Planet Alzheimer

My brother just emailed this to me and my sisters:

Planet Alzheimer

You are now a visitor on planet Alzheimer. You have chosen to follow a loved one
there, as they are an unwilling inhabitant, having been taken there by force.
You do not want them to be alone in this absurd place, but you are still used to
planet Earth. You will find the Earth rules no longer apply, and you will have
to learn to adapt to these new rules if you want to survive the journey:

Never argue
Logic and reason do not exist
Lying is acceptable
You are not who you think you are, you are who they think you are
Never take anything personally
Old memories are best
Learning to do something new is not important
Being loved and accepted at all times is important
Have no expectations
Take advantage of the shuttle back to Earth as often as possible

Yup.

So the news this week:

Last Friday my dad hit my mom in the face, because she was trying to get him to do something (not sure what), and was probably trying to physically move him toward whatever she wanted him to do. Dad has put up his fists in such situations before (my mom can't get it through her head that she shouldn't try to force him to do anything, that she should let the staff take care of him--that's what assisted living is for), and he may have hit her before--actually, we don't know that she hasn't hit him before--but this is not something we can allow to continue. Combativeness and hitting are normal (ha, "normal"), or common developments as Alzheimer's progresses, but it's unsafe for my mom, and better for my dad if he isn't being agitated to the point of striking out like that. The assisted living place, in consultation with my sisters, had a psych RN come in to evaluate my dad's cognitive function. We initially thought that all we'd need to do is adjust his medication. He scored 6 out of 70, which means that his function is much worse than we thought, and shifting his medication isn't going to solve the issue. We have decided that it's time to separate our parents. The assisted living facility has a memory disorders wing (locked), and we have moved my dad there. He shares a room with another gentleman. By all accounts, he seems to be doing a lot better there--it's quiet, his needs are all taken care of, and they engage him in gentle activities as he tolerates them. My mom can visit him whenever she wants, but if her presence agitates him, the staff ask her to leave. (This happened on Wednesday.) We're now trying to get our mom into a studio apartment across the hall from the 1-bedroom apartment my parents were sharing. It is also located right next to the entrance to the memory disorders wing.

Of course the whole situation is also having profound effects on my mother that I just can't write about right now. She is acting out while also trying to keep a polite veneer on things. I can only imagine how scary and frustrating it is, to have your spouse, the person you've been with for your entire adult life (they married when my mom was 22), slowly disappearing but looking basically the same, and behaving in some truly bizarre ways. At the same time, her cognitive function is also declining, albeit differently than his, and I think it's just impossible for her to fully process what's happening.

This--separating my parents--was something we all knew was coming someday, but we didn't realize it would happen so soon, or at least I didn't. We just moved them to this place last May. This week I've really had a hard time coming to terms with it. It absolutely sucks to lose a parent this way. I feel that I've already lost my dad, but he's still alive...and it's this slow-motion process of him just fading out, so the grief is protracted and furtive. This, though...it really fucks with one's romanticized notions of how one's parents will "grow old together" and "take care of each other."

RWP

I find a bittersweet irony in the fact that Wall Street is tanking, and The Washington Post is even heralding the end of American-style capitalsim, while my father disappears further into the fog of Alzheimer's disease. Both of my parents are children of the Great Depression, but my father was particularly self-aware and vocal about that. He was actually making predictions about what we're experiencing now, back in the 1980's when Reagan came to power and started deregulating industries left and right. In some ways I'm glad that he (Dad) isn't aware of what's happening now, but at the same time I'm sad that he doesn't get to feel satisfied or vindicated, or explain to me (and my siblings) in excruciating detail how the current crisis is "exactly like" the one that shaped his childhood world. I really miss the stories he used to tell to embellish his scathing indictments of U.S. economic policy. It is weird to me that his life has been bookended by financial panic and economic crisis. Dad was born in 1925, and he grew up very poor. Mom was born in 1932 and grew up less poor--what I'd call "lace curtain Irish," except that only her mom was Irish...and she didn't hail from a lace curtain background herself, she only rose into that status by marrying a guy with recession-proof skills (my maternal grandpa was an auto mechanic).

So here we go...

READING: Farthing by Jo Walton. I picked this up at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, upon my friend Sarah's recommendation. So far I'm really enjoying the book--I'm only about 50 pages in, but it's fascinating. It is both a murder mystery, and an alternate-future SF story, set in a post-WWII England in which Germany did not lose WWII, and Hitler remains in power, ruling over (from what I can tell so far) much/all of Western Europe. I'm also still working on Wallace Stegner's Spectator Bird. I love that book, too, but I picked up the Jo Walton book because...Stegner is great, but he's really serious, and I wanted something more lively to read.

WEARING: Still in the sweatpants and sweatshirt I put on when I got up this morning. I'm working at home today, so I don't really need to put on "outside" clothes.

PLANNING: Not sure what I'm going to be doing this weekend. It's still amorphous. No big plans coming up in the next few weeks, either.

KNITTING: I've been a little bit stalled out on my knitting this week. I haven't started anything new. I worked on my Endpaper Mitts (Ravelry link--you won't be able to see this unless you're a Raveler), and got through the first two increases for the thumb gusset. I'm also still working on my second rendition of the Lace Ribbon Scarf, and my first pair of socks (the first sock is finished, and I'm about halfway down the cuff of the second). I have been carrying the scarf project and the socks project with me on the bus, but I have mainly been using the scarf as my bus knitting project--because I am afraid of using DPN's on the bus. Well, the other day on the bus I was like..."fuck it, I want to work on the socks!" So I did, and disaster did not ensue. Nary a DPN mishap: no chasing a stray needle under a seat or down the aisle, no inadvertent jabbing of an innocent bystander. It was fine, enjoyable, a perfectly acceptable bus activity. I'll keep doing it...we'll see how long my luck holds out. Oh, and I have also knit a couple more inches onto my rendition of Jess's Gansey. I need to start on the sweater I want to make for my mom, and then I'll be knitting a cardigan for glaucon. I'm sort of dragging my feet on these projects, I think because I really want to fool around with some sweater design ideas I have for 6 skeins of emerald green Cascade 220 that's in my stash. That's enough to make a me-sized sweater (and that's what I bought it for), but not a glaucon-sized sweater. I have other yarn in my stash for him, though--actually I have yarn for two different sweaters that I'm planning to make for him. The Sweater Curse be damned! (I've already made him one sweater--he was wearing it yesterday, actually--and that didn't activate the Curse, so I'm probably safe.)