Fragments
When my dad was in recovery following an operation, the doctors pulled me to one side and told me they thought he'd had a stroke. He was confused, repeating himself, belligerent. As they made hurried arrangements for scans and other tests I spent some time with him, calming him down and making assessments of my own. He's fine, I reassured them, there's no new wrongness here. When the scans came back they lowered their eyebrows and went back to their rounds.
When my dad had a stroke during an operation a few years later he'd been in the ward long enough that nobody noticed. He was just confused, repeating himself, belligerent. I know, I know, I told them, but this is different, this is newly wrong, please look into it. The stroke was mild and he recovered quickly.
My dad is an angry word. My dad is a raised fist. My dad is a confused anecdote endlessly repeated. My dad is a procrastinated task. My dad is an apology. My dad is frightened of the world and all the people in it he is clever enough to know he doesn't understand. My dad is a gentle hand on my shoulder. My dad is a saved bee on a cold autumn pavement. My dad is a broken mirror. My dad is an old man.
My dad has Alzheimer's and vascular dementia. There are blood vessels in his brain that should be as thick as a pencil but are no wider than a hair. There are pieces of his brain that have gone missing, islands sunk beneath the sea. We've known for a long time that there was something newly wrong but now we have it in black and white. And now he knows it too. Mostly he's just annoyed that he can't remember the words he wants to say. For now it's harder from the outside.
When I was young I thought that too — my dad is harder from the outside. But I grew taller, and stronger. I grew calmer and wiser. And in the end I came to understand how hard it is on the inside. I wonder what he might have made of all the things he is so good at if he'd not been born in 1942 — born into a family that sent him away to a boarding school with 'highly intelligent maladaptive boys' in the title, which spat him into the world at 18, unsupported and unprepared.
My dad breaks my heart in every way there is to break it. After 78 years he is no closer to understanding himself, the world or the people in it. The things that make him angry today made him angry 30 years ago. He's the minotaur and the maze. He is a single song on loop and he doesn't know the words.
My dad is a kind man. He's kind in the way that only people who don't understand social conventions can be kind. He takes the shortest path to kindness, even if it means he tramples the flowers. His is a world where kindness is met with ambivalence, mistrust and rejection and I buckle beneath the imagined loneliness of that. “But I was just trying to help”. He is just trying to help. He has two artificial knees and still offers to get me water from the kitchen.
My dad is a language I have taught myself to speak.
It's very hard, watching a mind unravel. Losing someone while they're still alive. This isn't my first time with the strangeness of that and it's not easier the second time around. My dad will leave the world even more confused than he entered it, knowing very little of himself and probably afraid, as he has been all his life, and there is enough sorrow in that to drown.
It's time to be free, it's time to let go of those imagined futures ripe with reconciliation and epiphany. He will know even less of himself before the end, and even less of me. I will find my way to peace with that as I have with everything else — what else is there to do than make sufficient room for these sharp things that we don't rub against them.
My dad is a language I have taught myself to speak and I will not forget the words.
For more information about dementia, including how to access help and support, visit the Alzheimer’s Society
