The Eye of The Storm

The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea
driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven.
-Martin Luther

Friday was my day off, and I spent it with my parents. Mom had cataract surgery on Thursday. My older sister cared for them Thursday, Friday was my turn.

When did it happen to us that the children became the caretakers? It's an insidious thing, this situation. It started creeping in as slowly and quietly as the fog at the harbor, but gradually it has built and thickened and deepened. Nothing looks familiar anymore, and we are finding it hard to make our way.

I watched my mother nap for the first time on Friday. That may seem like a small thing, but for a woman who has always been a dynamo it is a big event. She's 80 years old, and she's tired. She's too tired to fight it off, and is yielding to it. It scares me to realize that she is old now, and her body is slowing down.

And Daddy? Poor Daddy. He was having a bad day. He was very confused all day, and wasn't sure who was there and who wasn't. My sister had slept there the night before, and he didn't understand why I was leaving to go somewhere else to sleep that night.

He's losing his verbal/cognitive abilities slowly but surely. He was reading the paper, picking the ponies the way he always does, and came to a word he didn't know. He didn't gloss it over, instead he said "I see this word, but I think it's wrong. POE-LEET doesn't sound right to me." The word was "polite". Later that day, he saw my mother's medicine on the kitchen counter, and he couldn't retrieve the word "medicine". He knew what it was, and what it did, but he didn't have the ability to find the identifying noun to correspond to the object. That is sad enough in and of itself; that he has been a pharmacist all his life makes it heart-rending.

As his brain is failing him, so too is his body. He is terribly frail these days. His legs are in very bad shape from spinal neuropathy. He uses a walker, but he can't remember how to use it correctly. He moves slowly and cautiously now. He has stopped wearing a belt because it makes bathroom visits more difficult for him. He is so thin and fragile that he has trouble keeping his pants up, and Mom had to help him with that. She also had to help him change his pants in the middle of the day, after he had some difficulty in the bathroom. He sleeps a lot now, slipping in and out of naps all day long.

There were rays of sunshine as well. Mom is trying to divest herself of excess baggage, so she is having all of us look through old pictures and take the ones we want. We all enjoyed it, and laughed a bit. It was so touching to see pictures of my siblings as the children we once were, and to be reminded of the happy times we spent together. Yet again, this was a two-edged sword: when we were young, so were our parents. There were also pictures of family members and other loved ones who have passed on, and seeing those was bittersweet.

Mom let me prepare, cook, and clean up from lunch and dinner. I was amazed that she actually yielded control over even something so mundane. Not much of a yielder, our Mom. I purposely cooked too much food, so that there would be sufficient leftovers for Saturday and she only nagged me a tiny bit. I get my control issues from nowhere strange, that's for sure!

I saw sparks of Daddy appear in a flash, with a silly face or funny line. This man who has made me laugh for over 50 years is still able to make me smile at his purposeful goofiness. It was good for all three of us.

Sometimes I feel like Miranda, tossed about in The Tempest that throws me up in an unknown land. Career, divorce, money, health--all these are part of the storm that has become my life, but it is crashing on the rocks of Alzheimer's that is tearing me apart the most. So I put on my big-girl panties and snap out of it, and continue to do what needs to be done to the best of my ability. That's a lesson I learned from both of them.

Then, I come here and cry alone.