Breakfast Memories Read online

  I could see Dad’s anxiety as he fidgeted with her fingers wrapped tightly in his hand while we walked past the office receptionist toward the examination room. “This will be good, Bernadette. He should be able to help us,” he whispered to her as he guided her into patient room number one. Please, God, I remember praying, still overwhelmed at what I had seen with the puzzle play, there must be a medicine to help her.

  She accepted Dad’s gentle kindness as he helped position her onto the patient chaise. She sat on the edge, her feet adorned in frilly lace ankle socks and white sneakers. She was swinging her feet back and forth like a happy child on an elementary school playground swing set when the geriatric neurologist entered the room and told her she had pretty blue eyes. She smiled shyly and sweetly and let out an adorable child-like giggle that could melt the heart of a tin man.

  He asked, “Can you tell me your full name?”

  “Bernadette.”

  “And your last name?”

  No answer. A long pause.

  “McDonough,” she finally said.

  “How do you feel, Bernadette?”

  A long pause. “I’m good,” she giggled, her feet still swinging.

  The doctor turned to my father. “Peter, tell me what concerns you about Bernadette’s health.”

  Dad dropped his head and looked at the tile of the office floor, his characteristically tall posture now sagged and hunched over. When we first walked into the physician’s room, Dad held his chest high, as if he were a warrior ready to protect his princess. But while the doctor was probing and searching for answers, I noticed a shift in Dad’s composure: he was sitting slumped in the chair and holding his head in his hands.

  In response to the doctor, Dad listed all the things he had said to me on the phone over the last year or so. “She doesn’t do—She’s not who she was. She’s messy, dirty, unkempt, and not keeping house. She has no interest in eating and sleeps late until I have to wake her up.”

  I was shocked. How dare he? How could he talk about her like that to a stranger? Mom was sitting right there! Didn’t he care that he would hurt her feelings? My hands turned to fists as I placed them under my thighs. I scrunched my face in anger as I glared at him thinking. Are you kidding me? How can you be so mean and selfish and talk only about how her aging is affecting YOU?

  I raged inside. This appointment was not supposed to be about him and his need to be taken care of, or about how she was no longer making herself pretty for him or doing this or that for him. That was how I heard his words, when, in my mind, we were here to talk about how to help her stay happy and healthy as she aged.

  I continued to glare at him.

  “Okay, Bernadette,” the doctor said, “I am going to ask you a couple of questions. Take your time answering. Where were you born?”

  “New York,” she answered.

  “Where do you live now?”

  “Close to here.” Then a moment later, “Fairport.”

  “What is the name of the president of the United States?”

  “Obronga.” (She meant Obama.) And she gave a silly laugh when the doctor laughed at the mispronunciation.

  “What year is it?” Time lapse. “It’s lots of years, I know that,” she said, with a sweet tone and happy smile.

  Dad remained bent over, looking at the floor.

  “What month is it?”

  “I don’t know, but I know it’s winter because we have snow,” she replied, again with sweetness in her voice.

  “Who is the man next to you?”

  “Peter, my husband,” she answered, with a giggle like a little girl disclosing the name of her grammar-school crush, rather than the man she was married to for over 55 years.

  I would soon learn, all too quickly, that knowing his name and knowing he was her husband was a huge victory in our upcoming journey.

  “Who is this girl?” He pointed at me.

  “My daughter, Catherine.”

  I let out a huge breath.

  Knowing my name today was another victory for our side.

  “Do you have other children?”

  “Yes, lots of children.”

  “How many?” We watched and waited for her to answer. She was wiggling and giggling but offered no response. It was almost as if she was in a wonderland far, far away.

  After several long moments of silence, the doctor continued. “Okay, I bet they are all great kids. Let’s not worry about how many. Can you tell me their names?”

  Time lapse.

  I listened anxiously for her response as she searched her mind, gazing up at the ceiling and turning her head back and forth. After a few minutes of silence, she gave three correct names out of her seven children.

  The back of my head started to ache, and my hands under my thighs turned clammy with sweat. I shifted in my chair, shocked that Mom couldn’t remember all of the names of her seven children.

  Oh, my God.

  I moved my stare from Dad over to the doctor, who was inputting his notes onto his tablet, seemingly unfazed by her responses—or lack of responses. Dad hadn’t flinched.

  The doctor continued, “What did you have for breakfast today, Bernadette?”

  She giggled. “Well, Peter always makes my placemat with coffee, and a bagel with marmalade.” Then she added, “And a napkin.”

  I would not know the significance of that last, tacked-on item until much later.

  Dad knew, though, and I would later wonder if it gave him even the tiniest amount of relief that she had listed it then.

  “Does she have Alzheimer’s?” I asked the doctor as he moved back to his laptop to input notes.

  “No. Alzheimer’s is a type of dementia,” he answered factually. “Your Mom’s dementia, based on her scans and her analysis today, is due to TIA strokes. It’s called vascular dementia.”

  “Strokes?” I gasped. Mom had strokes?

