Update for June
No pretty writing, just a basic update on the state of things around here.
I no longer post often for the simple reason that currently, every day is much the same. Gabe is bored out of his mind and yet in this one-horse town I have zero ideas of how to entertain him…or myself, for that matter.
Every day when we wake up, Gabe is already awake but I think he has now realized that it’s no use wandering the house looking for us at 5AM or whenever he gets up. He’s always in his room. He spends less time on Facebook since we changed his settings. All the change should mean is that he isn’t able to post publicly and embarrass himself, but for whatever reason it has led to less engagement generally.
I found puzzles with 100 pieces at Dollar Tree and bought him a bunch. He can work on one puzzle for days, but eventually he gets them done. The trouble is that he wants to keep them all put together so he’s running out of room.
He works on model cars or planes occasionally, but he never seems to quite get the final details done. Most recently he took a notion to sit right outside our front door and paint a black model, which as you can guess, wound up with him getting black paint on the white concrete walkway of our new house. (We really thought he knew better than to paint there because he’s always done it on grass before, taking a big piece of cardboard with him. But dementia will surprise you.) Mark and I were so annoyed our heads nearly exploded, but we didn’t say a single word about it to Gabe because he was already so upset with himself.
We haven’t seen a lot of outright crazy behavior lately, but there was one incident. Our son Brady always delivers Gabe’s nightime medicines to his bedroom along with a snack. One night he got the stuff prepared and we could tell Gabe had fallen asleep because we heard Brady gently saying, “Granddaddy…. I have your pills,” several times. We weren’t sure what was going on inside the room but eventually there was an increase in volume (remember Gabe is very hard of hearing and didn’t have his hearing aids in) and Brady saying, “TAKE THE PILLS! OPEN YOUR MOUTH AND SWALLOW YOUR PILLS!” over and over again, until he finally stalked out of the room in frustration and told us to handle it.
It was strange. Gabe was awake, it wasn’t dark, and the TV was on, but somehow he just wouldn’t respond. He wasn’t upset, and he kept looking into the cup where the pills were, but it was like he didn’t see them or had no idea what we meant. Eventually he took the pills and we said goodnight and left. I don’t know what all that was about, but historically we’ve seen some problems with waking him up once he’s dozed off. I gather that’s pretty common.
Gabe has stopped hugging me, and I am glad. It had gotten to be a bit much. Every time he wanted to talk to me about something, usually unneccessary thank-yous for “looking after him,” he started wanting to grasp me and hug me. I wasn’t a fan and would wriggle away as soon as I could. Maybe he sensed that. I’m still willing to give him a lil’ squeeze on occasion, but physical contact on a daily basis is not on the menu.
One thing we deal with often lately is a lot of over-apologizing. For instance, last night. It was a lazy Sunday and we were lax about getting any dinner started. Eventually decided to order delivery, which had things running about 30 minutes late. When food was on the table, I went to call Gabe and found him watching TV in his bed. At 5:30. He doesn’t sit or lie on his bed as a rule; if he’s in it, he has retired for the day.
I told him food was there and asked if he wanted to come eat, and he replied that he really didn’t. Brady had prepared a rather heavy snack of homemade ham and cheese rolls around 3:00, so I thought it very plausible that he was just not hungry. I said OK and went to take my place at the table.
Five or ten minutes pass. Gabe’s TV goes off. He comes into the kitchen and explains again that he just wasn’t hungry. We shrug and say “Fine.” But I can tell he is nervous. He’s afraid he’s done something wrong. (It’s not like we punish him or yell at him, I swear! He just lives in fear of causing offense, apparently.) So a few minutes later he comes back, gives the same speech, but adds that he is sorry and will “make it up” to us, sometime. Mark stayed out of it, but Brady and I both did several rounds of telling Gabe that was fine, it was totally up to him if he wanted to eat or not, and there was nothing to apologize for. I don’t think we convinced him, but he did finally retreat. Which is lucky, because if we had been forced to say it a few more times at a little higher volume, then we would be branching into “Now, don’t get upset with me,” territory.
