On Sunday, my father came to my apartment without a shirt on. He was wearing a winter coat when my boyfriend, Lane, picked him up, so it wasn’t until he got back to our place and unzipped his jacket that we realized he had nothing on underneath it.
My dad had skipped wearing socks before, or opted for shorts when pants would have been more weather-appropriate, but this—forgetting to put a shirt on altogether—was new. The reveal was like a punch to the gut.
Grieving the loss of a person with dementia is like death by a thousand cuts. You watch your loved one vanish a little bit at a time—sometimes in ways that are perceptible only to you, other times in ways even a stranger would notice—and you never know when another piece is going to break off. It just does, and you have to accept it and adjust your care plan, or deny it and suffer the consequences.
Lately, it seems as if my father is rolling downhill fast. He’s talking less and napping more; he’s reliving an upsetting thing that happened a month ago, day after day, as if it happened over the weekend; and his judgment is off. I won’t go into detail, but a “friend” recently took advantage of him, and had I not spotted the con and intervened, my father could have lost a lot of money.
“He was a cop,” I yelled to my support group when I told them about the incident. (My dad worked for the NYPD for 20 years.) “How could he have fallen for this?”
Various members chimed in with advice on how to handle the particulars of the situation, but our group leader, a social worker with decades of experience, zoomed out and said something I didn’t know I’d been needing to hear: “I think we have to support Patti as she comes to terms with where her father is today.” Which is to say, he’s declining.
Years ago, maybe eight, my dad rescued one of my duffle bags from the Long Island Railroad. I’d left it on an overhead rack and was sure it was lost for good. “There goes the one pair of jeans that actually fit me,” I thought. But as I stood around with Lane and my then stepmother—helpless and defeated, the three of us—my dad solved the problem. “The train will be back at 2:591,” he said, returning from the teller’s booth. “Your bag will be waiting for us.”
It was hardly an act of heroism, I know, but the story so perfectly encapsulates who my father was before dementia took over his brain. Calm. Even-keeled. Capable. The kind of person you’d want around in the event of a hurricane because he’d know all the right things to do and have all the right tools to do them.
I don’t mean to paint the man as a saint. My parents separated before I was conceived, and although my dad wasn’t a stranger to me through the years, he wasn’t a consistent presence, either. I have flashbulb memories of him carrying me on his shoulders or cruising me around Robert Moses beach in his Ford Bronco listening to “Bad Moon Rising.” But he didn’t send me off to prom or teach me how to drive, and I can’t close my eyes and picture his house on Staten Island, where he lived for nearly two decades with his now ex-wife and her daughter, because he never had me over there (I only ever saw him at my grandma’s).
The truth is, I spent my whole life trying to prove I didn’t need my dad only to realize when he got sick that I was wrong. How sad.
On Topless Sunday (a little levity, why not?), Lane gave my dad an L.L. Bean shirt to wear and I gave my dad a big, long hug. “Please don’t leave me, Daddy,” I begged him in my head. “Stay just where you are.” I had to pull away before I started sobbing into his shoulder.
I launched this newsletter because I thought I’d accepted my dad’s condition and could write with clarity about dementia and caregiving. But for the past couple weeks, I’ve been feeling like the same scared and panicked daughter I was four years ago, the one who couldn’t fathom that her father—the most competent man she knew—could possibly be so compromised.
“Don’t worry,” my dad texted me around that time, in July 2018. “I’m still strong.” He was still strong—and always will be in my eyes. But he was also a little bit gone. And now, it seems, he’s gone some more.
Recommendations of the Week
I love newsletters that offer recommendations, so I’ve decided to include some in Oh, Balloon every now and then, too. Let’s see how it goes.
1. “All There Is with Anderson Cooper,” the CNN anchor’s podcast about grief and loss. My friend Karen K. sent me this rec on Monday, and I’ve already listened to three episodes. (Thanks, Karen!) One standout is an interview with Stephen Colbert, who lost his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash when he was ten. He talks about how if you’re grateful for your life, you have to be grateful for all of it, even the sad things that happen to you. Pain, he says, is something that can “light your knowledge of what other people might be going through. Which is really just another way of saying that there’s a value to having experienced it.”
His words reminded me of something I recently told a fellow caregiver: “I feel like I’ve seen the light, and I can tell when I’m with someone who hasn’t.” Put less arrogantly (lol): Grief has deepened the empathy I have for others, and while I would give anything for my dad to live out his life the way he’d dreamed, I’m also glad to have the awareness that I do. We truly never know what another person is going through, and we should all try to act accordingly.
2. Michael J. Fox accepting the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Is this a difficult video to watch? Sure. To many of us, Michael J. Fox is Alex P. Keaton. He’s Marty McFly. He’s a legend. It’s hard to see the effect that Parkinson’s Disease has had on his speech and movement. But it’s also a remarkable thing to witness. Fox has humor and heart, and so much insight to offer about living with uncertainty, gratitude, and perseverance.
Watching him makes me think of something Lady Gaga said on 60 Minutes about Tony Bennett, who has Alzheimer’s, giving his last performance.
“It’s hard to watch somebody change,” she said. “I think what’s been beautiful about this and what’s been challenging is to see how it affects him in some ways but … it doesn’t affect his talent. I think he really pushed through something to give the world the gift of knowing things can change and you can still be magnificent.”
Michael J. Fox is still magnificent.
3. A Christmas Story Christmas (HBO Max). I watched this follow-up to the classic A Christmas Story with my mom’s side of the family over Thanksgiving weekend. It takes place in the early seventies, about 30 years into young Ralphie’s future, at which point he’s a failed author and father-of-two returning home upon the death of his own beloved dad.
I wasn’t expecting to like the movie—I was never a big fan of the original (sorry!). But it was surprisingly moving. “Nothing can prepare us for one of life’s most painful and inescapable events,” Ralphie says at one point. “The passing of a parent.” Yup, I cried.
That’s all I’ve got for this week. Thanks for reading!
I do not know if it was actually 2:59. My memory is not that good.