Laughter and Forgetting

Does it all have to happen on the same day?

The shit is officially hitting the proverbial fan.

I was going to write a whole post about checking my Dad into the Alzheimer's/Dementia care facility last week. But so much has happened since then.

The move actually went pretty well, and as depressing as it was, it was nice to know that he is with professional people that are well-trained to take care of him. I stayed for lunch and I will say that the old woman feeding clam chowder to her baby doll threw me off a little. Then there was the squabble at another table between two women over who should be sitting in which chair. It digressed into a shouting match of the "am not! are too!" variety. When the caregiver came over and asked one of the women if she would like to sit at another table, the lady said "No, I can put up with her." The other woman hurriedly responded by saying "But I can't put with you!!" Somehow, peace was made temporarily until another spat occurred. This one involved all four women at the table. One woman seemed to be the shit stirrer, and the other three started to gang up on her. The troublemaker complained that one of the other women walks around like "she owns the place." The response? "I don't have to act like I own the place - I DO own the place!" Well, there's no arguing about that, is there?

A bunch of eighty year olds turned into two-year-olds, and soon to be one-year-olds.

I was laughing out loud, but biting my fist to prevent a scene. I would have been more distressed about the whole thing if my Dad was addled by the arguing, but he seemed to focussing much more on the music that was playing, which happened to be the soundtrack from the musical "The Fantasticks." He loves that music and it was one of the first musicals he ever took me to, when I was probably about seven or eight years old. I know that Dad can only absorb a certain amount of stimuli, so I am glad his brain is choosing the stimuli he actually can still enjoy.

So that was Friday. On Sunday my husband made the two hour trip to see his mother who is paralyzed on one side of her face because the tumor is pressing on her nerves. These nerves are also connected to her swallowing mechanism, so soon she will be unable to swallow. On Monday night my husband and his Dad decided to admit her to the hospital for dehydration. She was taking morphine for the excruciating nerve pain, but it wasn't even working because there wasn't enough fluid in her body to spread it around. As I write, doctors are trying to put feeding tube in her, so that starvation doesn't kill her before the cancer does.

Also on Monday, my stepmom called to tell me that my Dad was in the ER. On Sunday night he had come down with nausea and vomiting, and by Monday the care facility thought he should be in the hospital. My Dad is prone to pneumonia, so they are pumping him full of antibiotics, and keeping him in the hospital for a couple of days. After my stepmom updated me on my Dad, she told that she had to put her dog to sleep that same morning because he had a brain tumor, something she had been worried about but hoping wasn't the case. Everyone loves their pets, but my stepmom is one of those people that has always related to animals better than people. She still can't talk about the day that her beloved German Schnauzer, Schnapps, died, and that was over twenty years ago. Her pets are just about the only thing I've ever seen her cry over, including my Dad. Needless to say, it blows.

I went to spend a couple of hours with my Dad at the hospital on Monday night, and had to take my son, because, as I mentioned, my husband is with his mother. We bought a couple of activity books and sat in my Dad's room. He was sleeping a lot of the time, but seemed to having be bad dreams, and was picking at his bedclothes a lot. It helped him when I held his hand and told him everything was okay, but the man looks like death. A vacant stare and his once six foot frame weighing in at 134 pounds. Not really something I wanted my six year old to have to deal with, but that's life, I guess.

The next day my son and I took the day off of school and work, and continued our tour of Pacific Northwest hospitals to visit his grandmother while she could still talk. It will only get worse from here, and we thought the sooner the better. Oddly, she looked like a picture of health compared to my Dad, though I think that is more related to the fact that she has her mental faculties, then her actual physical condition.

At the hospital there were some beautiful fish tanks. We stopped to look at one, examining the exotic fish. "Look at his one," I said. But no sooner had I said it than I realized it was as dead as a doornail, and appeared to have been in that condition for some time. A hole had rotted right through one side. For crying out loud, I thought, I know I need to teach my son that all living things will die, but does it all have to happen on the same day?

My father's decline has gained a horrible momentum in the last several months. There is a theory put forth by his doctors that he is suffering from numerous small strokes. They believe that it is not the Alzheimer's or dementia that is causing this crash into complete helplessness, but dementia aided and abetted by the lack of blood flow that causes strokes.