Which is the WORST, in terms of caregiver frustration. Jeez. This last round actually took me back some 40-odd years in my past to an old boyfriend of mine who apparently thought that “pleasant” was the only way I should ever look or feel, and I remember how much THAT used to piss me off. It also reminded me of the final weeks of Gabe’s late wife Carol and how he tortured the hell out of her until she would call us to come and intervene, and he would admonish her not to get upset.
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But with Gabe recently, we generally are not upset until he plays that card, and THEN we get irritated. Here’s another recent example. Gabe and Brady share a bathroom. For some unknown reason, Gabe thinks that he is supposed to wait until after Brady takes a shower (which might be noon or might be 2:00 PM, who knows?) to take one himself. He has been told many times that he can waltz into the bathroom anytime he wishes, but he doesn’t take that to heart.
The other day, Gabe actually HAD taken the first shower. Just as he was exiting, Brady emerged from his room. Gabe immediately starts falling all over himself apologizing to this unemployed kid of ours, saying, “Im sorry, I didn’t mean to jump in front of you, I thought you’d already taken a shower, “ etc. It is very nice and considerate, but so unnecessary that it becomes annoying.
Brady repeated once again that Gabe does NOT have to wait for him to finish, that he is free to take a shower whenever he chooses. Unfortunately this triggered the dreaded, “Don’t be upset with me,” and when Brady protested that he was NOT upset, he simply wanted Gabe to understand, things devolved into the even more dreaded, “I love you, I’ve always loved you, “ blah blah blah, add some crying for effect.
I know I sound mean right now. But damn, that stuff gets old.
One last thing I want to record since I may not post again for a good while: Mark and I are spending a lot of time in our home office lately because we are both working on book manuscripts. If I’m in there, Gabe will limit his visits, but Lord bless Mark if Gabe catches him alone.
He just wants to talk to him, we know that. He’s lonely and wants to talk. So please don’t think that we display to HIM how maddening it is. We don’t. Mark, professional nice guy of America, especially doesn’t. But it usually goes like this:
- Gabe remarks on either the state of our grass, our fence, or our in-progress pool. Mark agrees that yes, the grass is looking green, the fence looks good, etc.
- Gabe follows up with inquiries about his own (former) residence. Do we have a buyer? Yes. Do you think he’s serious? YES, he is under contract. And how much did we get for it again? Mark tells him. Gabe says Wow. That’s good, isn’t it? Depending on his mood he may ask more detailed questions, but he doesn’t understand anything about the escrow process or how the buyer’s VA loan is delaying everything, so there’s no sense trying to explain it.
- He often throws in a speech about all the hard work Mark has done, which he has, but it’s almost like Gabe thinks Mark personally built the house we live in now. He goes into what a good man Mark is and how proud he is of him, and then how proud he is of the grandkids and all the details about that. Very lovely but insanely repetitive.
- Then he’ll segue into how he hated to sell his old house but he didn’t need it, and on into a lot of imaginary things that Carol would have thought or felt if she were still with us and welp, there we go, down into the crying and reminiscing that would have been quite appropriate at her funeral but has gotten a bit stale over the last year.
This is about when Mark texts me and says something like, “Get your ass in here and help me,” because he just can’t listen to it another time.
The problem is that we feel this is not a natural sort of crying, but that Gabe intentionally WORKS HIMSELF UP into a crying jag. For attention, we suppose? To alleviate his boredom? Whatever.
We all spend too much time trapped in this house, in this town where there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. I’ll be glad when the damn pool is finished so Gabe can at least sit outside in the yard, even though I know we will hear eleven million repetitions of “I never dreamed of having a pool.” I’m planning to get him some other stuff, too, like a cornhole game, or horseshoes or croquet. Something he can do outdoors.
I wish I had more ideas to entertain him, but I don’t.
