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A total loss?
On September 20, 2018, we lost our house to a fire. The cause was never discovered.
My first concern was our three cats, who sadly all perished. I’m still mourning them.
Then, I asked a Red Cross volunteer on the scene if any of our photographs survived.
“No,” she responded. “It was a total loss.”
I felt like the earth had opened up, and I was falling into an abyss. I couldn’t believe that something so precious was gone forever.
To make a long story short, what she told me was completely untrue. We had a buffet with cupboards on the bottom that held about twenty very large photo albums.
Not only did the photos in the albums survive, but there were others scattered throughout the house that were intact.
I’m sure she was doing her best, especially as a volunteer. Maybe the firefighters used the term “total loss” (accurate in that the house was not salvageable and had to be razed) and that was her interpretation.
In any case, that incident reminds me of what’s happening right now with my dad. I was told in January by my brother that he had suddenly developed severe dementia.
My dad and I were completely estranged at the time. I cried because he was lost to me for good. There was one silver lining: He seems to have forgotten to shun me.
The first time I visited him in assisted care, he was dressed and sitting in a chair, looking completely healthy. But he was pointing to things that weren’t there, and talking about an imaginary phone call to a cab company for a ride home. He explained (erroneously) that he’d had a stroke.
On my second visit, he was flat on his back in the hospital. We had the most extraordinary, wide ranging, absorbing conversation. Not only was he totally sentient and engaged in the present, but he recalled events from his entire life with a nuance and analytic depth that astonished me.
I was so grateful for the richness of the encounter, but it was baffling. I don’t know a lot about dementia. I assumed it was progressive. I called an Altheimer’s/dementia organization, and researched online.
Everything I read, and those I spoke with on the phone, delivered the same bleak news: This was nothing but a brief episode of clarity, and it meant that he was about to die- most likely within days.
This happened in March.
The phenomenon I read about gave examples like this: The person suddenly recognized a loved one, or knew the names of common objects they’d forgotten.
The descriptions I read simply didn’t match my experience, leaving me flummoxed. My dad had, among other things, delivered what amounted to a TED talk about traveling in Europe. I learned that the food is better in a marketplace in Italy than in a restaurant, for instance.
Was I just in denial? Hallucinating a level of cognition that was actually transitory, and nothing but part of a dire prognosis? I’m still wrestling with this. I can’t find anything that contradicts the assertion that all that’s going on with my father is, in its own way, a “total loss.”
Getting back to my metaphor (though my dad is worth infinitely more than a house.) Our place after the fire looked like something out of a horror movie, with blackened walls and mangled couches. The kitchen floor was gone.
But my daughter’s room was perfectly preserved.
That single untouched room did not compensate for a house that couldn’t survive. But it was something, and we were grateful. Even so, it was strange to try to grasp that the devastated kitchen and unmarred bedroom were part of the same reality.
My dad’s condition is also hard to process. When I visited him yesterday, he was slower and weaker than ever. At first, he was confused when I mentioned his great grandchildren. Then, after some prompting, he remembered their names.
He pressed me for details about my recent boating trip. He named all the lakes he swam in as a child. I detected holes and lapses, but also insight and humor and connection to both the past and the present.
I’ve described the content of these visits to my therapist, and her response is always “Yes, that’s how it is. They come and go.” Maybe I don’t like my dad’s identity being subsumed by a syndrome. Maybe it’s a case of snowflake-by-proxy; my dad is special, and that has hopeful implications for me.
But I can’t overcome my stubbornness in clinging to the thought that there’s at least one room in his brain that is consistently present. I don’t want the evidence of that to be merely a hologram or cruel biologically based fluke.
My dad is going to die soon. His mind will be lost one way or another. But how desperately I wish that someone would agree with me that he is still here. The family members who could help me with this puzzle are estranged, distant or preoccupied. I feel truly alone.
But I am still finding treasures, with or without outside validation. When I told him about swimming in water 300 feet deep, he started singing “Deep water…. Deep, deep water…”
“What song is that?” I eagerly asked him. I’ve heard that people with dementia can have a remarkable ability to recall tunes from their past.
“It’s not a real song,” he said. “But it should be.” Then he laughed.
It really should be.
Thanks, Dad.
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