I’d like to blame the thick New Orleans heat for my recent silence but that’s not why my fingers have stopped typing. Nor is it the Virus or even my obsession with the current political battle for America’s soul, although they are troubling realities.  My malaise, while similar to what so many others are suffering these days, is less a reaction to current events and more a reflection of life with Ralph and the drip drip drip accumulation of Alzheimer’s impairment.

Hard to believe, but Ralph was officially diagnosed over seven years ago, in 2013, and, as my daughter recently pointed out, we had begun noticing lapses when she was a freshman in college three years earlier. So Ralph is already passing the ten-year mark usually held up as a fatal marker on the Alzheimer’s spectrum. And by Alzheimer’s standards he is doing remarkably well in all the ways I’ve described here so many times:

The short and long term memory problems with which he was originally diagnosed continue but are only incrementally worse. Now the repeated three or four discussions center around the tools he wants to get back from the farm (not possible), around whether our older dog Zeus is too thin, around where are savings are invested and if they are safe. He still comes across charming to strangers, not that he’s interacting with strangers or anyone else these days. 

But there is something else going on, and I no longer believe strangers would miss noticing he has impairment. There is, if not a slight vacancy, a mental hesitation in his reactions. A disconnect between what I say to him and what he hears.

Trying to articulate Ralph’s current condition to a friend recently, I found myself stating that he has increasing difficulty “retaining information” which is different than his memory problems. I am not sure what I meant exactly in the moment but in intuitively it felt correct. Maybe retaining is not quite it either; maybe the problem is “intake of information.” What I have noticed is that when I make what seems to me a simple statement, he has sometimes has trouble taking in the meaning. He looks at me as if he can’t hear what I am saying—I have considered whether he has a hearing problem and plan to get him checked when it is viable although he seems to hear quite well. If I repeat myself more slowly I can almost see him struggling to get his head around the meaning. But the problem is that I tend to put too many ideas in a sentence. 

I.e.: 

This morning I said we had a doctor’s appoint with our new neurologist here and that it would be over the phone. 

“I have a new doctor? Who was my old doctor?” (straightforward memory issue).  

“Stephanie at Emory in Atlanta, but we’ve had to find a new doctor since we’ve moved.”

“So are we going to Emory today.” (not only memory but also comprehension confusion)

Or yesterday, I was on the computer he started asking me questions about his farm tools. 

“I can’t really talk now, I’m doing Shipt.”

“What do you mean Shipt?”

“I’m doing a grocery order through Shipt because I realized we’re about to run out of milk.”

He looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. Shipt? I should have thought before I spoke because I had thrown three concepts at him, at least two concepts too many. Not only does he not remember why I don’t grocery shop in person these days and becomes anxious when I remind him about Covid (Am I going to get it? is his usual, understandable refrain?) but he has not noticed that our life has been altered by the virus, and he cannot grasp the concept or the steps involved in using a delivery service. 

All I should have said was that I was making a grocery list. He doesn’t notice that the groceries come to the front door or that I go through a cleaning process. All he notices is whether there is milk, bread, peanut butter and beer.

These are tiny examples; the moments of disconnect are always tiny, and often much more subtle. But there are so many of them, each annoying and heartbreaking in equal measure.