My father has dementia. He has had it for over twenty years ago. He’s almost 85, which means it was early-onset dementia. It also meant that we weren’t sure what it was for quite some time. It was obvious he was failing, but we did not know why. He retired around that time, and my mother explained that it was political. In Taiwan. the KMT are like the Republicans and the DPP are like the Democrats. That’s a gross simplification, but it’ll work for my purposes in this post.
My dad worked for a company that has the KMT in all the top positions. This is not unusual. When they were in charge, they had all the top positions. Despite all that, my father rose in the ranks because he was damn good at what he did. In a country that ran on corruption and bribes, he was upright and righteous. In a country where you were almost forced to drink to excess (it was in the culture), my father earned the nickname of ‘one glass Hong’ because he never accepted more than one glass of alcohol (and didn’t drink it).
When he was vice president, I visited him at his company once. The president was KMT, corrupt, and a thorough jerk to boot. Sexually harrassed the women who worked at his company with impunity and made everyone drink with him–whether they wanted to or not. When I met him, it was at a dinner. He was chugging down the vodka by the bottle, and his acolytes/employees/hapless vicitims were meeting him glass for glass. My dad was nursing his one glass (and never bringing it to his lips). I was drinking nothing. I awas accepting nothing. I don’t drink. At all. Well, back then, I probably had two G&Ts with K every six months or so. I gave up drinking completely–that makes it sound way more serious than it was–when I was forty.
I went out with some friends and had some frothy drink. It had ice cream and chocolate in it (before I gave up gluten and dairy), and my thought was, “This is delicious–or it would be without the alcohol.” That’s when I realized that I was a grown-ass woman. I did not have to drink alcohol if I did not want to. And I have not since. And I don’t miss it at all. Oh, and I’m allergic to alcohol as all East Asians are. We’re missing the gene that processes the booze. That’s why we turn red in the face.
Back to my father’s ex-boss. He kept pusing vodka on me, and he seemed nonplused when I said no. And kept saying no. I was not going to let him push me into drinking. I was not about that at all. It’s such a part of Taiwan’s business culture, though. Drinking to great excess, I mean.
Anyway, my father got his boss’s job when his boss was quietly moved out of the position. I don’t know the whole story, but from the bits my mother has let slide, I have surmised that the old boss was taking bribes and had become a liability.
My father did an excellent job as president of the company for at least a decade. Then, he suddenly retired, and I always felt there was more to the story than my mother was willing to tell me. At that time, my parents were coming to visit us once a year or so. Every summer for four weeks or so. Funnily enough, they plan to come for six weeks, but my father starts agitating to go back by week three. I don’t think they ever stayed longer than four weeks. My father would grouse to my mother about life in Taiwan when they were there and say that he wanted to come here. Then, when he was here, he could not wait to go back. That’s him in a nutshell, though.
About twenty years ago, I started to see a decline in him. His mind was not as sharp as it used to be, and he was becoming much more forgetful. I don’t know when I realized that hehad dementia, but it was when he was at a fairly young age. And I think that’s why he was pressured to retire. Otherwise, why not keep him when he was making them so much money?
He stayed in early-onset dementia for a decade. It was noticeable, but not too bad. It became more obvious about five years ago, right before the pandemic. We went to Malta on vacation, and my mother requested that I ask Ian to go, too, so we could keep an eye on my father. He was getting worse, yet, but he was still more with it than not.
That was when I really noticed the decline, however. I clearly remember that either that year or the year before, I had to take my parents to the place where my father gets his CPAP mask. It’s weird, but I have to translate the English–into English for him. He could not understand what the medical rep was saying, and my mother couldn’t translate it into Taiwanese for him. So I had to translate the medical English into everyday English.
Anyway, that night, my father asked me how the mask worked (it was different than his old one). I explained it carefully to him, and he nodded his head as if he understood. The next night, he asked me again, and there was no recognition on his face that we had gone through this exact same thing the night before. We did this every night he was here.
Here’s the issue. Before his dementia, my father did not pay attention to anything that didn’t mean anything to him. If something was not of his interest, then he did not care about it at all. So it’s hard to know when his lack of comprehension was because he didn’t care about something or because he truly did not understand. In the case of the CPAP, though, I knew it was the latter.
I have had issues with my father all my life. I don’t want to get into them here, but it’s safe to say that I am low contact with my parents for a reason. I only talk to them when they call, which is once every three weeks on average. I make the conversation as short as possible, and I’m gritting my teeth the whole time. I don’t tell them anything personal if I can help it for as long as I can help it
And yet.
Whenever I talk to my father, there is a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. My heart breaks for him because no one deserves what he’s going through. He manages to hold it together some of the time when we talk. The last time we talked, however, it was Father’s Day in Taiwan. He had had a rough couple of days because he tooks a half-dozen pills he wasn’t supposed to take. His meds, but not meant to be taken all at once.
He kept saying we hadn’t talked in so long and that we should talk more. We had talked twice in the last three days before that, but I just kept telling him that yes, we would talk more. And my heart broke into smaller pieces.
I have more to say, but I’ll leave it there for now.