March 13.19

If all the world’s a stage

give mine the glint of gold

scarlet plush and curtains

in towering thespian fold.

Give me a kindly audience

who patiently endure

through epilogue’s last echo

from brassy overture.

Give me jeweled soliloquy

sparkling in its wit

not too long but long enough

for annals of World Lit.

Give me blue-white spotlight

commanding and intense

before that sky-high curtain

begins its last descent.

After final curtain

when there isn’t any more

may there be one ovation

which resounds with loud “Encore!”

 

 

I never know where Bill’s photos — or any photos, for that matter — will lead me. This one brought back one of my favorite memories of my father, a brilliant man who developed dementia. Before the dementia claimed him, he wrote his own obituary and declared to me that he wanted people to read it and say, “Let’s bring this guy back!” I laughed, but I felt his longing not to be forgotten. How human.

 

 

Many thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.

Remembrance of things never past

February. It has nothing to do with groundhogs or valentines or Lent or the aching drab of late winter. It’s about assisted living. It’s the anniversary of separating Dad from his own home. A Caesarean without anaesthetic. An amputation without tourniquet.

When the memory came back to me a little while ago, I could feel my hands go clammy. I looked: my palms were sweaty. So quickly does memory turn to flashback.

Home is much more than worn highways in the carpet; it is independence, control, identity. All that is lost in assisted living. And, for Dad, by my hand. Rocks in my chest. I feel them now.

Dad’s dementia was non-Alzheimer’s, a cruel state of awareness and unknowing. Dad might seem fine during the day (he wasn’t), but at night he wandered, goaded by that unknown, a danger to himself and me. We were both sleepless but he didn’t know it. So he, uncomprehending, had to go into a secure place. He had a lovely apartment with his own furniture — and a locked door at the end of the hall. Incarceration became cardiac stress and in five days he was in the hospital.

Simultaneously, Dad’s sister Jean was dying of leukemia, his sister Edna showing signs of her own dementia. I was saturated with aging and dying. My face twitched so badly that I seemed to be winking.

No part of caregiving occurs in a vacuum. Always other things are going on. When I see this sweat on my palms today, fifteen years later, I also see my empty-eyed father, my deadly white Aunt Jean, my muddled Aunt Edna, and I long for sleep.

Caregiver flashbacks. Will anyone believe them?