Month: January 2023

Monday this week was the one year anniversary of Pop’s passing. That has led me to think about him more than usual and perhaps more tenderly than I often do. I feel incredibly fortunate to have had Pop as my dad. I have known many good fathers and numerous amazing father figures in my lifetime, but I don’t think that I could point to one that I think is better than Pop was. That makes me so lucky. As Pop began to lose his cognitive faculties due to the dementia and Alzheimer’s, he never forgot who I was. Many times I have heard stories about how someone with Alzheimer’s doesn’t remember a family member that is talking to them and I imagine that that has to be incredibly heartbreaking. So, in a second way, I was incredibly fortunate.

People say about people that, “He was like a second father to me.” I could name several that I feel that way about, but they aren’t included in the three dads that I have been thinking about this week. Cognitive diseases can do some strange things to people. My grandpa suffered a series of strokes as he got older that took away his ability to communicate clearly. Prior to this I can’t recall a single profane word coming out of his mouth. He became an honorary sailor in the post-stroke season. In retrospect, I suppose that it was his frustration coming out as he tried to communicate to his then young grandchildren or embarrassment from having to be fed by a child. I can’t claim to be an expert on stroke victims so this is all just speculation, but I think that his mind was still working, but the body and parts of the brain were in rebellion. What a terrible thing it must be to not be able to tell your loved ones how much you care. One day after feeding him I was getting ready to go do something else and he reached over and grabbed my arm. I think he just wanted me to stay with him a little longer. As a result of the physical impairments that came from his strokes he wasn’t overly gentle. He didn’t hurt me, but it freaked me out and bolted. In my minds eye and much to my shame, I think he shed a tear. That was the one and only time that I was ever afraid of him.

Growing up Pop could be gruff at times. I don’t think that there is a parent who doesn’t have to lay down the law at times. This was the first of my three dads. This was the dad I called dad. He taught me most of the things I know about day to day life. I knew him for nearly four decades. He was pretty amazing. He was an award winning float builder, scout leader, engineer, craftsman, breadwinner and artist. I remember building pinewood derby cars with him. He was a master with cardboard. He made a bull head (like the two person horse costume) with tubes running through the nostrils that blew “smoke”. The egg drop contest entry that he helped me build was strong enough to stand on (I know I tried it). He was practical and fun and sometimes ornery all rolled up into one. Dad was never overly emotional, and he wasn’t one to verbally express his feelings very often, but I knew he loved me, even if he didn’t say it very often.

Pop was my second dad. I call him my kind dad. This is the Pop that I think most people who knew him in the last few years of his life remember. This was the dad who gave roses to everyone, who gave multiple copies of the same Christmas card from 1989 to everyone at the grocery store, who made new friends with the girls at the beauty salon. He walked to the local senior center until Covid closed them down. He walked through the neighborhood giving away roses (or putting them in his pockets to be laundered at a later time). This was the dad that everybody loved. 

After he broke his hip, I got a third dad. He didn’t stop being kind, but I named him for a new characteristic that seemed to come to the forefront at this time. This was grateful dad. I mentioned earlier that Pop had never been verbally expressive but he began in his last few months to be more open with his feelings. I know that he was confused and maybe hurt because we had to put him in a care center. And to be honest, when I had to leave him, even though he was in capable and kind hands, it was a hard thing to do. He was under the care of some phenomenal people, but he wanted to be at home with his family and friends. He told me often how much he loved me, but more than the expressions of love, I remember his words of gratitude. Thanks to me for visiting him. Thanks to the people who took care of him. In similar circumstances, I doubt that I would have reacted from a place of thanks, but Pop did.

I learned some important lessons from each of my dads. I learned how to build and break things from Dad. How to work with tools, what a loving father looked like. From kind dad I learned some lessons (which I’m still trying to implement) about how to treat other people. We come into contact with all sorts of people in our daily life. Kind dad was a friend to all of them, many who you might not expect to be friends with an itinerant octagenarian. And maybe the most important lesson came from grateful dad. Even when life is throwing you the greatest challenges and you have more to be unhappy about than you have to be grateful for, you can always thank the people around you for the things that they do. And you can just be grateful that they are part of your life.