  “She might not have known she was having them. TIA strokes are not always felt. They are silent strokes, unlike the strokes one might have in the heart.” The explanation ended there.

  Oh, my God. Poor Mom.

  He gave us prescriptions. One was an antidepressant that also affected memory, and the other pill was specifically useful, when combined with the first, in slowing the progression of memory loss.

  Slowing the progression? Does that mean it doesn’t cure this? Mom had strokes and we didn’t know it? I felt a panic rising in my throat and wanted to scream the questions pounding in my head. What about stopping the progression? What about bringing her back?

  We needed another doctor. We needed to do something. We needed to take vigorous action.

  When we left the office, my hands were still shaking. I was frustrated with Dad, with Mom, with myself, and with this supposedly expert doctor. My mother’s mind was vanishing before our eyes. What were we supposed to do now?

  Mom was seated in the back seat, smiling out the window like a happy child.

  We did the only thing I could think to do, knowing she loved chocolates and desserts. We went for ice cream.

  Four months later, we were back with the same doctor in the same office.

  He again told her she had pretty blue eyes. She again smiled and giggled, sitting just like she had during the last appointment, although this time getting up onto the chair, she was a bit more unsteady and required the help of us both. Once situated, her feet started to swing, just like in the last appointment, as if she was a toddler back on a swing set.

  “What is your name?”

  “Bernadette.”

  “What is your last name?”

  No reply.

  “Who is the man with you?”

  “Oh, that’s Peter.”

  “Who is he?”

  Blank stare.

  “Who is this girl?” He pointed to me.

  Time lapse.

  “Catherine.”

  “And she is?”

  Another blank stare. My throat tightened.

  The geriatric neuropsy
chologist would not meet my gaze and continued his assessment when she did not answer his question.

  “On this piece of paper, can you draw me the hands of a clock at the three o’clock hour?”

  With the pencil cupped by her thumb and three fingers, she awkwardly but happily drew what she knew of a clock. She drew no hands on the clock. She drew the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in the center of the circle. She then skipped all other numbers and drew the number 9, and placed it outside the circle.

  I couldn’t even look at my Dad. I could barely breathe. Where was Mom? Where was my mom?

  I dropped my head to my knees and stared at the floor. Dad did the same.

  If the day of the “no-show beauty parlor” had been hard, and if that day in the kitchen watching her attempt to complete a toddler’s puzzle had been terrible, then this day was the worst of them all.

  The doctor wrote a prescription for another drug that might offset some of her fatigue and advised us to be patient with her memory loss and monitor her behavior. In other words, he offered nothing new.

  When we left his office that afternoon, I knew in my heart that this would be the last visit with that doctor. There was something seriously wrong, and I had to let my siblings know.

  Just as we had needed our parents when we were children, now they needed us.

  I brought them home, and said I’d stay for a couple of days just to be around if they needed me. Dad refused my offer.

  “We’ll be OK now that she has new medicine. Thanks for helping. I can take care of things now. You go back home,” he said. So I did. I couldn’t challenge him and his capability to care for her. I just didn’t have the heart or the energy left to say what I knew was the answer to their crisis: We need to move her into an assisted living center.

  Mom was experiencing mental and physical disintegration, meaning she was losing her connections and her beautiful mind. Dementia was stealing from her a mind that had skipped third grade, graduated from university with honors, and over sixty years before, captured and held my dad’s heart.

  I returned home that evening and sat with the boys and Mike at our kitchen counter cluttered with an SAT study guide, a history textbook, and a double-cheese pizza that Manny had picked up on his way home from football practice. I quietly watched as the boys studied and ate, all the while wondering: Would anything in our lives ever be the same?

  Morning sonnet on a napkin.

  CHAPTER 4

  His Plan vs. Our Plan

  For three long years after the no-show beauty parlor day, her mind continued to disintegrate while the minds of all seven of us became increasingly concerned about how to help them. What was the answer? There had to be a plan. What we found was that there were plans. In fact, all too quickly, we learned of three separate plans: Dad’s, ours (the children), and God’s.

  Plan Number One: Dad’s plan. He would build them a fortress.

  Although he was not an architect, fear of the future and dementia’s swift progress, ignited my dad’s genius. He designed for them a retirement condominium, with special accommodations for Mom, located just one quarter-mile from my own home. As with everything in their lives together, this was typical of my father. He had an answer, and control of all things, for both of them. Or so he believed.

  His challenge at that time was how to stay together and out of nursing care. What he wanted was to build a fortress that would protect her against the disease closing in on them.

  And so he focused his energies.

  He loved working on his blueprints: one floor, walk-in bathtub, seated shower, motion lights along the baseboards of every room, and no steps for her to trip on when entering from the garage. He found the best prices for appliances that had emergency shut-off valves in case she forgot she had turned something on—the oven, stove top, coffee maker, toaster, or her Clairol electric curlers. The blueprint included no doors, just extra wide entrances separating the rooms in case her future included a wheelchair.

