Navigating Loss

It's another paralyzingly quiet moment during Pants's parents' visit. The only sound is the humming of the air conditioner and Pants's mother, R.'s, occasional labored coughs. R. has had pneumonia three times this year, an has now invested in a nebulizer, a machine I remember from childhood because my brother had to use one for his asthma. It makes you look like the smoking worm from Alice in Wonderland, and it almost makes me wish I had rumble lungs just so I could sit around and puff vapor from a machine twice a day. When I smoked as a teenager I think it was this, the fascination with gadgetry and slow, contemplative process of puffing little clouds out of my mouth that formed the bulk of my habit, and not an addiction to nicotine. Addicts are much more conscientious-- I kept forgetting to smoke, and thus had to stifle the highly uncool reflex to cough.

I'm feeling like a bad hostess. When one of your guests has very little short term memory left, the lapse into boredom for them is quick and steep. I am left wishing we had invested in cable, or even had a toddler dashing around to liven things up. As it stands, Pants and I are some of the least stimulating people you'll ever meet. I read, he naps, in the evenings we watch BBC nature programs, and then we call it a night. This seems to suit R. just fine, who, for the first time in ages, is catching up on her reading (World War II espionage and the flora and fauna of Yosemite, which we visited mostly by car yesterday) but for Pants's father...

There's so much I can't imagine about Alzheimer's, especially this strain of it which has set in so early in his life and taken so much so quickly. Every time D. has gotten to visit us in the past three years, we've lived somewhere different, and the struggle to map the interiors of each of our new living spaces as a guest has provided one of the ways I can see the progress of the disease.

Yesterday we drove out to Yosemite. Pants's family has always been big into the national park thing, and they've been almost everywhere. Some of my earliest conversations with D., back when the disease only meant he couldn't work and sometimes lost his train of thought, and back when I was only the new girlfriend, a tenuous experiment after the unmitigated disaster of the college paramour, were about the beauties and memories in various parks. We formed our friendship over maps and snapshots. D. was an avid and capable outdoors man, and taught Pants the wildly attractive art of homemaking in the wilderness. It was a treat to take D. to such an iconic park, even if the static of logistics often got in the way. The road trip was long, so Pants brought along a nostalgic surprise-- two c.d.'s of classic Western songs, to which his parents laughingly sang along. D. has always been tone deaf, and R. sings pitch-perfect but in a high, warbling soprano, so they've always made a funny duet. Pants and his older brother used to snicker through church hymns at their parents' mismatched but enthusiastic performances.

The park, unfortunately, was packed. Frenetic Japanese teenagers, languid Spaniards, and grim-faced, athletic Germans in those awful gardening sandals clogged the walkways and taxed D.'s limited navigational resources. Several beautiful pictures hold D. drifting in their frames, gazing unfocused at the hordes of gabbling foreigners disgorging from nearby tour buses. "Look at me!" I'd call, "Smile!" and more than once it seemed that he humored me out of a reflexive polite obedience, and not because he recognized me or understood that he was part of a picture. This morning we reviewed the pictures on my computer screen, and he seemed shocked and pleased to hear that we'd taken a trip the day before. Each image fired a new synapse that reminded him of fragments of past trips, activities he'd led with his boys, things he'd done as a scout leader, and each new story started with a few confident words and then faded. Conversations now draw on all my reserves of constructing narratives and viewpoints. I told him what he'd seen at each stop, what sounds we'd noticed.

D. and R. have a touching kind of teamwork going, and I think it's ironic and amazing that even though the disease has wrought such merciless and swift subtraction, the two of them are still teaching me about what a relationship builds up over the years. I've read that Alzheimer's can change its victims' personalities, and that the frustrations of forgetting can fray nerves on both sides of the equation, patient and caretaker. But D. and R. are both scientists, and both Christians, a protective (and somehow not contradictory) combination that allows them to draw on reserves of scientific logic and religious faith depending on the situation. They hold hands everywhere they go these days-- her ankles aren't strong and recently she's been short of breath so she leans on him. He depends on her as both rudder and anchor in the chaos of crowds. She has a frank, no-nonsense way of assessing a situation, and he is gentle and humbly accepting of each instruction.

I don't think this symbiotic give-and-take is built in. I think it's a product of negotiation and experimentation under the most extreme of pressures, and the most unstable circumstances. I think it comes from years of planning, and years of coping when plans erode, and a commitment whose strength has held even as so much else has crumbled. I'm humbled by watching them, even as they sometimes drive Pants and me nuts with their nightly phlegm chorus and quirky fascination with roadside weeds. It's helped to remind me what I signed up for that night in December when I sniffled my way through the vows and felt electric and jittery from all the benevolent eyes watching us. Through moves, job searches, endless road trips with impatient pets, meager bank balances, bizarre military subcultures, hurricanes, mountains of flight manuals to be memorized, loneliness and perpetual upheaval, I have a hand to hold.