Hats

Dabbing napkins at our lips after finishing tuna salad, spinach soup, and the ubiquitous melon slices, Mom and I sat in the dining hall a little while. I grumbled to myself about why food service providers cannot seem to come up with any fruits besides melons (Hello? Perhaps you’ve heard of apples, pears, bananas, grapes?) when I was distracted by a dapper elderly gentleman nearby droning on to a trapped tablemate about generations of his German ancestors. “Gee, his voice is loud,” I commented. Mom hadn’t heard him. I found it a bit hard to hear her soft voice because of his, but we both felt too relaxed to get up and go. Other than this man, his victim, and four gray-haired folks playing cards, aided by light from a small goose-neck lamp they’d brought, Mom and I were the only diners left.

From my vantage point, I could see two of the long hallways leading to apartments, the little gift shop and mail room. As I watched residents come and go, I noted to Mom that it must be “argyle day” since I’d seen several argyle sweaters. I happened to be wearing one myself; maybe that’s why I noticed. She replied that argyle is popular this year, and she has an argyle sweater, too. I didn’t mention my socks were also argyle.

“I’ve been looking at old family photos, and there’s one of Dad and his dad on the beach in Connecticut,” I began. “Grandpa’s got his usual beret on, and Dad’s wearing a hat with some kind of decoration on it. I don’t remember it and can’t figure out what kind of hat it is.”

Mom said she knew the photo and wondered if it was a hat she’d bought him. “You know, when Dad and I met in the forties, all the men wore fedoras. But once hats became passé, Dad no longer liked to wear any hats—until he retired and took up tennis—then he wore tennis hats.” I nodded. I have Dad’s tennis hat in my car so that it will be readily available to shade his eyes when I wheel him outdoors in summer. I asked her if the hat in the old picture was one she had bought him.

“In the fall of the year we lived in Connecticut, Dad was invited to be on a panel at a meeting in Ann Arbor or Detroit, I forget, so Grandma came to babysit you kids, and Dad and I drove all night. When we got to Toledo, we went to the hospital to visit my father, who was there for a gallbladder problem. When we walked into his hospital room, he cried … My father cried because we had come.” Mom was quiet for a moment. Her clear, cornflower-blue eyes seemed to be seeing the scene afresh. “Then we went on to Ann Arbor or Detroit, and after the panel discussion, we got back in the car and drove all night to get back to Connecticut.”

“So it was on that trip that you bought that hat for Dad?” Mom returned from her reverie and strained to remember where that particular hat had come from. I wondered where that particular reverie had come from. She finally mentioned she always liked him in hats.

From there conversation wandered back into passé fashion trends, especially women wearing hats, and always dresses or skirts. She said that one frigid winter day in 1966 she sensibly sent my sister to sixth grade wearing smart, wool flannel slacks to protect her from the cold on her long walk to school. The school immediately called her to say my sister would not be allowed into class until my mother brought a dress for her.

Vacuum cleaners whizzing around our table signaled an end to our lingering after lunch. We left to drive the few blocks to her house, where she explained to me how to take care of Dad’s bills “in case anything should happen to” her. It was pretty simple, but I’m grateful she told me how she does it. I sat on the floor and organized papers into piles: nursing home bills, prescription bills, laundry service bills, long-term-insurance payments. Paper-clipping the piles, we put them away. Earlier we had decided that it would be unwise to make our usual visit to Dad because of the nursing home’s dire warnings about rampant flu strains there and all the quarantined hallways, and we would instead play a game. But when I asked what game she wanted to play, she blurted, “I’m worried about Dad. When I was there the other day, his eyes were all red.” When I volunteered to dash over and check on him, she urged me to.

I walked back past the dining hall to the nursing home. Bracing against the wind (in my hood and warm slacks, haha), I questioned how smart it was for me to be defying the nursing home’s warnings but hoped with a wing and a prayer and a mask grabbed at the front desk that I’d escape unscathed. Further, I decided I would relish this visit. I would wear not only my eyewitness-report-to-mom hat, but also my light-up-dad’s-day hat.

Once I wheeled Dad into his room in the Alzheimer’s wing to listen to his favorite music cassettes, I could see his eyes looked painfully bloodshot. My mother had requested I feel his forehead for a fever, and his temp seemed normal. I went and got a nurse, who told me his eyes weren’t bloodshot because there was no hematoma. I asked her why they were so red then, and she said she’d have the doctor look at his eyes. Perfect. His brown eyes smiled though as he gyrated his hands to Boots Randolph and Billy Joel. Was it a Talking Heads song he danced in his chair to? First one shoulder jutted out, then the other. Then he shrugged them to the beat. Then he pulsed them out again. So cute. Was it when Crystal Gayle sang, “When I dream, I dream of you” that he swayed dreamily? What a delight to see him responding to music with pleasure. He has so few pleasures left—indeed so few responses.

