory. Then, you more quickly start to lose your speech processing ability. As the disease accelerates, you forget to do things like dress or wash yourself. In the end, your brain stops sending commands to your autonomic nervous system: your body forgets how to breath or to keep your heart pumping.
Welcome to the machine.
Sometimes, my father would come downstairs from his bedroom in underwear and an undershirt. My brother would hustle him back to his room and help him get properly dressed, because pants. Pants are pretty self-explanatory to those of us who do not have Alzheimer’s; to my dad, they can be something of a mystery.
While people with Alzheimer’s still have some capacity for thought, they are aware that something is happening to them, but they aren’t clear what, so they find their own explanations. My father took to hiding his wallet (from the thieves in his imagination), forgetting where he left it and accusing the people he lived with (in other words: us) of stealing it from him. And, I gotta tell you, he hid it in some very creative places (such as under piles of clothes or in shoe boxes): it often took us hours scouring his bedroom to find it so we could return it to him.
We traced dad’s decline by his use of language. At first, he groped for words. “Where is my…my…my…”
“Cane?”
“No. My…you know…my…”
“Coffee cup?”
“That’s not it! You know! My…”
“Chiropractor?”
“Toothbrush. That’s it. Where is my toothbrush?”
Then, he started substituting random sounds for words he couldn’t remember: “Where is my flurble?”
“Toothbrush?”
“Flurble!”
“I’ll get your toothbrush.”
Eventually, his speech came to be dominated by random sounds with only the occasional English word. “Am I geebler fooble bobble?”
“Umm…toothbrush?”
Occasionally, he would come downstairs from his bedroom in the middle of the night only in an undershirt. Aiieeee! My brother would quickly hustle him up to his room to get him dressed. Because, let’s be honest: nobody wants to see an 86 year-old man naked from the waist down. Not even 86 year-old women.
The most memorable thing caused by my dad’s deteriorating mental condition happened in the early evening, when my mother and I were watching television. I thought I heard the sound of whooshing water, but that would be absurd. Water doesn’t whoosh indoors. At first, I ignored it. However, the sound was insistent, so, after a few minutes, I was forced to investigate.
In the barroom next to where we were watching television, water was pouring in a fountain from the ceiling. It was like an indoor Niagara Falls…without the Maid of the Mist and Madame Tussaud’s. My father, whose bedroom is above the barroom, had run the water in his private bathroom with the plug in the sink and forgot to turn it off. Cue the waterworks.
To be fair, the bar hadn’t been cleaned in years. Still. We had to use just about all of the towels in the house and the application of space heaters for many hours to dry the room out.
My brother, who is the most practical person in the house (which makes him the cleverest), disabled the plug in my dad’s sink to ensure that the rain clouds didn’t return to the barroom.
More of us are living longer, being the clever apes that we are, which means that dementia and mental decline are on the rise. At some point in your life, you may have to take care of somebody with Alzheimer’s or a similar condition. If so, keep in mind that, while the progression of the disease has common elements, the way it manifests will be unique to the person you’re dealing with.
The deterioration of the human mind can be just as creative as its growth. Who knew?