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Dementia is terrible, part two

Posted on August 10, 2024 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I was talking about my father’s dementia yesterday. In my own meandering way, I was grieving for…what exactly, I’m not sure. Not my relationship with my father because that’s always been strained. That’s putting it politely.

I’ll be blunt. We don’t have a relationship; we never have. My father spent most of my childhood not in the house. I am not going to get into all that, but he and my mother had a very fraught marriage from the start. He cheated on her constantly, and he never bother keeping it a secret. I knew about it once I hit my teens–maybe even before that–because my mother made me her emotional support person when I was eleven.

My father claimed to be working until midnight every day. Yeah, right. ‘Working’. Is that what the kids are calling it these days? He was fucking around–and he never found out. It was an open secret at our church that he always had a piece on the side–from the church.

My father never went to any of my activities. I was in dance, orchestra, softball, cello, and theater at various times in my life. I can count on one hand the number of times he showed up to one of my activities, and that was when my mother made him go.

I didn’t mind, honestly. He was such a negative presence in my life–holy shit. I just thought of something. My ex-SIL was someone who sucked the joy out of the room. She was so unhappy all the time, and she made it her life’s mission to make everyone aroundher miserable as well. I don’t think it was a conscious decision on her part, but she was just so unrelentingly negative. And I’m saying that as someone who is fairly negative myself.

My father is the same. He doesn’t find any joy in anything. There are things that he likes doing, but he rarely smiles unbidden. He doesn’t like any food. Well, he likes Taiwanese food, and very few specific American dishes. The cod dinner from Culver’s and the burger from Smashburger were two of them. His favorite, though, was the brisket my brother made the last time they came. This was Thanksgiving after my medical crisis. Keep in mind that my father never praises anything. After he ate the brisket, he said it was the best thing he had ever eaten. Unprompted.

Dementia is terrible

Posted on August 9, 2024 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

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.