I told him about the picture of him and his father on the Connecticut beach. No sign of understanding in his eyes. I yammered on anyway, reacquainting him with the fact that his father was an artist who liked to wear berets, trying to describe the unusual hat he himself was wearing, finally promising I’d bring the photo to show him someday. Then I launched into ages, figuring he was almost 40 in that picture and his father would have been in his early sixties, about my age now. Since Dad had been a mathematician, sometimes he shows signs of understanding when I talk about numbers. He didn’t today.

Now it was his suppertime, so I wheeled him to the Alzheimer’s hall dining area where the nurse greeted him with a tiny paper cup containing the pills my mother had just taught me how to pay for. The brisk wind carried me back to my mother’s, where I assured her Dad seemed not to have the flu but the doctor would check his eyes. And more good news: Although many wings still struggle with four strains of viruses, the Alzheimer’s wings that have been on lockdown for more than a month have now been cleared because they have no more flu. I had made an appointment for Dad to get a haircut Monday, which pleased Mom. Since he doesn’t wear hats, she likes his hair to look nice.

Joys

In the photo, a slim, dark-haired young man gives the photographer a mildly amused smile while a young woman in a light coat beams up at him. I show this black and white photo from about 1940 to my father and explain, “Look, here you are with your sister Pat.” Dad reaches out a bony arm from his nursing home bed for the photo and pulls it close to his face. He’s wearing his glasses, so I figure he can see it at least somewhat okay; he’s not squinting. His pale face remains expressionless. He asks, “What are their names?” And so it goes through all the photos in the small album.

That Dad does not recognize past scenes is not a surprise. That he can’t identify himself in a photo or remember his own name is new. He does still know which room in the Alzheimer’s wing I should steer his wheelchair into. I used to think he recognized his name on the name plate by his door. And for his first eight months there, he did know his name. Now I wonder if he recognizes his Senior Olympics ribbon we tucked behind his name plate. Or maybe, like a blind person, he just senses about how far down the hall his room is, or its distance from the lunch tables. Who knows?

* * *

Is it just my imagination, or is the pool I’m swimming in changing shapes? In my ninth year of swimming here in Elder-Care Park, my laps certainly feel much longer. And am I swimming farther now to grab sides of the pool to rest? Has the narrow, straight-edged pool I first dove into swelled into an amorphous, bulging blob, lap lanes now fuzzy?

Though my parents are nine years older since Dad’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, I feel 15 years older. That might be fatigue talking. My six “bonus” years have happened just since last April. That’s when the hospital wouldn’t release Dad back home to the sole care of his 90-year-old wife; they would release him only to a nursing home. You might think when Mom’s grocery lists for me went from Milk of Magnesia, toe separators, bread, latex gloves (lge), bed pad (waterproof), to nonemergency items like cole slaw (1/4 lb.), grapes (if on sale), and gala apple (1), my support role would have eased up. Yes, grocery shopping is less painful now, but other feelings have surfaced.

Seeing my father helpless and alone in a nursing home stirs up the pool in Elder-Care Park and straps weights to my wrists and ankles. When my role was grocery shopping and odds and ends, my laps were energetic butterfly strokes. Helplessly watching Dad’s dramatic decline slows me to a crawl. It breaks my heart and squeezes my lungs—not ideal conditions when swimming an indefinite marathon in an infinity pool.

Though Dad napped a lot in his and Mom’s home, he was eager to putter, work jigsaw puzzles, and play his favorite music on cassette-tape anthologies he’d recorded in more organized years. Eventually, he couldn’t make sense of the tape player’s Play button or Volume dial, but he smiled sublimely while tapping his feet to eclectic mixes of Fleetwood Mac and Keely Smith, Jimmy Dorsey and Dire Straits. We were more than happy to operate the machine to see him so happy. And no matter how many words and functions and memories Dad forgot, he always remembered how to find the cookie jar.

To see my father’s happy, homey little world reduced to one small, lonely room surrounded by strangers—well, it’s crushing. Since then, everyone in our family has been heartbroken for him. We explored other options but finally had to admit he needs more care than we can provide. Nine months later, sorrow still makes swallowing hard. Hoping Dad doesn’t feel abandoned or unloved haunts us. We love him so much. And love is what we try to convey in every visit to the nursing home. We rejoice in wide-awake-smiling-conversational visits and sob after hollow-eyed-weak-voiced visits. The differences in his cognition levels may seem random, but they are not. As 2011 progressed, Dad’s abilities regressed. Alzheimer’s tightens its death grip on yet another precious person.

Yet I thank God for oh so many aspects of Elder-Care Park. One is that my mother has gotten a respite from her tireless eight-year, 24/7 care of her husband. Another is that as her physical health declines, she can still enjoy her home and simple pleasures. My husband has cooked a lot of yummy dinners for us to eat on days I come home from being with my parents, and two generations of our family have rallied to help our parents/grandparents any way we can. Also, new family dynamics are developing. I look forward to seeing them unfold. Weeping willows in Elder-Care Park may not be as lush as orchids overhanging a Hawaiian beach. Swimming laps may not be as thrilling as surfing. But God is in the park!

Besides thankfulness, I have four, no five, joys in all this.

