Two Brutal Stories
A journalist I was doing an interview with last week told me a couple of amazing stories. The first was about an old guy with dementia, probably Alzheimer’s, who was slowly descending into the disease. He’d always been a good man, a good husband, and his wife was looking after him as he grew more worried, more upset, more obstreperous. What a change in him, and how painful for her. But she continued looking after him, trying to take care of him, trying to keep him calm at times. He grew violent, and probably she was scared. But he had always been such a good man.
And one day he lashed out at her hard. He beat her and beat her until she died.
This can’t be the only story of it’s kind. I know there’s a movement to try to get guns and ammunition out of the houses of Alzheimer’s patients. Lots of guns in America, and they’re a bad combination with dementia, which can have violent aspects. But even without a gun, a still-strong Alzheimer’s patient, no matter how kind and gentle he might have been in the past, can wreak some havoc. Can kill someone he loves, or used to love and no longer even recognizes.
Then, a second story, about a man who apparently dragged his father into the water off a Florida beach—to hide his nakedness, to clean his dirty body and diaper, the story isn’t entirely clear—only to have his father die the next day.
Bobby Yurkanin and his father
This story I tracked down on line, and you can read a full account here. It’s the story of Bobby Yurkanin, a man in his fifties who had, in spite of the troubled family of his youth, had returned to look after his mother, who was dying of cancer. Shortly after she died, in 2001, his father showed the first signs of dementia, and Yurkanin began to look after him, as well.
His caregiving went on over years—and his father was a far more difficult patient than my father was. He wandered through the condominium where they lived, sometimes nude, sometimes entering into other people’s apartments. He went out on the street wearing only a diaper.
To quote the AP story about the Yurkanins, “The son assumed his caretaker role out of necessity, friends said, despite a strained family history and a less-than-perfect childhood. And those who observed him and his father together often describe the younger Yurkanin with similar adjectives of praise:
Dutiful. Patient. Dedicated.”
Others describe times when Bobby Yurkanin lost control of himself, screamed at people, yelled obscenities. He was clearly under great stress: the natural stress of a caregiver overwhelmed with the extended, year-after-year obligations of looking after a difficult dementia patient. No one accused Bobby Yurkanin of abuse: “For all the unraveling that now seems apparent in Yurkanin’s life, many who observed him with his father say they saw a son who, yes, would grow frustrated by his dad and sometimes raise his voice, but whose care was undeniably loving.”
The great unraveling came on a Fort Lauderdale beach when the elder Yurkanin started to take off his clothes, and Bobby pulled him into the waist-deep water, where he pulled down his shorts and dirty diapers. There was a struggle, Bobby hauled his father out of the water, he lay on the beach, an ambulance came—there are many more details to this in the link above—and the next day he died.
Bobby Yurkanin was charged with murder.
It’s another story that seems completely believeable, completely understandable. The pressures that caregivers are subject to, day after day, month after month, year after year, often with an apparently-endless life of restrictions and trials ahead of them, make it inevitable that sometimes people are going to crack. In Bobby Yurkanin’s case, almost a decade of support and care for his parents ended on a Florida beach with his father dead on the sand.
The last paragraph of the AP account reports of the younger Yurkanin: “Only in retrospect has he become aware how overwhelmed he was as a caretaker, his lawyer says. Under the circumstances, he adds, Yurkanin feels no burden lifted.”
It’s one of those stories about which even the best of us might think, That could have been me.I never came close to any kind of violence against my father—but I certainly felt the frustration, an occasional madness that would drive me upstairs to my room, there to lament any harsh or cold words I had uttered to my father, the man who had done so much for me my entire life. But what if my father had been as much trouble as the senior Yurkanin? I cannot know how much frustration I could have withstood.
Two stories, two brutal stories.
Other than that, a Happy New Year to all!