It doesn't really matter, the effect is the same. Last week he forgot how to walk. He moves his right foot but them does't know what to do with his left. You have to lean over and move it forward for him. he forgets more words daily, the exact opposite of a Toddler's language explosion. When I watched him for my stepmom last Sunday, he didn't know what yogurt was, even though he has it almost every day for lunch.

He is moving into a dementia/Alzheimer's care facility on Friday because my stepmother can no longer take care of him. Thank goodness, because I just don't think I have the stomach to help my Dad pull his pants up after going to the bathroom any more. Even though he is almost completely out of it, you can still sense his embarassment. He was a very modest man. I'm so glad he doesn't remember the feeling for long, because few things have made me feel worse than my father's shame.

When I got home from his house the other day, I talked to my husband about it. We talked about having a pact to put one another out of our misery if we ever get to that point. But what is that point? My Dad still knows who his wife is, and who I am. And he still occasionally gives a weak laugh. But I think he has passed "that" point. He can't walk, he can't really talk, he can't remember the words to ask what the score of the baseball game is. He loved baseball. He loved politics. He loved film. All gone.

I have a friend who has talked to her own father about what "that" point is. They agreed that when he no longer cares about the Washington Husky Football team, it was time. This is a friend who had to schedule her wedding around the Huskies away game schedule.

So it's gotten to the point where I really want my father to die. But I also don't want him to die. I know it will be so much harder when there is no longer a warm body there. It's strange, I've started to speak about him in the past tense, because he is no longer alive, really. And yet, and yet...

the long and winding road

Remember this post? Last week, Miyumi, the friend that I talk to more often, the one that grew up in Japan, and is exceedingly polite and avoids all conflict, called me and apologized profusely about that dinner. She said she was horribly uncomfortable during the whole meal and her meek comment about how hard the Alice's life was going to be "with three" was her lame, ineffective but polite, Japanese attempt to lead Alice to talk about her pregnancy. She had been sure that Alice had told me that she was about to give birth again, since Alce was the one that invited me to the dinner, and supposedly "caught up" with me at that time. But Miyumi realized early on in the meal that this was not the case. That I didn't have a frigging clue.

I really felt so much better that someone else had thought it horribly weird that Alice's pregnancy was never discussed. Miyumi knows I can handle other people's pregnancies, people get pregnant all the time, but that it's kind of nice to know in advance, so as to mentally prepare. She also understood that not talking about somebody else's pregnancy is alienating to the infertile one. She remembered, very thoughtfully, that Alice's second child was born when my first miscarriage was due. I thanked her profusely for saying something. It's one of the reasons that she has remained my friend. She gets it.

But just when that became then I got unexpectedly bowled over by some other news. A friend of my husband's wife is pregnant. We don't really do stuff with them as a couple, although we have once or twice. She miscarried last spring, and we both realized that we probably hadn't heard from them these last seven or eight months because she was pregnant again. So I knew this was coming. I thought I would be fine.

Let me give you little history. This couple had their first baby when the wife was 40. The baby had some very rare and complicated health problems that have led to major surgery structural surgery on the bones in his head. The most recent report is that the boy has lost some hearing , and is currently, at almost three, significantly speech delayed. As mentioned this woman had a miscarriage last year at ten or eleven weeks. She had another miscarriage before the birth of her first child. Life has not been easy and she deserves every happiness, and certainly a healthy baby (as we all do.)

I am not that keen on the wife. She is intelligent and articulate, but very uptight. Her house always must be spotless, everything is organized to the nth degree. She bought a new house when she was about five weeks pregnant last spring, and unfortunately lost that pregnancy, but still had a big ol' house. Interestingly, she bought that house without her husband ever seeing it. I know men that are pu--y whipped secretly want someone like that to run their lives, but it doesn't make the whipper any more attractive to the outside world. The woman has her husband on an incredibly tight leash, more like a choke chain, really. The poor man gets about an hour of "free time" allocated to him weekly. He always has to ask for the wife's permission for any recreational activities. And when I use the word permission, I don't mean he needs to check in to see if he has any other obligations, but rather he needs to get leave from his supervising officer. I actually heard his wife say before the first baby was born, that he couldn't "just go to baseball games anymore," that he would have to stay home most of the time for the baby. This couple gets free tickets to the games because her Dad works for the team, but I don't think he went to any baseball games that first year after his son was born.

