When The Mind Takes An Unannounced Vacation

A good friend is having to care for her mother who in addition to a stroke is now suffering dementia. I speak to her every morning and my heart goes out to her as she recounts the previous evening’s events. Fortunate to have parents that are very young, I have not idea what it feels like to care for one of them. What her stories have brought to mind however is memories of my grandfather when dementia settled inside his head like an unwelcome visitor. One who moves all of your furniture and places things out of reach where no amount of searching yields the desired object.

Before we knew Parkinson Disease was taking a neurological toll, we assumed he had gone a little nuts. Common variety craziness is what we thought. He had other thoughts. For a long time he was convinced of the knowledge that the FBI was after him. His crime? Transporting a typewriter over state lines. You didn’t know it was a illegal did you? It’s not. The trash men? My father sent them to spy on him. Why? Not sure since my parents had been divorced for nine years at this point. The smoke detectors in his apartment? Listening devices. He would call the apartment manager to ask that she do something about the residents upstairs who were so obviously spies sent to listen in on his conversations via the smoke detectors.

The first time Carrie met him he showed her his emergency kit. He kept it nearby in the event he had to flee at a moments notice. Inside were the essentials; clean underwear, clean socks and lottery tickets. Yep! He was going to run away from home with nothing but underwear, socks and lottery tickets.

Eventually it became clear that he could not live alone so my mother moved him in with her. She would wake up to him crawling in the dark into her room to let her know “they were out there”. A few times he actually got out the front door before she woke up and convinced him to come back inside to safety. We laugh about it now. Not because it wasn’t serious but because sometimes life throws stuff your way you can’t do a damn thing about. It sucks and you find yourself mourning a person who is living and breathing right in front of you but you know it’s not really them. What was that line in Steel Magnolias? Laughter through tears.