Same House Different Tuesdays

Nobody told me how absurd dementia would be.

Sad, yes. Frustrating, certainly. Exhausting, absolutely.

But absurd?

I wasn’t prepared for that.

My father and I live in the same house, sometimes separated by only a wall, and increasingly I have the strangest awareness that we are occupying entirely different worlds.

His world has become extraordinarily difficult to organize.

There is breakfast.

There is a walk.

There is lunch at 11:30.

There is television.

There is dinner.

There is bed.

That’s essentially the day.

And somehow, to him, this relatively simple sequence has become a mountain of multitasking.

By two o’clock in the afternoon he may begin pacing because bedtime is approaching.

Bedtime is at 3:30.

The problem isn’t necessarily bedtime.

The problem is waiting.

Waiting until 3:30 when you could simply go to bed now seems increasingly ridiculous to him. Why would anyone do that?

And trying to explain the reason begins to feel equally ridiculous to me.

Then there is nighttime.

We have a dementia clock. We have notes. We have created all kinds of little external structures to hold pieces of reality that his brain can no longer reliably hold.

But the concept of staying in bed until the clock says morning can be nearly impossible for him to comprehend.

Not obey.

Comprehend.

That’s an important distinction.

Time has become a very strange substance around here.

And yet this same man will suddenly begin talking about how perhaps he retired too soon and should go back to work.

Or he’ll announce that he has decided he isn’t going to run for office.

There are moments when I want to say, Dad, getting from lunch to bedtime has become a full-time job.

I don’t.

But I think it.

Then there are the finances.

Every so often, a sudden concern arises about money as though he has been sitting in his apartment balancing accounts all morning and has just discovered an irregularity.

He hasn’t been managing his finances.

But somewhere inside him lives the man who did.

And that man apparently still holds meetings.

There are also the stories.

The same stories.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Some of them I have heard nearly every day for two years.

I know where they’re going before he gets there. I know the characters. I know the punch lines. I could probably understudy him at this point.

And throughout the day, about every thirty minutes, I hear the door.

He wanders out into the main house looking for me.

Sometimes he doesn’t quite know what he’s looking for.

Sometimes he wants to know when lunch is.

There is a sticky note on his phone telling him:

Just resting until lunch at 11:30.

But the sticky note exists in my reality.

Thirty minutes later, lunch may no longer exist in his.

So from wherever I happen to be in the house I yell:

“Hey Dad! You’re just waiting for lunch at 11:30.”

“Oh! Okay,” he says, usually laughing. “Just checking. I got confused.”

And I hear the shuffle back toward his room.

Until the next time.

And here’s the part that has become fascinating to me:

I don’t always go in there anymore.

Not physically, and increasingly, not mentally.

I used to climb inside every confusion with him and try to straighten the furniture.

Where are we?

What time is it?

What’s happening next?

Why are you worried about that?

Remember, we already talked about this.

Remember?

Remember?

Remember?

I am beginning to understand that I don’t live there.

So while my father is trying to determine whether 2:00 is sufficiently close to 3:30 to justify going to bed, I might be on the treadmill.

While he is contemplating returning to the workforce, I might be lifting weights.

While he is deciding not to run for political office, I might be writing my master’s thesis.

While he is temporarily concerned about finances he no longer manages, I might be washing my hair and conducting what has apparently become an ongoing scientific investigation into porosity.

We are both here.

Same address.

Same walls.

Same Tuesday.

Completely different Tuesdays.

And perhaps this is one of the strangest things dementia has taught me.

We assume reality is the thing we’re all standing inside together.

But living with someone with dementia makes that assumption increasingly difficult to maintain.

My father isn’t simply forgetting facts. His relationship with time is changing. Sequence is changing. Future is changing. The relative importance of things is changing. Something that seems tiny to me—waiting ninety minutes—can become enormous to him, while something enormous—returning to work—can suddenly seem perfectly reasonable.

And I am learning something too.

Love does not require me to enter every reality he enters.

I can answer from the treadmill.

“Lunch at 11:30, Dad.”

“Oh yeah! That’s right.”

And off he goes.

I don’t have to follow.

There was a time when I might have considered that selfish.

Now I think it may be one of the healthiest things I have learned since my father moved in.

Because while dementia is doing whatever bizarre thing dementia is doing to time in the room beside me, something else is happening here too.

I’m getting stronger.

I’m studying.

I’m resting.

I’m thinking.

I’m laughing.

I’m living.

There is something almost impossible to comprehend about watching someone I love lose his ability to navigate an ordinary day while I am rediscovering my ability to inhabit my own.

But perhaps those two things are allowed to exist in the same house too.

His world can be getting smaller without mine becoming smaller with it.

And when I hear the door open again in thirty minutes, I’ll probably hear:

“Hey, what time are we eating?”

And from somewhere inside my own strange little universe I’ll yell:

“11:30, Dad.”

“Oh yeah.”

A laugh.

A shuffle.

And for another thirty minutes, we return to our respective realities.