Her husband is a huge flirt, so she is eternally suspicious of his activities. To the best of my knowledge he has never strayed in the thirteen years they've been together. But consequently, she doesn't like me much, because he flirts with me, too. As though that's my fault.

All of the above is neither here nor there. The wife is not evil, and certainly has not had things come easily.

So why, oh why, did I feel gut punched when I heard that she was due, with a baby girl, at the end of next month? A few minutes after my husband shared this news, I checked our home voice mail and there was a message from the husband. "Hi it's Bob, Mary, Aidan, and soon to be baby Emily!" Fuck. That was even worse. So happy, so hopeful, so optimistic.

It's so little and petty to feel the way I do. I know I have been extraordinarily lucky in having a child at all. The fact that he is healthy and intelligent and well-adjusted is a gift that so many parents wish for.

And yet I am so jealous. So jealous it makes me want to cry. I know her exact age because she has the same birthday as my husband, but she's older. She will be 43 and 8 months at the end of May, when she is due.

I can see that I'm an ungrateful wretch. And it feels wretched to be one.

What feels even worse, is that when I mentioned it to my best friend, I was being even more wretched, because she just turned forty-five, was unable to get pregnant in her forties (she married at 39), does not own a home, and does not have the money to adopt. She's a wonderful human being, and despite her situation has been a very good friend to me through my miscarriages. She is an amazing person, but even she can only take so much. She said to me, "Well, some people might just want to have what you have."

"Sorry. I am so sorry" I said. Because she is fantastic, she genuinely accepted my apology. And I was appreciative of the reminder that my pain can appear very selfish, and I told her that. You have to be able to count on your friends for that kind of thing, because someone who didn't care about me would have just gone off and bitched in their blog about what an insensitive cad I am.

I have friends that have no husband or partner despite only wishing for that. I have friends that cannot afford to buy their own homes, and may never be able to do so. I know a woman who only wanted just one child, and lost that baby at term. (I think she may be pregnant again, but I don't think she wants to tell anyone until that baby is nine and a half months old.) All they want is that one thing, and for right now, they can't have it.

So am I really selfish and greedy? Well, yeah. But I do appreciate what I have. Every day, all the time, I feel lucky. But when that miscarriage scab gets ripped off, it's the same old pain all over again. And it never feels finished. A lot of people have said to me, "I hope you can find some resolution in your struggle with miscarriages and infertility." Like there is a place that exists where I'll be grateful to never have had another child. Like the fact that I had one foot in the door to having a second baby so many times, only to have the door shut in my face, will feel like the path I always wanted.

I have started to realize that there is no resolution. There will never be a day that I fully embrace never having had another child. And that trying to get over it, is like trying to get to the end of a road that goes on and on. I don't believe it will work. I think the key is just accepting the pain will never go away, completely, it will just get smaller in the rear view mirror.

Grandma M.

NOTE: My father is sinking into dementia so quickly, and so inexorably, that I feel I need to start remembering everything he has ever told me. To get it down so that is stays real. And so that my son can have some family history, and some stories of his grandfather that don't involve forgetfulness and decrepitude. It's been one of my new goals for this blog, (because if it is in blog form, I will be psychologically forced to do it, instead of talk about it) and this is my first installment.

My Dad was born in 1928. He was the youngest of five boys that were born in a ten year span. His mother was born in 1882. This of course means that my grandmother was 46 when my Dad was born, and 36 when she had her first. She was almost 32 when she married my grandfather, who was two years her senior, in the summer of 1914. I've often thought it curious that she didn't have kids the first few years of her marriage and wondered what her medical diagnosis would have been, because she definitely wasn't practicing any form of birth control. But that's what years of miscarriage and infertility have done to my mindset. Calculating maternal ages, the age spans between children, and projecting possible fertility related health issues. God, I'm pathetic. Anyways, once my grandmother did conceive, all systems clearly became a go, as she started pumping the boys out at two year intervals.