Joy 1: God is the life raft that floats close to me when a new wave of emotion washes over me. Sometimes I swim steady laps for days in calm waters—taking Mom meals, buying her groceries, visiting Dad, thinking up little activities to brighten Dad’s day and stimulate his diminishing brain cells, driving them both to doctor appointments, communicating Elder-Care-Park news to out-of-state siblings. Then suddenly, life pelts my pool with stones like these:

·         First seeing oxygen tubes on my father’s face

·         Aching for the loneliness I see in his hollow eyes that brighten when we arrive and fill with quivering tears when we leave

·         Remembering Dad and Mom crying together last April when he asked her, “What’s going to become of us?”

·         Feeling frustrated by and sometimes angry at institutional rules

·         Feeling completely, utterly helpless as I watch Alzheimer’s and age steal what’s left of my once-vigorous parents

·         Even sadness that Dad’s desserts are now bowls of canned fruit, not his favorite—chocolate chip cookies

·         Disappointment that Dad slept, curled up on his bed, oxygen tank humming air into his nose, his mouth sputtering “puh,” through his 90^th birthday party

·         Lately, new fears for my mom’s frailty

My heavenly Father knows when such triggers are too much for me, I won’t be able to glide to a gutter along the pool’s edge to process emotions. His raft is at my side in a heartbeat. Thanks to God’s grace and mercies, the ripples pulsing outward from these stones are just eddies of emotion, not tsunamis of suffering. 

And you know what else? This lifesaving raft has a cup holder where God collects all my tears. I wish I could neatly articulate my emotions since I’ve been in Elder-Care Park, but I can’t. I sometimes wish I knew which stages of grief I am in at any given time. I’d really like to make sense of it all. But it’s pretty much all I can do to fling an arm over the raft, give my roiled-up feelings to my heavenly Father, and rest in the truth that the Holy Spirit prays for me with groans too deep for words.

Joy 2: Even as my arms burn with fatigue, our Lord strengthens them for one more lap, one more visit, one more letter to the nursing home administrator, one more grocery list. I’m learning to laugh about my own forgetfulness: Do we need sweet potatoes? Was the sweet potato I bought recently for my mom or for us? Oh well, if it was for us, I’ll just buy another, no big deal. I no longer care so much about details. I just have to trust the Lord to remind me if I forget an important one. Also, God’s coming alongside me deepens my understanding of biblical concepts like sacrifice of praise, thank offerings, praying without ceasing, dwelling on what’s excellent and praiseworthy, and new mercies every morning.

Joy 3: God expands my heart, exercises lung muscles, and teaches me to number my days aright. Living in survival mode glues frequent quiet times with the Lord onto my calendar pages. One engages in much less casual bible reading when one is desperate. Spiritual lessons abound. Many days I have only five loaves and two fishes, which frankly, I’d prefer to put on my own plate. In the lap pool at Elder-Care Park, God drills me in giving out of my poverty. I have to be much more intentional about saving energy for my husband and activities that refresh me. Gradually letting go of my parents, I sense some new freedoms and adjusted priorities.

Joy 4: Two years ago on my father’s 88^th birthday, he asked Jesus to forgive his sins, come into his heart now, and take him to heaven when he dies. Whoohoo! Next party I have with Dad, he’ll jitterbug over to the tape player, press Play, and we’ll make up a glorious, giddy new dance to the “Hallelujah Chorus.”

Joy 5: I get to spend time with my parents that I wouldn’t have if they were both still hale and hearty. My parents are among the most generous people in the world. They gave me so much. The joy of giving back, of serving them, is more than I could have asked or imagined. But just their companionship is priceless. I love sitting at their kitchen table with Mom to share mundane details of our lives. She’s a news junkie, fascinating and well-informed. And in an election year—whoa, look out. She’ll be sharp. I love sitting at Dad’s bedside to page through a photo album or book of animal photos and to play his favorite songs for him. Plus, these years with my parents allow me to tell them how much they mean to me.

Okay, I selfishly admit to Joy 5a, which may be more peacock pleasure than true joy. I am a major techno-weenie by anyone’s standards, except my mother’s. Though she’s far outpaced me in conducting life’s business on the Internet, she still needs a little tutoring now and then. Setting up a Microsoft Word table or Excel spreadsheet for Mom is about the only time I feel smart sitting at a computer.

***

            Elder-Care Park is this season of my life. I have no idea what season God might ordain next for me. Whatever it is, I know His plan, purposes, and presence will be in the new season, too, whenever it comes. Meanwhile, I’m just here swimming and resting, swimming and resting, which is a bit like living in the moment. Modern philosophers urge, “Live in the moment,” but this is certainly not a new concept. In Matthew 6, Jesus tells us not to worry about tomorrow. Isaiah 43:18, 19 also says not to dwell on the past; rather to see the new thing God is doing now. Funny … All a late-stage Alzheimer’s patient has is the moment. Though my dad has no idea how his example helps me grasp this biblical concept, it is at my father’s bedside where I most strongly experience God-designed, living-in-the-moment peace.