Dementia is brutal. I’m not making an inflammatory statement by saying that, I think. It takes no prisoner and leaves everyone it comes in contact with hurt, battered, and bruised. Emotionally, if not physically. There is no reasoning with it nor is there any way to get around it.
In the last post about this subject, I talked about how my mother made me her emotional support person when I was eleven, and it’s only gotten worse since then. Well, to be more specific, that it’s only gotten worse in the last few years. Not coincidentally, it’s when my father’s dementia took a turn for the worse. I remember before the pandemic, they came here in 2019. Yes, my father was forgetful back then. Yes, it was clear (to me) that he had dementia. Yes, he slipped now and again when it came to who I was. But he was still mostly there.
I do remember, though, the one example that drove home the point that he had dementia. We had gone to the C-PAP provider because he nedeed a new mask. I drove them there and was waiting in the waiting room. I was called in because my father wasn’t understanding what the rep was telling him. So I had to explain to him–in English–what the rep had said to him–also in English. It was really bizarre.
Later that night, my father came into the living room where I was. He had the mask in his hand and a puzzled look on his face. He asked me to explain it to him. I did, and he went away satisfied. Until the next night. Then, he came back with the mask again, the same look of puzzlement on his face, and he asked me to explain to him how the mask worked. He did this every night he was there, and there was no indication on his face that he had any idea he had asked the exact same thing several nights in a row.
That’s when it hit home that he actually had dementia.
The difficult thing is that my father has been a raging narcissist all his life. He doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t affect him. If he’s not interested, he simply won’t listen. You cannot MAKE him listen. So, there was part of me that thought he was just not listening. Until the third or fourth night when he asked me yet again. That’s when I realized that he actually couldn’t retain what I was saying, and it wasn’t him being a jerk.
This is one of the worst things about it, though. It’s hard to decipher what is him and what is the dementia. Articles don’t really address the fact that some people were jerks before they got dementia and they didn’t suddenly become angels after they get dementia. In fact, sometimes, they become even worse. In other words, abusive people get dementia, too. And they’ne still abusive.
That’s my father. He is whiny and demantding, clinging to my mother every waking moment. My mother said that if she doesn’t pay attention to her every second of the day, he does something in revenge. Like ‘accidentally’ knock her to the ground. This is where it gets dicey. The last time they were here, it was after my medical crisis. Two days after I came home, he wanted me to look something up for him. On the computer. When I could not even read the font. He did not tell me this–my mother did. Because she is his stooge and his go-between. And she knew that if she didn’t do what he wanted, he would be a dick to her. So, yes, she was throwing me under the bus in order to escape his wrath. It wasn’t the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last.
Anyway, I told him that I couldn’t, and I admit that my tone was incredulous. I had just died twice and came back, but then spent a week in a coma. The next week, I was awake, but I was drugged to the gills and dealing with the aftermath. Two days after that, I was at home, but still in the early stages of my recovery.The very early stages. My father was there as my mother pestered me. It was an article I had found before for them, but I literally could not read the font on the screen. And I could not process anything, anyway.
I stood my ground even though my parents were saying, “It’s just one article.” They did not understand that it wasn’t the number of articles, but the fact that I just could not read any font at all. I told them to ask my brother (and to leave me alone was the implication, but not spoken out loud). My father glared at me as he went back to the dining room. He ‘accidentally’ knocked my pills to the ground–and believe me, it wasn’t an accident.
Let me rephrase that. It’s not that he did it on purpose, but more like…he wasn’t looknig to avoid it. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but I saw him do it. He wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings, but he also didn’t make a beeline for my pills and knock the bottle off the table, either.
It spoke to me how deeply selfish he was. I had just died twice and came back twice. I was in a coma for a week and drugged to high heavens. The drugs did not completely leave my system until several weeks at home. And I understood why people did drugs. I felt so fucking good while I was high. Nothing could touch me, and I was unbreakable! It wasn’t until a few weeks at home that I realized that it was the drugs.
The medical crisis changed me. Even more so, spending the next two-and-a-half months with my parents showed me that the family dysfunction was both deep and enduring. My mother only cared about my father, and she could not make it any cleareer that she would and did choose him over me in a heartbeat.
This was the biggest lesson I learned when I was recovering from death. My mother would have left me for dead if it meant my father had a better quality of life. That was a sobering realization, and I’m still angry about it.
K and I talked about how we knew things t hat would break our parents (my mother and her father) if we talked about them frankly. For her, it was telling her father that he was never ther efor her when she needed him most. He cheated on her mother and walked out on the family when she was a kid. And he didn’t really play a part in her life for the next decade.
On my side, it’s telling my mother that she had not cared about me or my brother in a good way. She did not see us as independent persons with our own thoughts, dreams, and beliefs. She did nothing to nurture us if we dared to step out of her preconconceived notions of what should nand shouldn’t be. I’m done for today so more later.