Visiting Day

Any day we visit Dad is a difficult thing. I WISH I could say that I go with a happy heart, and return with joy, but that it the direct opposite. The trip depresses me so much that I am a coward and make someone go with me. My poor daughter is usually the one who is elected.

Seeing my father is the worse part of the experience because he is no longer the man I remember as my father. This horrible disease has turned him into a person who is incontinent and drools constantly. He cannot form phrases because the words escape him. He will parrot, but that's about it. It helps to have someone with me because then he can sit and listen.

The other part of the trip that is so terrible is watching the others. We have been there so long. I have watched them deteriorate, die or simply disappear. There are still two who have been there longer than my dad. They are both women. One was becoming violent, but you can tell she has been medicated.

Looking around the unit, it would seem that many of these souls could continue much longer, but they do. They languish daily. Some are in wheel chairs; some just slump in chairs. There are the few that just wander, and then there are those who "talk" to you making no sense at all.

R is one of those people. She was there when my dad and step mother got there. Her husband was in the assisted living section and R was in the Memory Support Unit (locked unit). I didn't know that at the beginning. When I would arrive, R and her husband would be in the rocking chairs out on the front porch or just in the lounge area. They were such a smart looking couple. They were meticulously groomed.

Suddenly, I noted that R was in MSU and her husband was no where around. I met her son in a family support group where he explained that his father had a stroke before coming to the center. He was left without the ability to speak. Since she had dementia, they had to be moved. He died sometime after V. I haven't seen her son in quite sometime.

R would slouch in chairs, moaning and crying. She was no longer groomed. At one point I really believed she would die soon. She had a wound on her leg that would not heal, and she developed a serious edema in that leg. That wound healed, but R continued to mentally deteriorate. Once she did come out of her dementia when she focused on my grandson.

Funny how little children bring the patients about sometime. If it can bring them back to the "surface" of their memories, they want to talk to the children. They seem to return to the better times, even if it's only for a few minutes. Then they slip back into the void.

The real point of this post is that someone in the unit died. The staff is pretty closed mouth about it. I don't know if it was R or J. I haven't seen either of them for two weeks. I'll have to walk close to the rooms to check names. Death in that place is really not sad. These folks have already "died;" their bodies just don't know it yet.