  My husband Michael and sons Manny and Marshal, then seventeen and fifteen, were awestruck by his remarkable brilliance and love for her. Dad wasn’t driving much by that time, so I would drive out to Rochester and pick them up to spend the weekend with us. The boys would return home sweaty and smelly from their Saturday mornings of football and wrestling practice, throw down their helmets, kick off their cleats, and take a seat at our island kitchen table. Once seated, Dad would share his progress on the drafts of his blueprints, complete with accuracy in measurements for buttresses, entrance-ways, and nautical wall hangings.

  “I’m building this for your grandmother. You can see where I raised the microwave from the lower oven to the top oven, because I use the microwave much more than the oven these days,” he proudly told his wide-eyed grandsons, knowing that what he had drawn with his own hands was work more associated with the drawings of a tenured architect.

  I was impressed, too, but not only because of his vision and architectural skills. I was used to that. Gee whiz, the man was an absolute genius. I was impressed with him because I realized that he was handling Mom’s dementia with his own expressions of love, whether the expressions were apparent to me and my siblings or not. I stopped being angry at him when I let myself accept that it was their love and their relationship. I began to understand “love languages”—the different ways people express love, and expressions that are counted and felt as love by the one receiving them. I no longer judged, but more often prayed that I could push my energies from being angry at his stubbornness, to appreciating the depth of how he loved her.

  These kitchen gatherings offered me a glimpse of what I saw as his higher level of love. He was willing to relocate to a new town, give up his community presence and friends, and start a new life with her in a new house, built especially for her. He was recognizing his own limitations and putting all efforts into protecting her from danger, and guarding them both against the threat of her removal. He was beginning to accept that she would eventually have to be in “a place” without him.

  Sadly, his plan wasn’t happening fast enough, and more importantly, his plan wasn’t part of a bigger plan, one that was evolving as his children acted with their own language of love. We needed to intervene sooner than the groundbreaking on his new home. All seven of us had learned well from him, so in the spirit of his legacy, we created a plan with a love for them both which was different and better.

  In November we held a family meeting and talked about the difficulty and pain of witnessing both of our parents experiencing different types of failing health. We all agreed that helping them was even more difficult than watching them struggle. Dad was in charge and didn’t want help. He only wanted solutions without anyone interfering with his plan. We all agreed that although he had created his own solution to build the condominium and relocate closer to me, we needed to change their situation immediately and not wait for the condo. Dad’s health was declining rapidly. The perfect storm was brewing with two very fragile parents living on their own. To make things even worse, Dad was becoming more and more defiant and resistant to any of us getting involved.

  He refused to have aides come in beyond his own visiting nurses. Four ulcerations had developed due to his multiple-heart related surgeries, including quadruple bypass, stent implants, pacemaker and defibrillator implant. A wound care specialists came weekly to bandage, cleanse and tend his venous ulcers. The ulcerations caused insufferable pain, and four to six times per day he swallowed narcotics—taking a dosage that today would put the prescribing physician in jail. Yet in my Father’s mind, as long as he could think, he could fight the pain; and as long as he could fight the pain, he would fight to keep and protect her.

  Plan Number Two: Our plan.

  None of us had been in these waters before. There was no rule book. We decided on a plan to help them and began to navigate the sea in the most loving way we knew how. We had to do it quickly.

  I called Dad three days prior to my arrival at their home. Mom rarely answered th
e phone anymore as dementia started to affect her speech articulation, and she sometimes couldn’t get out the word “hello.” As part of our family meeting, we had crafted a compelling story of how Mom needed the joy of being in the company of her grandsons, my boys, who knew of this plan as well. My bargaining tool with Dad was for me to take advantage of the most vulnerable part of his life—protecting his wife. And so the phone call took place.

  “Great news, Dad,” I said, “How about you and Mom come here for a quick vacation? Just for three or four months during the cold, so that I can help you take care of Mom.” I glanced at Marshal’s varsity wrestling match schedule on the wall knowing that this new plan of ours would limit how many of his matches I would be able to attend. “There’s an opening at a seasonal assisted living around the corner, and the boys and I can see Mom every day, just until the winter ends. Mom will love it. She and I can bake, and I can help her find a physical therapist to help her with her balance.” I paused and, hearing only silence, continued. “And while I take care of her, you can rest and take care of yourself and spend more time on your blueprints for your new house.”

  My hand was shaking as I held on to the phone. Of course, it was our intention to never let them return to their home, to keep them with us until well past the winter months, and I think he knew that. But hearing that I was not worried about him—which, of course, was far from true—that in fact, I was just worried about Mom, he conceded.

  I could feel and envision him, holding his head in his hands and hunching over, resigned to defeat, as he choked out the words, “OK, we’ll come,” he said, “but just for the winter, and I need to bring my treasures and ship models with me.”

  I had to deliberately choose words that didn’t sabotage his fortress plan and punch down his pride. It was far from easy because I was not being honest with him. Breathing slowly I said, “Just start labeling things for me to move that you absolutely can’t live without for the next three months.” I hung up the phone, shoved my own first-born child’s college applications out of the way, and broke into tears.