The long goodbye: an Alzheimer's almanac

By María Eugenia Guerra

Mother's Day.
In my mother's kitchen I am engulfed by tenderness for both my parents. My youngest sister and I are busy at what we try to do most Sunday mornings. While I make breakfast for our parents (eggs, whole wheat toast, and a fresh fruit salad), she fills a plastic box compartmentalized by days of the week with a week's worth of medications, one for my mother and one for my father. My sister is a good bet for a chore that must be thorough and absolutely correct. I am a better cook.
It's the one morning a week we don't discuss business, hers or mine. It's a morning we might run to the grocery or the hardware store after breakfast to get something our mother has said she needs. It's the morning we drive around with our hearts in our throats for having witnessed over breakfast yet another slide in the cruel ravage of my father's mind by Alzheimer's, a disease that has changed him and in so doing has changed us.
While I cut canteloupe, strawberries, and bananas and my sister puts the right meds in the right slots, my father has come into the kitchen to be part of the breakfast preparations. He flattens and folds the plastic bags from the grocery store with an enormous sense of purpose. Even though I am using the sink, he cleans every bit of it, bringing the stainless steel to a high shine. He is oblivious that I am using it still. I wash the dishes and utensils I have used to make breakfast preparations and ask if he would like to dry them. He says, "Sure," and then goes back to cleaning the sink.
I lean into him, my shoulder pressing into his arm and I tell him I love him. He says, "Of course!" in a nearly merry way that makes me laugh while I weep. I ask if he will set the table, and again he says, "Sure."
Over the next half-hour he will not remember how to set the table. Some of us have two knives and a large spoon, several napkins, no forks, and no glasses. Mine is the setting with all the napkins, and for a second I remember what he used to say when I was a child -- that I was very generous because I shared my meals with my clothes, something that was said with much affection and sweetness. That was then.
Today we don't have names anymore and sometimes we are all his sons. He knows us by what we do. Our boy at the bank. Our boy at the ranch. Our boy who works up the road. Our boy who lives next door. The one that's married to Clyde. Grandchildren are no longer on the radar screen. They are strangers who occasion Thanksgiving dinners. My youngest sister and I don't correct him anymore and we've learned to change the subject quickly when things start going south. We've learned to ask for help, and we've learned from others and from some of the valuable resources we have discovered in literature and film. This is textbook Alzheimer's. This is our life.
Though he doesn't remember the names of the children he loved all his life and who have loved him, children whose minds and hearts he formed and cultivated with loyalty and faith and books and exuberant stories and songs, he does remember that empty plastic milk jugs go to the blue recycling bag in the garage. He remembers that he flew 35 missions over Germany in World War II, that he came home on the Queen Mary which docked in New York, that he took a train back to Laredo and walked at midnight from the train depot not to the home of his family but to my mother's house on Laredo Street to ask her to marry him. It is my mother who is his anchor to this life. He is certain only of her. The rest of us are sometime strangers on the periphery of a life he himself no longer recognizes.
At first we did not speak of the disease to others, believing that might rob him of dignity. The diagnosis didn't surprise us, but almost everything else has, including the swift degeneration of his beautiful, complex mind, the mind that with my mother's built all our lives, built enterprise, sent children to college, ran a ranch, fueled imagination, grew gardens, and put love before all else.
The curve ball has been losing our place in his memory, and what child doesn't look to his or her parents for their place of belonging?
I look for my father's heart. I look for it every time I see him, longing just for the moment to be his child again.
Why am I writing this, that which seems should be so private? I am writing this to understand on some very elemental level where my father has gone.