The Missing Watch
Just try saying “It’ll turn up” to someone with dementia
Gabe misplaced his watch today.
Gabe, my father-in-law, has dementia and lives with our family. If you were to look back to my earlier post entitled “When My In-Laws Moved In,” you’d find the story of how Gabe injured himself by falling off a ladder as he attempted to climb onto the roof of his old house.
What I didn’t go into at the time, for the sake of brevity, was why he was trying to get onto the roof. Well, he was looking for his car keys. I’ll let you digest that for a moment.
That was such a chaotic time in general. Gabe’s wife Carol was extremely ill, so my husband, our two grown kids, and I were taking shifts at their house, caring for her, while a confused and hostile Gabe made life miserable for us all. One of his fixations at the time was the need to start both of their vehicles (neither of which anybody was driving anymore) at least once a week, to keep the batteries alive. After one of these sessions, he realized he had misplaced the keys, and God help us all.
Again I’d like to stress that nobody needed either of these vehicles, but Gabe nearly lost his mind and made us all lose ours, looking for these keys. After a couple of days of relentless searching, he decided that maybe he had lost them while cleaning out the gutters one day, so he was attempting to get on the roof and look for them when he fell and broke his shoulder. (Spoiler alert, the keys turned up much later, during the estate sale. They were hidden under something in his tool room behind the carport.)
So today he misplaced his watch. Here’s how it happened: husband Mark and I were in the pool. Gabe came out the back door in his swim trunks and was about to get in with us when he noticed he needed to remove his watch. I observed him for a minute as he tried to decide where to set it down. He considered the grill at first, but then eventually put it (I think) on a table.
When we finished swimming, Mark and I came inside first. Gabe remained outside for the moment, sitting on a lounge chair to dry off in the sun. Somehow, by the time he was back inside and dressed, the watch had gotten lost. I thought I’d go right to it outside, but it wasn’t there, and I haven’t spotted it in the house yet, either.
And if you know me even a little by now, you know exactly how worried I am about it. (Not at all.) I looked around a bit, (as did Mark and son Brady) didn’t see it, shrugged and said, “Oh well, we know it’s around here somewhere. It’ll turn up.”
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This does not set well with Gabe’s brain. He continued turning the house upside down, even going out the front door and searching parts of the yard where we know he had not been, in a desperate attempt to locate this watch. It’s not super valuable. Plus, he has another watch. But what upsets him so is the fact that he lost it. To him, it indicates something about his mental capability that he doesn’t like to be faced with.
He stopped by our office door, almost in tears, apologizing to Mark (who is no more worried than I am) and bemoaning the fact that he’s old, “stupid,” “useless,” and can’t keep up with anything. All this kept up until we were able to distract him with dinner.
I’m sure we’ll run across the watch tomorrow.
Meanwhile, just for the sake of keeping an account of how things are going around here, I have to mention that it seems Mark’s patience with Gabe is at a low ebb recently. And I’m not judging, nor do I think anybody should. Heck, let me be honest before I talk about Mark and tell you that I lost patience with Gabe myself recently, in a particularly unbecoming way.
Pregnant daughter Beth and her husband were visiting, and we’d all been out to a pizza place. Upon arriving home (as often happens) Gabe senses the party is going to break up soon and gets emotional. He came up to me, wanting to hug me and thank me for all we do for him (his words), and cry. And it just hit me wrong at the moment. I was already a bit on edge about a totally unrelated matter, and I did not deal gracefully with what I feel is a rather tired routine. Instead of petting and comforting him, I said something more along the lines of a slice of pizza being nothing to go to pieces over. Rude, I know. I apologized a little later, but there you go. I’m not a saint.
Mark, on the other hand, is not likely to snap and say too much — he’s more apt to just stop talking. Lately he is increasingly tired of the constant, “Huh? Huh?” that is a part of every conversation with hard-of-hearing Gabe. Mark likes to make little jokes and off-the-cuff remarks, and these invariably go over Gabe’s head and have to be repeated, so I see that Mark is trying to train himself to just talk less. Sometimes, I can tell that Gabe notices the lack of engagement.
Today, before the watch incident, Mark had brought up some of our concerns and questions about what the nature of his parents’ marriage had actually been like. We will never know, but because of things we’ve witnessed and heard, we often wonder if his mother’s whole life revolved around sacrificing everything else on the altar of keeping Gabe content…no matter how unreasonable Gabe may have sometimes been. Mark said that when he starts thinking about such things, he feels somewhat less sympathy for Gabe’s current situation.
I get that. But I secretly wonder if what’s actually happening is that he is avoiding Gabe because in all honesty it’s not very enjoyable to hang out with Gabe, and rather than just admitting that, Mark may be using Gabe’s past sins as an excuse, to assuage any guilt he might feel for avoiding his father.
Which in turn makes me think about our marriage. Mark would have you believe that all his questionable/nefarious dealings with other women were the result of me being “mean” to him. That’s what he tells himself, and them, and me. But what if the truth is that he cheated because he just plain wanted to and found opportunities, and the whole “you weren’t nice to me” is a handy retroactive way to excuse himself? The older I get, the more I realize how many things in my own life I will never truly understand.
If I were a super talented writer, I would now find some way to link this last part back to Gabe’s lost watch, with some kind of a crackerjack metaphor to illuminate the deeper meaning of everything. Ok, how about…I wish all the time we lost in this marriage, all the years of misunderstanding each other, could be fixed as easily as finding Gabe’s watch is going to be. I wish I would just be making the bed or emptying a wastebasket and suddenly locate the answer that was hiding just out of sight, and go “A-HA! NOW I finally understand what went wrong in our relationship. Now I’m finally on solid ground as to how things are between us, even today.”
But I don’t think it’ll ever be that easy.