Thanks, dad – all three of you.

Identity theft is an ever more common crime these days. It’s a major inconvenience when it happens, not to mention a crime that costs billions of dollars each year. When it happens, it feels like such a violation of privacy, but what about when it is a crime you commit on yourself.

Pop was never the same after mom passed. He missed her so much, though he rarely said anything about it and never really communicated his feelings about his hurt. At least he didn’t say that much to me about it, maybe he was more open with his feelings to my other siblings. But we knew. Mom and Pop were really a matched set and one without the other was just half a team.

I remember visiting with Pop a few days before he passed. He was in a wheelchair because he had fallen a few days earlier and they were afraid that he would fall again and hurt himself. I wheeled him into his room and he said, “This is the room where Dixee was.” Pop had a picture of mom on the night stand and I assumed that he was confusing the picture with mom. Pop passed a couple of weeks after that and I wonder if mom had been there visiting him and preparing him to be with her again.

Mom and Pop were married for 50 years before she died. Their story was a beautiful one. Pop told me the story of their engagement more than once, but I still remember the day that he couldn’t remember it anymore. One of the great love stories had been lost, stolen by a merciless and unforgiving disease. Identity theft of the most terrible kind. 

Pop lost a lot of other stories too. Some I try to recall from when I was a child and he would tell me about his experiences in the campus married housing, his work for Kennecott, or how he considered himself Steve Young’s first receiver. But those ones were stolen too. 

What a shame.

Having a parent with Alzheimer’s is kind of the opposite of having a child. With children, you expect that they will make mistakes, but you also expect that they will learn from them. Alzheimer’s goes the other way; behaviors that you expect stop and they are replaced with what can only be described as oddities.

It’s easy to react, in such situations, impatiently. Perhaps real parents, who have built up a store of equanimity after years of raising kids, might respond in a much more sanguine manner than someone who has never had to go through that experience. It isn’t fair, though, to be angry at a person who doesn’t understand what they are doing to upset you, especially when you know that it would never be in their character to do so.

As Pop began to decline, and I mean really decline, I found that I was spending more time being, if not angry, at least frustrated when I came across these peccadilloes. He was still, in many ways, self-sufficient. He could dress himself and get around by walking. He had his routes and his routine so that he was still ok to be at home by himself during the day. And thank heaven for the many wonderful neighbors who kept an eye out for him; he had an external support group that not only monitored, but truly loved him as well.

The first time you pull a bowl out of the cupboard and cereal covers the counter and the floor is annoying. It is a new and unexpected trick from someone that you expect to know better. The proof is there, in decades of living with him, Pop had never once done this. Luckily, Pop wasn’t around at the time, or I might have lashed out unkindly. Instead I cleaned up the mess and thought about what was going on.

Vascular dementia was an old diagnosis, Alzheimer’s was a new one at the time. This may be the first and only time that this is ever said, but perhaps the diagnosis was a blessing in disguise. Dementia, at least the symptoms that Pop showed from it, was characterized by a cognitive drop and then a period of stable mental state. At first, it was the same story, over and over, but that was about it. You got used to it after a while and, since you knew it was coming, you just learned to roll with it. 

Alzheimer’s, whether it was just a progression of the dementia, or whether it was a whole new thing, came with an ever changing set of bizarre actions. One day it was cereal in the fridge, complete with milk, the next it was a bag full of candy and a stack of gas station loyalty cards. Some of them were peculiar, sometimes they could be maddening, if you weren’t prepared.

