Day-to-Dementia

Looking back, there were some signs. I’d find a glass of E&J brandy he had poured himself the evening before in a kitchen cabinet. He began asking me more frequently to accompany him to his place of employment and help him with the same email system he had been using for years. Nastiness would come out of nowhere, which wasn’t so unusual, but it was becoming more pronounced, and even more out-of-the-blue. It wasn’t until sometime later that we’d really understand what was taking shape.

He worked another year or two until the age of seventy-four. A few times, my mother made references to issues he was having with his group’s department head. Only once or twice that I recall did she vaguely indicate that something could be amiss with his health. Otherwise, when she did speak about it, she would fall back on the all-too-familiar explanation that it was personal, that again it could just be chalked up to xenophobia, or professional jealousy, or a colleague’s bad-mouthing him, that the department head was under pressure or had simply turned out to be an asshole after several years. He was fine, she figured he would work another several years, she would pronounce, that he would end up with a better pension, so on and so forth.

I moved to another state toward the end of 2002 with the woman I was dating, and by the end of 2004 he had retired and he and my mother relocated to a sister city of mine. The signs would have been more obvious as more time passed, if only we had some familiarity with them or we had known what they signified. He was having difficulty remembering what I did for work, and then whether I was even working at all or attending a higher-ed institution. He would broach the subject with an affected casualness, and such inquiries quickly became frustrating, irritating, as if his seeming inability to hold onto the information was purposeful or due to inattentiveness or a lack of focus due simply to a lack of caring. Eventually he wouldn’t be sure where I lived and then it began to seem as if he was confusing me with my brother, as though the details of his sons’ lives were getting criss-crossed.

Again the email. I set him up with a new Yahoo! account which he could never remember how to login into. I would walk him through it, he would take detailed notes, and then the next time I saw him, he was asking me all over again what URL to go to, what his username was, what his password was, how to compose an email. He had projects that he wanted my help with, shapeless projects.

There were new strange quirks. He insisted it wasn’t necessary to use soap at all when washing the dishes. The dish could be greasy as hell but all it needed was hot water, he would argue. I would look at a counter full of dishes that had just been “washed”, many with a visible scummy film on them after repeated use and hot-water treatment, and start the process over myself, maddened at the stupidity of his obstinacy.

Little did I know what was coming down the pike. My father’s mind was slipping, and things were going to get much worse, making the early frustrations telling but trivial. Ultimately, he would be diagnosed with dementia with psychosis, and ultimately, we as a family would fall into a day-to-day holding pattern…