The Friggin' Angel Gabriel

Pants's parents are in town for a week long visit. Right now, his mother snores with blessed regularity on our living room couch (she's not had a break from being a full time caretaker in weeks), his dad is flipping through an Adventure magazine, Pants is tearing over Death Valley at 400 knots, and Abby is twitching her paws in dream-sleep at my feet. My epic job search has entered a twilight period where one offer is in the works and another languishes in the realm of possibility. Things are quietly waiting for change.

I haven't written much about it before because the experience hardly seems mine to talk about, but Pants's father is in the later stages of Alzheimer's disease. He's recently moved into an assisted living unit, but Pants's mother and brother and sister-in-law visit him regularly and take him out to go swimming and take day trips with the family and his two small grandsons.

State-hopping with the military has been especially frustrating for me because Pants and I are separated from this loop and often powerless to help when things get overwhelming. Pants's mother is directly descended from iron-willed plainswomen, the kind who will reach fearlessly into the womb of a bellowing cow in labor to untangle the calf, and getting her to admit that working full-time as a public school teacher and a caretaker for Pants's father has been an epic struggle. When I ask her on the phone how things are going, she says, "Oh, fine!" in a strident tone that makes me believe they are anything but. The assisted living arrangement has seemed a blessing all around, but it's been long in coming and has required several tipping points.

Luckily, there is Gabe. Gabe is an 8-year-old cocker spaniel who is Pants's father's best friend and constant companion. As the disease has advanced and the concept of time has fallen away, Gabe has been the one rock solid constant whose presence is reliably uncomplicated. He has been allowed to move into the assisted living facility, and when Pants's father occasionally becomes confused or upset, turning the conversation to Gabe seems to set the world right again.

If only we were all so fond of Gabe.

The cocker spaniel is a mysterious breed. They look so loving and innocent with their huge, wet eyes and their curly, mud-flap ears. But every cocker spaniel I've known has been completely immune to any concept of discipline or reason, and Gabe is no exception. His penchant for overturning trashcans and spreading their contents throughout the house has led Pants's folks to purchase large, industrial metal canisters for their home, the kind you'd imagine for biohazard facilities. Gabe also has a charming habit of urinating all over the feet of visitors, charging at the door with one long scream-bark whenever the doorbell sounds, and leaping back up on to the couch with maddening persistence after being pushed off repeatedly and told "no." His hunger is insatiable, the tragic result of some thyroid malfunction, and anything mildly edible, even if stored on high shelves or tabletops or meant for another pet unlucky enough to share space with Gabe, is in danger. Finally, he's rather blase about appropriate places to relieve himself, as he enjoys full diplomatic immunity from Pants's father, who defends Gabe's every transgression with unfailing filial allegiance.

It feels almost sacrosanct to badmouth this dog, but it's a favorite topic among Pants and I and his brother and sister-in-law. We do it with great creativity and profanity, and usually dissolve into near hysterical giggles with imitations. It's almost as if in skewering Gabe and the domestic chaos he wreaks we can vent a few of our frustrations about the ravages of Alzheimer's and the helplessness we all feel in the face of it.

Gabe has been an especially painful issue this week since he wasn't allowed to make the plane trip out to California. I'm still unclear whether this was because of the cost associated with shipping him or because, in his habit of focusing on annoyances that are not the main issue, Pants vetoed his presence, and I suspect the reason may be a combination of the two. Whatever is was, I spent the week prior to the visit worrying that a Gabe-less week in a totally foreign city would deeply upset Pants's father, and at least the first two days seemed to have borne this out, but yesterday was a little better. The explanation of temporary situations and distances and vacations and "next week" didn't seem to convince Pants's father that Gabe was neither dead nor had he been taken away for good. At first he constructed sad narratives about the course of Gabe's life and his gentle personality and the tragedy of his death, and when I tried repeatedly to correct this story alone with him in the local Starbucks, Pants's father broke down into tears and said, "Bless you, if only that were true." It was almost too much for me, but I figured that if I broke down into tears too, that would only undermine my story about Gabe's being alive but in another state.

The local flower nursery failed as a distraction. Pants's father is an avid gardener and usually enjoys showing me all of his plants and their blossoms, even occasionally plucking some off their stems and putting them in my hair, which makes us both laugh, but our local nursery owner has an apparently limitless pack of dogs, and they sleep quietly in the shadows of the tomato vines and citrus bushes for sale. Soon the flowers lost all attraction and he paced the aisles quickly whistling and patting his leg for Gabe.

I don't often have to handle Pants's father on my own these days. It's a tag team activity for anyone but his mother, whose presence he automatically takes as evidence that things are OK. My fondest hope for this visit, though, has been to give his mom some time to herself to rest, but it's been hard. Not helping things at all is Pants's flight schedule, which has allowed an iron-clad series of excuses for him to disappear for up to 12 hours every day, sometimes flying, sometimes studying in a secure vault. When he comes home, he disappears into the study or into a nap. It's not fair for me to be frustrated by this but I am, and my most persistent visual fantasy today has been of my fingers closing gently and then with increasing pressure over his throat. This is not the kind of stuff I should write about my husband, but I figure it's better to write about it than do it.


Yesterday was better. We swam at the base lap pool and went to the local farmer's market and the activity seems to rinse some of the lingering Gabe anxiety out of the air. Abby has also been helpful in her own way. Her herding instincts have kicked in and she makes laps during the slow, quiet hours during the oppressive heat of the day, like now, her claws clicking on the wood floor as she visits first me, then Pants's mother, and then his father, sniffing each of us and licking our feet. If only Gabe were so subtle...