A Caged life for Grampa

Another day at the hospital... and a caged life for Grampa. He couldn't understand why we wouldn't let him out of bed to walk around. All he wanted to do was walk. We would pull the sheet back to reveal the large bandage around his knee. And he would look at it completely perplexed as to what happened...

He would sigh and sit back in bed.


Today's flashback took us back to only 45 years ago. He is talking to the men who worked for him.... 45 years ago. But they were no longer in the room.

He keeps looking at his watch and saying "We're running out of time. We need to work fast." He would ask how "Lehman" was doing and if I'd seen "Jones". Then he started speaking about "Tubbman", another one of his men. But now he was talking in past tense - as if he were speaking up at his funeral.

And he stopped himself and looked at me... with a look that told me he was confused again.

In just a moment's notice... his brain would turn back on.

Countdown to Alzheimer's

He came out of surgery in a haze. A deep haze. He didn't know why he was in the hospital. All he needed was a knee replacement.

Now he couldn't remember why he was here. At first he didn't remember my name. He couldn't remember the name of his second wife... he called her my Grandmother's name instead. But even as he spoke Grandmother's name I could tell he knew that wasn't right. He had the look in his eye... "Why am I confused?"


Day after day I sat with him in the hospital. He would sleep. He would wake up. Sometimes he would remember my name. Sometimes he wouldn't. Sometimes he remembered my cousins' names... and not mine. Sometimes he called me "Jim". (I'm his oldest granddaughter and do not resemble a "Jim" of any sort.)



And then he would have a few moments of flashback. It was presumedly 65 years ago, in his world.

I sat with him as he assembled hats. (This was his job 65 years ago.) Assembling hats for the other men in his troop. He folded imaginary fabric in his lap. Layer after layer. Hat after hat. He folded, and folded ... and folded.


And then, as if he snapped back into reality, he looked right at me and asked "Did you kill anyone in the war?"

Just a glimpse of his state of mind.

It's a slow fade...

The awareness that Alzheimer's was entering our lives hit us square in the face several years ago.

Grampa was starting to forget the 2nd half of a sentence when he telling a story.

He would look at me and start to say something, call me by someone else's name... and then immediately he would know that was the wrong name. But he couldn't figure it out. So I would offer up my name... "HI GRAMPA! It's Lori!"


Most of the times that would help. He would usually remember.


Sometimes he wouldn't.


His wife, my step-grandmother, started making excuses for him. She would hide their reality from us. She would explain he wasn't available to come to the phone. And when we wanted to visit she would say they weren't going to be home. And when Christmas rolled around ... they were "going to be spending Christmas with her kids this year". She didn't know how to handle it. She thought by changing his meds he could get better. She tried everything she knew. But she couldn't hide it anymore...


Our "Big Man" just wasn't there anymore.

That's what he used to say to the grandsons. I used to be able to hear the boys wrestling in the living room... and then Grampa would come in and swoop one of them up off the carpet. And the boys would giggle... and Grampa would say to my cousin "Who's The Big Man now?! Huh?!" Grampa would tickle him until he would relent: "You are Grampa! You're The Big Man!" Pleased with his eldest grandson's response... he'd set him free. And the boys would go back to wrestling on the living room floor. Oh the memories that come flooding in...


I couldn't tell you when it happened exactly... but our family eventually realized that Alzheimer's was approaching and we better be ready for it.