Visiting Parents
My father has Alzeimer’s disease, and my Mother’s Day present to my mother is to spend some time visiting them at their retirement community so that I can care for him while she does other things for a few days. I did this once before, for a week, when she visited my brother in Florida, and I didn’t find it nearly as hard as my mother had led me to believe it would be. In fact, it was easy. My father is at the stage where he asks a question, and you answer it, and two minutes later he asks the same question, and you answer it again, and two minutes later, he asks the same question. But I’m patient, and I just answer the question each time it’s asked. And it does seem to me that information sinks in; it just takes lots of repetition for it to do so. I remember once in the car he asked my mother what they were doing that day, and she told him they were going to see the doctor (for what purpose, I don’t remember, but she included that information in her answer to his question). Two minutes later, he again asked what they were doing that day, and again she told him they were going to see the doctor and why. Two minutes later he asked her not what they were going to do that day, but rather why they were going to see the doctor. And he doesn’t ask the same question over and over all day long; he asks it two or three times.
Anyway, I’m patient, and it doesn’t particularly bother me to have to repeat my answers, or to ask him a couple of times if he has enough shampoo while he’s showering (so as to jog his memory and make sure he uses the shampoo). But then, he’s not my spouse of over fifty years.
I’ve brought along a few books I’m reading: an Erma Bombeck book I bought my mother for her upcoming birthday and want to finish before giving to her; the philosopher Paul Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, which I’ll be commenting on in the philosophy section of this blog; Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which I recently stumbled upon in the local library; and The Encyclopedia of Chess Middlegames: Combinations, a great book filled with chess problems and solutions. I didn’t bring The Poincaré Conjecture, about the shape of the universe, or the Samuel Reshevsky chess book I just bought but whose title I forget. I hope to get some reading done while I’m here, but there’s a computer here, and I tend to lose a lot of time reading and writing online!
July 22nd, 2008 at 11:34 pm
computer encyclopediaVisiting Parents