My grandmother's maiden name was Galvin. She grew up a devout Catholic in Brookline, Massachusetts, and her father was a florist who owned several stores in the Boston area. At some point before my grandmother and grandfather married and she moved away to Cleveland, the family that was soon to become the most famous Catholic family in America, Joe and Rose Kennedy, also moved to Brookline, next door to the Galvins. (This is according to my father. For all I know it could have been kitty corner, or three houses down. At any rate it was nearby.)

My grandfather was from Cleveland, OH and he was most decidedly not Catholic. In fact, he tended toward thinking that religion was a lot of BS. The horror that the Galvin's must have experienced when their daughter wanted to marry outside of the faith must have shook the family's religious roots. I can only assume that given the fact that my grandmother was already thirty-one, they pragmatically realized that a procreating Catholic was better than an old maid. Part of the deal clearly was that "the issue of the union" would be raised in the Catholic faith. And my grandmother took that task on with great enthusiasm. My Dad had so much Catholic guilt running through his veins that he has always found a way to make things his fault, one way or another.

My grandparents were married on Nantucket Island. Both families had "summered" there, and it is where the two had met. They were of the first generation that would transform the Island from a former whaling colony that had fallen into depression after the whales were hunted to near extinction and other fuels had replaced whaling oil, to a rustic and quaint summer retreat. As you may know, the Island today has some of the most expensive real estate in the country, and while it remains quaint, rustic is no longer applicable. I still find it charming to think of my grandparents marrying there on a warm August on the eve of World War I, with the scent of rose hips thick in the air. If you have ever been to Nantucket in the summertime, you know it is a very intoxicating aroma. It seems a very romantic wedding evening for two people that never exuded much romance, at least not to the outside world.

Even though my Dad grew up in the thirties and forties, in some ways he seemed to come from an earlier era. I mean, when his mother, my grandmother, was four years old in 1886, a womens' suffrage amendment reached the US Senate floor, only to be defeated two to one. Hardly surprising since no women could vote on it. The following year, Utah women LOST the right to vote. It wasn't until my grandmother was almost 38 that she could legally vote. And knowing what I know about her, I am sure she simply asked my grandfather who she was supposed to vote for. That is the era she was from; as a young girl it never would have occurred to her that she could have even a tiny voice in national politics, or that she could be non-dependent on a man to speak for her. And it was from this view of the world that she became a parent. She was uber traditional and proper. She was in her middle age during the roaring twenties. I can only imagine her horror at rising hemlines and speakeasies.

After her children were born, My grandmother relied on nannies and housekeepers to help her raise her children. Again, she was of the pre-WWI era and the Belle Epoque - where art and innovation fluorished, and Europe was at peace. The class system was very much in place and even aspired to, as the sinking of the Titanic so clearly demonstrated in 1912. My Grandmother turned thirty the same year that epic disaster occurred. I am unclear on how the depression affected the family. I think they may have been rich before, and not so rich afterwards, but my grandfather was a lawyer, and they lost neither their home nor their servants after the crash in 1929.

There was no judgment in that era on not being your childrens' main caregiver. You had has many kids as you could, and if could afford to not let them muck up your life, so much the better. Even so, my grandmother was close to her children, in a way. While I am certain my father never talked about anything remotely personal with his mom, he seems to have fond memories of her, even though she rarely paid attention to his activities. She turned a blind eye to the boys chaos and let them beat each other to a pulp, as boys will do. From what I've heard from my Dad, raising a fuss at the dinner table was a cardinal sin compared to throwing a roller skate at your brother's front teeth. You could always go to confession for that. But she was there, she was consistent, and clearly fond of her boys.

Later, during World War II when all of her sons were or became of legal age to enlist in the military, my grandmother was proud to be a Blue Star Mother. She had four stars in her window, for the four older boys, and my father often joked that she kept haranguing him to join the military so she could get that fifth star up there. And in fact my Dad did becomea WWII veteran, technically speaking, even though he didn't join the Army until after D-Day and never made it through basic training. But that's a story for another day.