At this particular juncture, I found myself constantly frustrated. Why are there used Kleenexes all over, why is there no toilet paper… Oh it’s in his room, he’s using it as Kleenex. The cereal from the cupboard just happened to be the incident that let me change my way of thinking.  I knew, and this wasn’t a deep down kind of feeling it was right on the surface, that Pop was not going to get better. There was no doubt that, while he once knew how to put the cereal away, or to fix more than just a peanut butter sandwich, there were things he was no longer going to do the way he had always done. As I swept up the cereal, I had to ask the question, “What can I do to not be angry with Pop?” The feelings were all mine and he couldn’t be held responsible for my temper.  I don’t get angry with a child when they accidentally spill a drink; in that situation you clean up and move on, or help the kid clean up. However you chose to handle it, getting angry isn’t the right way to handle a genuine accident. Yet, here I was angry as, in some ways, Pop was being very childlike.

The answer wouldn’t have been obvious but in light of the new diagnosis it gave me the strategy that I used to respond to the daily changes. I would just say, “Ah, Alzheimer’s,” and clean up, and move on.

A crash at 3:30 in the morning was an immediate cause for alarm. Pop was 87 years old and falling was just one of a number of concerns. He was lying on the floor at the foot of his bed but he was awake and didn’t seem to be in pain. That was a good sign.

“My leg isn’t working right.”

Honestly, my foremost concern was that he was having a stroke, not that he had just broken his hip. An x-ray at the hospital confirmed that the femur had fractured. His self-reported 4 out of 10 on the pain scale was a testament of just how tough Pop was.

Pop had dementia and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few years ago. Despite Pop being a fighter, the doctor gave a grim prognosis. He told us he had never seen someone with dementia last more than a year after hip replacement surgery. It gave us a timeline; that was something.

It should have been obvious, but perhaps I didn’t want to know, that Pop wasn’t going to ever come home. Having been his primary caregiver for a couple of years, even though in the past year several family members had increasingly stepped in to help out as Pop needed more help, it was hard to not feel like a failure. I don’t know how most people feel when they have to make the decision to put a loved one in the care of others. If I had the opportunity, I might travel back in time and ask Mom and Pop how they felt when they had to put Grandpa in a home. For me it was a crushing feeling that I was incapable of taking care of Pop any longer. And, I wondered, and maybe I still wonder, how good of care I had given him.

Over the next few months I began going through the house and encountered a strange phenomenon. There were prescription bottles filled with change. There wasn’t just one or two of them either. I found dozens. By the time I had finished I found around 60 bottles and about $300 in change. 

As December rolled around I was thinking of a new project to work on. Every couple of years I like to take on a photography project to work on for the year. Sometimes I have a good idea of what the project will be, but usually it’s a notion and a naive jump into something that turns out to be more effort than I expected. What I knew is that pill bottles and spare change were part of the project, whatever that was, and I planned to start in January.

Even though we had an approximate timeline (less than 1 year) for how long Pop would still be with us, I expected that it would be near the end of that timeline or, and perhaps this is an indication of just how clueless I can be at times, that Pop would beat the doctor’s experience. So I started at the beginning of the year. At first it was disjointed and random as I was trying to come up with the details of this project I was starting. I had the raw materials, and I had this goal of donating something to an Alzheimer’s organization when I was done. That was it.

The idea of painting them to look like animals came in the second or third week of January and I thought I was on the way. And then the unexpected happened. Pop died. 

My brain told me that I could just go on with the project. I knew I was going to miss Pop. At the risk of sounding calloused, I wasn’t sad to see him go. The last couple of days he was on hospice care and was unresponsive in bed. Pop had lived a full life and he had never been the same since mom passed 16 years earlier. He was back with his sweetheart and a fully functioning mind, how could I begrudge him that. The reality was, that grief affects us all and sometimes in unexpected ways. The short of it was that the project I had started was just too much to tackle at the time, and while I worked on the animals over the course of the year, I just didn’t have the drive to turn it into an actual project, just pieces. 

In the end I decided to take a mulligan on 2022 and try again in 2023. It would seem like by now the project would be fully formed and clear, but once again I’m winging it. 

The first animal I made was Aethelbert the penguin. He’s been around for almost a year now, and I did try to make a final picture with him last year, but since I’m starting over, that included the need for a new Aethelbert picture. The beginning of The Change of Mind Project (revision 2) starts with this.