Regrets
A journalist, doing an interview with me today, asked among other questions if I had any regrets about the year I spent with my father as he sank under his dementia.
None came quickly out of my mouth. And that is surely true about that year. I arrived at my father’s house on December 21st, 2004, and left it, after cleaning things up following his death, on December 20th, 2005. An exactly full year. The only year—or anything longer than a couple of weeks—that I spent with him since I graduated from college. I grew frustrated and antsy at times: I can see that in the journal I kept, though now I can barely remember it save for what I wrote down. I have a few minor regrets (I forgot to tell the journalist this) about contradicting him when he was sure that people had gotten into the house and stolen things, or that Mitt Romney had come to visit and was in the refrigerator. I could have been more inventive. I could have gone to check to see if the state’s governor had actually come to call, then reported back truthfully that he wasn’t there.
But those are minor regrets, to be sure. What I would have regretted would have been not leaving my life in Ohio that year, and not going to stay with him.
All that is predictable. Who ever says they regretted spending a year with their parent or spouse or sibling? A year is short enough that the sacrifice is not that great, and there’s apt to be little time for regrets to build.
But what if it were three years, or five, or ten? Who could devote their life to someone for so long and not feel regret that too much of their own life was passing them by? I’m stunned by people who stick with it year after year, whether they are looking after someone at home or have put them in a dementia unit in a nursing home. I think of what Mary Gordon wrote in Circling My Mother, after her mother had been in a nursing home for eleven years: “My mother’s body is inexorably failing, but not fast enough. She is still more among the living than the dying, and I wonder, often, what might be the good of that.”
She writes, “The sight of her blackening teeth, now only stumps; her hair, scraped down almost to her scalp; above all the smell of her made me panic, made me want to cover my face with my hands and cry out, ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t do this.”
The grinding care, the pure duration of it, makes me wonder how long I could have gone on with my father. A year was easy. (Well, I didn’t think it was easy at the time, especially because I didn’t know how long it was going to be.) But to continue year after year: how do people do it? We all want to know that, don’t we? Could we do it? What are we capable of? I did it for a year, and still don’t know if I could do it for five or ten years.
Mary Gordon did have a life apart, and a good thing, too. She had her writing, and she explains, even after showing her panic around her mother, that she writes about her to witness “to the mystery of an impossible love.”
What advice, the journalist asked, would I give to others in my situation, with a parent sinking into dementia.
“Go do it for now,” I said. No one can say how long it’s going to last, or how long you can stand it. “Start now, or whenever you’re truly needed, and do it for as long as you want to, or as long as you can stand up to it.”
I know this, that there was never an minute during my time with my father that wished I’d done something else that year.
Tags: alzheimer's, caregiving, dementia, memory, nursing homes, regrets
Do you have any regrets about moving those pills. Taking away his choice?
Was that more about you than him? Ouch
Yes, that didn’t come to me in the midst of the interview. Perhaps it should have. Perhaps I haven’t taken enough responsibility for moving those Nembutals out of his reach.
It does go against everything I believe about letting the aged and infirm choose their own path, and their own end. Yet how quickly I removed those pills, so clearly gathered together by my father with the thought of ending his own life when it became too much for him. It was not to much for him at the time, and didn’t become so—this is my judgment, based on the closest observation—until ten days before his death. Before that, no matter what he might have thought before, he wanted to live. But this doesn’t absolve me of making a bad decision.
It’s true, I was thinking of myself, which made it a reprehensible act. I was also thinking about his medications: how we had, some eight months earlier, seen that he could not keep his medications straight, and brought in a retired nurse to administer them to him every day. I wouldn’t have wanted him to get into his Nembutals and take a half dozen, or two dozen, in a confused state. That may have played a role in how I reflexively took them from his shelf and stored them upstairs.
But the heart of it was that it was a mistake, a selfish mistake. I wasn’t ready for him to die.