I’m back to talk more about dementia. At the end of the last post, I veered into talking about how my mother nags and nags until she gets what she wants. She’s been that way all her life, and she taught all of us, including my father, to give in more often than not. Maybe not my father. They had so many shouting matches over seemingly everything, and the environment flipped back and forth between angry yelling and stony silence.
My parents should never have married. I know that sounds harsh, but I honestly think that they would have each had a better life if they never married. No, wait. That’s not true. That’s assuming that they would have gone in different directions and grown as people. My parents are in their eighties and have been married for over half a century. They met in Tennessee where both were getting their graduate degrees (at different schools). My mother had been engaged to someone in Taiwan because her mother wouldn’t let her date unless she was engaged. Which is bonkers to me, but that’s Taiwan in the early sixties, apparently. At least my grandmother’s mentality, at any rate.
She was a piece of work–I’ll tell you that much. I met her maybe five times in my life, and she left a terrible impression on me. Stern, domineering, woman/girl-hating, selfish, and just an unpleasant person in general. My mother had a very rocky relationship with her (because they were very similar), and she was honest with me that one reason she wanted a daughter so desperately was so she could have a better relationship with her daughter than she had with her mother.
Which, by the way, is not a good reason to have a daughter. Or a child in general. My mother has told me that she wanted to be a mother since she was a little girl. She says it’s the most important thing in her life, but she doens’t act as if it is. She wasa dutiful mother when my brother and I were kids, She cooked, cleaned, took care of us, etc. She was almost a single mother in the way she had no help from my father.
My father definitely would have married another doormat to wipe his feet upon if he hadn’t married my mother. The cold hard truth is that he needed someone to take care of him because he wasn’t going to do it himself. When he was president of his company, he had a secretary who would print his emails out, put them on his desk for him to read, and then type up his handwritten response into an email.
The last time my father was here, he was rambling on and on about how he had missed the boat on computers. This was two or three days after I was home from the hospital and still hopped up on drugs. He felt the need to ramble at me ad nauseam (which was his wont in general), and I could barely keep my eyes open.
I don’t know if there is any correlation between how someone is before they get dementia and how they are after. What I mean is that I don’t know if it matters that he was a not-great human being before he got dementia as to how severe the symptoms he’s experiencing now. I don’t mean in a retribution kind of way, but in a ‘I am a miserable human being who makes other people miserable’ kind of way.
I have a lifetime of wounds that haven’t healed because of him. His unrelenting sexism was terrible, and the way my mother groveled at his feet (but then broke down and screamed at him), gave me a very bad idea of what a relationship should be.
Fast-forwarding to my parents now. My father is clearly getting worse. I don’t think he’s going to be around for much longer. As I mentioned earlier, I have to think of my parents as not my parents to have compassion for them. In the video I included above, James Blunt has a line about, “I won’t read you your wrongs or your rights” in a song about saying goodbye to his father before the latter dies. (At the time, his father was dying.) There’s another line, “I know your mistakes and you know mine.” Right before that, he sings, “No need to forgive; no need to forget.” The theme of the song is that this close to his father’s death, the only important thing is to be with his father and comfort him as he (his father) passes away.
As I listen to my father ask me for the fifth time in the row about my health or urge me to drive to visit him the next day, all I can do is comfort him as best as I can as my heart painfully constricts. “Sure, Dad. I’ll visit you tomorrow.” “Don’t worry, Dad. My health is great!” Five times in a row. Without any hint that he had just asked that.
No matter how rocky our relationship was for all of my life, it’s hard to watch him fade out like this. No one deserves to feel that way; no one. Dementia is so inhumane and cruel, and it’s just so hard on everyone. Not just the person who has it, but anyone who is around them in any way. I had tears in my eyes as I listened to him struggle with who I was or where I was. And I know from my mother that he’s very depressed–thinking he has no reason to live. He’s been saying he should die, which, of course, is hard to deal with.
The problem is that he has never been able to find anything intrinsic to feel good about. He is a vast receptacle of need for validation, and he never could fill it to the top. He hated being alone because then he would just have to sit with his thoughts and the lack of a core. Now that he’s mostly isolated and doesn’t have anything to fill his time, he is forced to just be. Which he can’t do. He never has been able to.
He’s a shell of himself and it’s painful to see. As I said, I would not wish this on anyone. I want him to be able to end his final journey in a painless way, but I’m not sure that’s possible. It doesn’t help that my mother is in denial. She’s desperate to make him ‘normal’ again, and she regfuses to believe that she can will him to get better.
That’s partly because of the very negative attitude that Taiwan has towards dementia. I’ll talk more about that tomorrow.