Alzheimer's Lullaby

Alzheimer’s disease took my father. He was a Great Depression era kid, grew up tough, took a long drink from life and owned a sense of grace.

Some glibly say that those of us watching Alzheimer’s envelop a loved one are in a state of denial. Denial implies a choice; that somehow Alzheimer’s has been presented as a choice, but you simply choose to ignore the possibility. Only those of us that have seen the disease entangle a loved one know that you cannot look at a loved one as though they are the subject of a multiple choice question. The uninitiated onlooker is utterly bewildered. The only frame of reference you have is the loved one’s past. The vision you had of them does not fit the figure before you.

At first I thought that my father just needed to get out more; he just needed new material to freshen his mind. However, his conversations always migrated back to memories of years earlier. It was maddening. I wanted the conversation to move forward, to explore the contemporary, but the conversations remained entrenched in the past. It never occurred to me that Alzheimer’s was in the process of sending his memories of the here and now to the Bermuda Triangle.

My father’s sense of humor fell off the radar screen as well. The sense of humor that coined the quirky comic phrase: “Well isn’t that just prophylactic!” had vanished without a trace. The jokes, the kibitzing, and the warmth were gone without so much as a whisper. Once in a while a spark would reappear – a laugh, a smile or a word. You hold out hope that your loved one is emerging, but the sparks always fade back into the fog, reappearing less frequently as time goes on; then it occurs to you that you can’t remember the last spark.

My father knew he was lost. One evening he stood in my doorway, drew me close, eyes swollen with pleading tears, and whispered: “I’m in trouble. Something is wrong with me and I can’t figure it out.” For a moment I swam in the pooled tears in his eyes. He turned and left. I got the message.

About this time my father paced relentlessly, to the point of exhaustion. He had wandered into Sundowner’s syndrome. Perhaps he was searching for a beacon that would guide him back home through the fog of the Bermuda Triangle, but she is selfish. She does not give back what she has taken.

By the time it’s obvious that it is Alzheimer’s, the disease has spun your loved one’s mind like a roulette wheel. My dad sat down next to me, looked at me and uttered, “Chicken shit 1st Sergeant Fowler. (Fowler is our last name.) Christ, I hate seeing my men coming back all shot up!” He fell silent, turned and stared straight ahead. The roulette wheel had spun, the ball dropped and he was back in the South Pacific fighting the Japanese, in the spring of his manhood. I was not to be born for another eight years.

As Alzheimer’s progresses Friday the 13th emerges; paranoid psychosis finds a home in your loved one. Their mind becomes a caldron, mixing a witches brew of actual memories and grotesque fantasies. My father wanted to keep a knife with him at all times; a butter knife, steak knife, butcher knife, any knife. He was convinced that starving Japanese soldiers were coming in the night to steal food. How do you disarm a man who is trying to protect himself?

In a word: drugs. The prescribed anti-psychotic drugs dropped him into a zombie like state. The man was mobile when lead and stationary when placed. My father had become warehouse material. And my mother was exhausted. He died shortly after being placed in a nursing home. It’s interesting to note that anti-psychotic drugs are suspected to hasten the death of an Alzheimer’s sufferer. In my father’s case, the correlation seems strong.

They say Alzheimer’s disease is the long goodbye. That doesn’t ring with me. I like to think that Alzheimer’s disease sings a lullaby, distracting at first, then maddening, but ultimately comforting in the end. A comfort that eases you into that long Good Night.

Copyright Stephan Fowler 2008. All rights reserved.