Tag Archives: Alzheimer’s transition moments

From Memoryland to Babyland Part 2

Caregiver/Spouse Issues, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

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It has been over six weeks since I last posted, a long stretch given I usually post at least once a week. I have spent most of that time, ever since BabyRalph’s birth, in New Orleans helping my daughter and her growing family. Basically, I have been embroiled in Grandbaby Land, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else in my life.

Including Ralph.

I write those two words nervously aware that you may be judging me as a bad wife for leaving Ralph in the breach. Or maybe I am projecting my own nervous guilt? A little of both I suppose.

But the funny thing is that Ralph is thriving in my absence.

I didn’t make the decision to be in New Orleans  lightly but I can’t say I hesitated. There were some rocky health moments in the first couple of weeks of BabyRalph’s life, and while he is fine now, he has demanded a little extra care. My daughter asked me to be there as much as possible to help. Ralph and I discussed it, and he was surprisingly comfortable, even encouraging, at least in the abstract. So after our initial visit, I drove him home to the farm and spent a few days organizing his life to work without me for the next ten days before driving out the driveway without him.

I called in favors from friends to set up a schedule of visits so that someone would be dropping by literally every day, whether to take him out to dinner or to chat for a few minutes and make sure he was okay. I set up his pillboxes. I bought and cooked frozen pizza, a roast chicken, and other favorite prepared foods.

Most important I made a new form of checklist for him: a linear calendar with times and activities spelled out in detail and a space for him to check X once he completed a given activity. Every day he was to X when he took his pills, when he fed the dogs, when he ate lunch, when he ate dinner (with menu suggestions spelled out), when Francis or Debbie or Kay etc. visited.

Ralph has always loved lists and calendars. When he ran his business, he swore by his calendar keeping and had all his employees keep detailed calendars as well. Now that his sense of time is shot—he can read a clock but has no sense of days, dates or the passage of time hourly or daily—we keep both a calendar book and an eraser board calendar for reference. (He does not use a computer or smart phone.) But this new checklist, which I taped to the kitchen counter, has been a revelation. He loves it and takes pride in checking off. The irony is that the only time he has missed taking his pills in the last two months was a Saturday when I was at home with him so didn’t have the check off list in action.

As for my presence, basically I have been gone for a week to ten days at a time, then home for two to four days, then gone again. While I am in New Orleans, I call Ralph in the morning to make sure he gets up, then every three hours or so throughout the day. And of course he calls me occasionally, although not as often as you’d think, usually when something has sparked him into a loop and he wants to discuss it over and over on the phone, just as he would if we were together at home.

But really he doesn’t seem very needy because he is suddenly Mr. Social, enjoying the company of my woman friends, “the Girls” or “my girlfriends” as he calls them, who sit with him during his late afternoons on the porch and sometimes drag him out to dinner. The woman who has cleaned my house for twenty years comes by twice a week (refusing to take money for the extra visits so we have arranged a barter) to make sure he has everything he needs. Everyone who comes, knows to check the pill box just in case and to make sure there are never more than a few beers in the fridge as well as where to hide the extras.

More important, so far everyone has let me know that Ralph seems to be not only holding his own, but in great spirits. Of course I worry, am I being selfish.

As a wife I should want to be with Ralph more than with anyone else. But the truth, and it is not easy to face or state, is that I can’t say I have missed Ralph as much as I think I should (of those shoulds!). This time with BabyRalph and family—filled with three-hours-of-sleep nights, endless laundry and washing of baby bottles and pumping implements, constant carpooling of a social butterfly thirteen-year-old adapting to having a tiny half-brother, and all the extenuating tensions of a life-changing event—has been a kind of vacation from my usual responsibility. I know Ralph may be less able to handle my absence going forward so I am taking advantage of the opportunity.

But I find myself wondering more and more how I am going to give up spending so much time with BabyRalph and how I can finagle Ralph into spending more time down here too. This is the crux of so much. As a married couple, the decisions of where to live and how to spend out time should be joint decisions. But I know we cannot live indefinitely the way we do now, on a farm that leaves us somewhat isolated and that Ralph can no longer keep up on his own. BabyRalph’s birth has thrown a spotlight on the need to make a decision sooner than later, but also on how complicated and difficult that decision and the ensuing changes will be…

Ralph, Captain Emiritus–An Alzheimer’s Transition Moment

Caregiver/Spouse Issues, , , , , ,

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For as long as I’ve known him, Ralph’s love of  boats and boating pretty much summed up his identity:

A lover of the outdoors.    A sportsman who preferred active participation in physical activity to watching from his couch.     A competitor who found competing against himself (or a fish) as rewarding as competing against others.    A problem-solver whose knack for fixing  machinery matched his love of tinker.    A perfectionist who kept his gear shipshape.    A leader who reveled in being captain of his crew.

