A link to ‘The Remember Balloons’ arrived from my sister the other day. It’s an enchanting animation that softens some, the sedate heartache of Alzheimer’s, and, along with it, dementia’s sad and sinking, drawn-out demise. Its arrival clearly coinciding with the anniversary of my father’s death from the dreaded duo, the differences between them, I’ve no mind to delineate.
He succumbed to them in his 80s; his sister, as well, in her 70s.
We had moved him into a long-term care facility about 10 years ago now. However, some impressive escape attempts led to a more secure ward, confining him further, and deeper within.
While travelling to St.Catharines for these grievous visits, one would surmise that a last meaningful conversation was imminent. There’s a TV ad, I recall with a shiver, that depicts a view of young children at play through a window, but, it’s blurred some by rain … closes slowly … then it’s finally quiet and still.
I’ve seen and heard the same.
He hadn’t spoken coherently to me for the better part of his final two years. There were fleeting flashes of recognition – maybe 5-to-10 seconds within a 45-minute visit, limited mostly to sporadic, sometimes chatty, incoherence. Strangely, however, he’d nod to my wife, “It’s hard on him,” meaning his demise; meaning me, but never in my presence.
On occasion, we brought our beagle, Arthur, whose quiet calm was therapeutic and immense, when that plumbed, via conversational probe, was paltry. With one hand stroking Arthur’s velvety-soft ears, his gaze fixated on the small, brass, nametag held in the other, I gently asked him, “What does it say?” I was rewarded with a sneering, “Arthur,” in sarcasm sufficient for six.
Again, beyond babble, he hadn’t spoken to me in two years.
That moment is perhaps conveyed best in that great final scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, wherein, the Indigenous giant, mute through the entire length of the movie, suddenly states, “No thanks,” when offered some gum.
As sad a saga as dementia is, it is not one without humour; far from it.
During one particularly arduous drive south through that morass that’s the GTA, I told myself no beers with Dad, till our errands are done. While I always looked forward to a couple of beers with him, and whatever conversation might come, the combination of that brain-numbing drive and the quaffing of a couple, would dull the pain some, but tended to fog my mind too.
As well, I was on assignment, … caregiver duty, relieving my beleaguered mother. And, here she was, backing her car out of the garage at high-speed, narrowly missing my truck. While simultaneously securing her seatbelt, she lowered her window for a quick “Good Luck!” and was gone.
I waved apprehensively, with my eyebrows up, as her car rounded the corner on two wheels to my left. Then, with the sensation of some wind, but more so, a sound “SWOOSH!” I instinctively ducked.
With a quick glance to my right, I caught sight of my father, alone in the front yard, or, so it seemed, for, there was an unearthly chaos and commotion, worthy of 10 men. On the lawn, a few feet from the front steps, he was at once bobbing and weaving, while twirling and spinning, all the while failing to corral a most expansive piece of glass that kept getting caught in the strong wind.
I crept-up cautiously trying to ascertain some sense of the precarious proceedings. I jumped over his scythe-like swings of the glass, but had to high-tail it back often, for the risk of decapitation when it got caught, propeller-like in the wind.
Way beyond bizarre, even when factoring in his condition, was the strange matter of his turning to shout to me every 30 seconds, “Would you like a beeeeer?!” throughout this 10 minutes of mayhem. 'Of course I would,' I thought to my terror-stricken self. In fact, I’d gladly have a dozen, but all I could manage was, “NO!” yelled back at him.
Finally, he tired, and with the wind subsiding, most of the dust settled. I slowly eased the pane from his grasp, and, thank God, the danger elapsed.
I told him firmly, “Go lie down. No, I don’t want a beer.” I then removed the real pane from the screen door, and hid it and the other – one that I may have borrowed from Marineland, way back when a teen – in the basement behind the furnace, where it had been, if I had so, since I was 16.
An hour later we were on our way to Port Colborne. Dad was an accomplished carver, and a farmer there had been supplying him with basswood for years.
Now, St. Catharines to Port Colborne, is about as straightforward as that zig-zag from Orillia to Owen Sound, though shorter. How bewildered I was, then, when Dad rhymed off a couple of quick turns, a brief flight on the 406, and a slick service-road slant. Voila! Main Street, Port Colborne, in a nifty 19 minutes.
