Awake, and other matters

Bah.

I could say "and that's all I have to say about that" because the first word sums up the experience, but on the other hand what else have I to do until the hot chocolate is ready? I'd been dreaming about my parents, being on holiday with them in a Manhattan turned third-world village; the dream's turning sour woke me.

One of these days I must gather my courage and tell you about my father. Why not now, you ask? All right, I will. I can always just delete this post.

(The regular reader from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon should please stop reading now! Talk to the regular reader in Regina before continuing.)

My father is losing his memory (that's what that series of posts in the Autumn was about). He tells the same tale several times; asks a question twice within an hour; comes into the kitchen to read us an unusual name out of the obituaries, wondering where he's heard it before, not remembering that he read the same obituary to us that morning. If he gets separated from my mother downtown, he will start walking off in a random direction. Mom chases breathlessly after him, when she catches up he blithely says "I'd have come back"—but neither she nor I believe that he would then know from whence he started.

I am horrified by his condition, what it implies for him and for my mother who must cope with this. He has turned very pedantic and exacting, querying every statement and challenging every statistic. Nobody is allowed to say "nobody is allowed"—"what, not anyone at all? who does the forbidding?" I thought at first that he was just getting vicious in his old age, as dogs do, but I think that it's related to the memory loss. He really doesn't know, he really is uncertain whether what we are saying is factual truth or poetic license, and his challenge is meant to reassure himself that he has interpreted it correctly.

Now fast-forward to Monday morning (this is the "more, very different" that I teased you with then). Lying in bed I heard a key scratching at my door and thought, "Mrs. Neighbour is on the wrong floor again," she has mistaken my door for her own at least once a year for the last twelve years; since I was still in bed, I ignored it. A half-hour later, dressed but not yet breakfasted, I heard tears and lamentations coming from the staircase: Mrs. N was standing at the elevator crying—wailing—as a new neighbour from upstairs tried to discover what was wrong. I went out and spoke to them, she explained: "I can't find my son's apartment! I don't know where he is, my keys won't open any of these doors. I want to go home but I don't know where it is." She had been up and down the whole building, trying every door, but (I infer) had got muddled with the keyring and had tried her key in Neighbour's door and then his key in her own.

I took her up to her own apartment, and opened the door with her key. She got excited and barged past me into her own apartment, calling "N, are you here?" She went into her own bedroom, waking her husband of nearly sixty years, and asked him "Are you N?" (In fairness, it was quite dark and she did think that she was in N's apartment.) Mr. N got up, I explained the situation to him with some difficulty (he thought that I wanted to get into N's apartment), then he explained to me that Mrs. N has senile dementia and is going rapidly downhill. Poor Mrs. N, what a terrible illness; I can't get the image of her standing before her son's door and not knowing where he lives out of my mind. Mr. N can hardly walk and N is a depressive alcoholic; Mrs. N has taken care of them both. Which of them will now take care of whom?

Fast-forward again to this evening (Thursday) and an e-mail from my mother, saying that Dad had a small stroke three weeks ago (!) Full results of the tests are due in two weeks, but he is apparently in good shape other than being blind in one eye having some pain and difficulty reading (my hysterical over-interpretation, sorry).

This turns me into a six-year-old: I don't want any of this to be true, I want all of these problems just to go away.