Early in our marriage, as soon as he had a little extra spending money, Ralph bought his first boat, a small daysailer. I was never a boater and I remember at least one miserable ride in the early days of my first pregnancy. Then he traded up for a racing sailboat he named HARD RAIN after the Dylan song—apropos since every time I was dragged onboard, not often,  a storm showed up too.  For years Ralph sailed almost every weekend, frequently both Saturday and Sunday, with my close friends as his crew, while I stayed home with our toddler(s); if you think you catch a whiff of  lingering resentment on my part, you might be right. But boy, Ralph enjoyed himself. He always came home whistling with a story to a tell

Nevertheless, around the time we moved to the farm, he sold the sailboat–a matter of distance and weekend farm chores. But in the early nineties we started spending time on the Forgotten Coast, that still unspoiled stretch of Northwest Florida . Ralph being Ralph, we soon owned a lot with a house trailer near a boat ramp. Ralph bought a used skiff with a motor that seemed to die a lot, at least when I was around. I hated that boat. Then he found his beloved Paper Moon, a boat he could maneuver in both shallow streams and the sometimes rough waves of Apalachicola Bay. We moved to a piece of land with a dock on the bay and a garage apartment, but no actual house. By then Ralph and some pals had formed a Fishing Club that met for frequent “tournaments” although active participation dwindled over time to mainly Ralph and his even more obsessive first mate The–Other-Ralph.

Then our daughter introduced us to the new man in her life. Ralph, ever distrustful of her various would-be suitors, accepted this one immediately for a simple reason: he was a serious fisherman, a fly fisherman no less. Fly Fisherman also hit it off with The-Other-Ralph.  The three started fishing together and Fly Fisherman willingly took on more and more responsibility for the less fun tasks like prepping the boat, organizing the lunch, and cleaning afterwards.

Over the last few years Ralph, who used to stay out on the water for ten hours straight whatever the weather, began coming home for lunch after a couple of hours, then finding reasons not to go back out in the afternoon with the others. By last spring when The-Other-Ralph’s family and ours gathered for a week of beach and boat, my Ralph found reasons not to fish at all—the heat was bothering him, he had a stomachache. Fly Fisherman ended up taking The-Other-Ralph and his family members out on the boat without Ralph. Afterwards Fly Fisherman cleaned and made repairs as well.

Since then Ralph has not stepped foot on the boat. When I suggested trips to Apalachicola he was less than enthusiastic. We’d get down there and he might cast his line from the dock but he would avoid even visiting the garage where the boat is stored. On a visit last fall, my daughter was dismayed to find the garage in disrepair with mouse droppings and nibbles on the seats.

Ralph’s boating days were clearly over. Still, if he could not quite admit that the boat had become a responsibility he didn’t need and could not longer handle, I wasn’t going to force the issue. And the idea of selling such an essential part of Ralph’s identity was an anathema. (Also daunting since I’d be the one in charge.) So what to do?

With Ralph, The-Other-Ralph and Fly Fisherman about to have milestone birthdays, although thirty years apart, my daughter had a suggestion.

Ralph looked at me askance when I mentioned the possible birthday present. “What if I want to use it?”

“You’ll get Fly Fisherman to take you out.”

The more we talked it over—and believe me we talked it over many times a day, often repeating the same exact sentences—the more Ralph liked the idea. No, loved the idea. Once our two sons, who have no interest in boats, and The-Other-Ralph gave their enthusiastic blessing, Ralph became gleefully obsessed with giving the boat to Fly Fisherman.

Here was his out–a  way to acknowledge his loss of interest, not to mention stamina and capability,  without losing dignity. He embraced as his own choice the possibility of keeping Paper Moon in the family while handing over the actual responsibility. He told everyone that he’d decided to give the boat to Fly Fisherman. The problem became making sure Ralph didn’t spill the beans about what we wanted to be a birthday surprise, but somehow the word did not get back to Fly Fisherman.

Last week, Ralph sent a birthday card to Fly Fisherman with a photograph of  Paper Moon on the cover and a short, funny note inside  i explaining n his own words that he was turning over the enclosed boat title.

He signed it, then had a thought and added a PS.

“I still expect to be addressed as Captain when aboard.”

I breathed a sigh of relief both for the smooth transition and the proof that Ralph was still Ralph.