I could only stammer, “WHOA, … Man, you really nailed that! Nice navigation. Now, where do we get the wood? My God, doesn’t he then turn to me, and in the utmost of innocence, calmly reply, … “What wood?”
I don’t think I had ever been as fond of him as in that moment. I glided along blankly for a block-and-a-half, then swerved sharply into a parking space in front of a tavern on the main drag. I suggested to him warmly, “How ‘bout that beer?”
In the late 60s, he taught me how to pronounce “Esposito”, ahead of Tony racking up 15 rookie shutouts in 1970, and brother Phil scoring 76 in 1971, rendering it “Smith-like,” and easy by ’72.
There were Junior ‘A’ Black Hawk games, with Marcel Dionne dominating at Garden City Arena, and, even a picture of Dad playing varsity hockey for Dalhousie-U, out east.
He liked it that one of his Exploits River hockey buddies from the 40s, in “Newfie,” he called it, made it to the NHL with the Red Wings in the 50s. Seventy years on, he gazed after his sister’s ashes flowing down that same river.
Too soon thereafter, he and I set out on another drive that I had been dreading, one from which I returned home without him. He thought we’d checked into a hotel, though it was a mere mile away.
“You can’t do that in a hotel,” he hissed with stern agitation, as I tried to maintain my balance standing on a soft, deeply-cushioned, high-back chair. With a hammer held awkwardly under my arm and a number of nails in my teeth, I managed to fend him off waving a painting, while hanging an assortment of the same, along with some pictures.
Moreover, it was hard to see, as it was now late and the lights had been dimmed, and, a headband would’ve helped, as the room’s ambient 88-Fahrenheit had me sweating profusely.
I rolled out a tiny carpet, stopping for a second to assess the reconfigured, cozy confines, then abruptly I left.
Returning the next morning, I founded him sitting on his bed, with his coat fully done up, shoes on, and ready to go. On his one side was his fully-packed suitcase; the other, a perfect pyramid of all the pictures and paintings I had hung. The room’s beautiful ‘institutional-blue’ walls were again barren and benign.
The ‘hotel’ turned out to be just fine. In one especially brilliant way, cold cans of beer and the Three Stooges was a banner Father's Day.
He’d accompany the nurses on routine room visits. Some had been his patients, whom he helped along to conception, thereafter, delivering the new lives to them, while his now waned before them. He was given a clipboard, a desk was moved into his room, they called him “Doc.” He produced proliferate notes, all in a size-6, exquisitely printed, English-alphabet-font.
However, a decipherable word, appeared not within the lot.
There were a few skirmishes at the ‘hotel’, sometimes he’d be snoring soundly in the wrong room. When in his own space, occasionally there’d be a picture of some other guy’s family on the table by his bed.
On the bulletin board in his ‘hotel room’, I pinned-up a PK Subban hockey card, telling Dad, “He’ll win the Norris,” though when he did, Dad was oblivious.
Soon enough, Dad’s physical deterioration narrowed the long-held lead of his neurological lapse. A call came with notice as per “a matter of days.” The next morning, hourly, was the manner of, “You’d better come.”
I had determined to opt for warmer memories and invigorating images, and, as such, I declined, deferring the sad day’s spectacle to my sister. His last breaths were choked and discomforting with mean gasping, and gagging, with a gurgling, good mess.
So, I was told.
Still, timeless and vast – not unlike that of the river – is the solemnity that emanates from a peaceful picture, captured moments before. The weathered old surgeon’s hand – that fine implement-for-outlet from the wide margins of his finer, Picasso-like mind, intertwined with the hand of his daughter, but not that of his son; he, having failed to factor in the perspective of his father, for the blurred focus of his own.
Apparently, that’s a ‘remember balloon;’ one I’d sooner forget.
John Epstein is a former, 25-year Orillia business owner who left southern Ontario for the north years ago, and has never been back. He is now a freelance writer, whose column appears monthly in OrilliaMatters. He can be reached at [email protected]
