It’s like watching the slow and dying embers in the
backyard firepit on a sultry summer’s night.
In some ways I understand it, some I don’t.
Maybe it’s meant to be that way.
It’s hard enough to watch someone you love die but it’s the
‘dying marathon’ of Alzheimer’s that really hurts inside.
I had a deeply emotional visit with my father this past Sunday.
I felt this impending sense of detachment from him that I’ve never seen or felt before.
My sister says it’s that way with most patients in the final stretch of the endgame.
I am trying to make myself understand that.
Not doing too well with it either.
The past 5 years have been a sad and long goodbye and although I’ve said it before,
I want to believe in my heart that he is ready.
My father did not cry yesterday which had me scratching my freshly shaved noggin.
It was almost as if he was trying to be strong just for me,
but maybe I’ll never know.
I sat and held his thin and badly shaking hands and really looked at him,
into my father‘s eyes.
My heart was instantly shattered as a lifetime of tender and lost moments came crashing into my mind.
I want many things for my father and not one of them was in this room that has held him prisoner for the past 5+ years.
I want him to walk and feel the rays of the sun on his face again,
love and be loved in return, find the missing piece of the puzzle he’s been searching for since he got sick.
Find my mother.
I want him to find enough strength to finally fade away and find his corner of the sky,
his cerulean peace.
It’s time for my beautiful father to go home.
Because of all the places I roam, I miss having him there the most . . .

He stares blindly out the window of another night
down on Bleeker Street, where nothing seem to change except a world gone mad.
He exists.
I exist.
I go to him, touch his shoulder feeling the quivering bone underneath my hand
but he doesn’t move, nobody is home it seems.
As I bend to kiss his forehead,
I think back to my childhood remembering the smell of him;
a rich elixir of leather, spice and a fatherly scent I could never quite put my finger on.
It was a smell of  total comfort and one of extreme familiarity.
His scent is different tonight; he smells clinical, preserved and abandoned.
He smells like a familiar stranger, an ancient decade of melancholy memories,
echoes of voices lost in an obsidian mist . . .

I sit there with him as we both blindly stare out the window, watching a world gone by
and we sigh,
we cry,
we say goodbye to the too many words left unspoken,
the things we once took for granted,
and the once welcome spaces where we no longer belong.
I take his frail and shaking hand and wonder (as I have thousands of times before)
how many more nights will he sit here all alone and stare?
And simply exist.
There is little left to say but with my father, somehow that’s okay.
Somehow, I know he understands.
He has taught me well.
He was never big on words anyway.
It will be very hard to forget the nights down on Bleeker Street and even harder to forget
the little man just sitting staring out the window . . .

Off in a not too distant somewhere, I hear the shimmering sound of church bells.
Melancholy yet beautiful, their dissonance fills the night air with a longing, a void filled, 
an endless possibility.
Dark grey clouds move low across the sky saturated with change; change of the heart and mind,
soul and body, a chasm of repeating continuation.
The church bells chime on, sounding more and more like a movie soundtrack that once defined your life
as it echoes the pain,
loss of cerebral photographs, and confusion of all the simple things that mattered.
And yet, the sound is oddly comforting, a musical pall of earth tones beckoning pure white light.
I am suddenly aware of the clip-clop of my blackened dirty shoes on the pavement below,
an urban heartbeat, the intrinsic essence of time and space; of a time that
I listened for the sound of your footsteps, of a space holding everything you once were.
You.
My dear, drifting and lonely Father.
If you could only know what I want for you in the most loving of ways.
If you could only hear the beautiful church bells.
But the world will continue to hurt you until you find a way to finally listen.

Maybe it’s a sign of survival, of anguish,
of the frightening realization that mortality does exist in the deepest recesses of the mind.
Maybe it’s a sign that everything is still changing,
still in that near frozen state of flux . . .
For him, for me, for the four walls that still imprison him,
for a world that looks to him as confusing today as it did several hundred yesterdays ago.

Maybe it’s not a sign at all but a palpable gesture that while he sleeps,
this ravenous disease does not; it always wants more.
It replaces what it takes with something barely recognizable, something dark and foggy,
something you never want to talk about around the coffee table but remains forever.
Sometimes this thing just takes.
And takes . . .

Maybe it’s a sign that he is tired, fed up with playing the host,
sick of food that looks like pureed shit put through a strainer that he has to try and swallow.
Banana Crème Pie should never look like soup.
But it does.
And that’s a crying goddamn shame.
His mother was a pastry chef, Christ in a sidecar.

Maybe someday I will look back at this point in time and have a moment of revelation
but I’m not betting on it.
If this disease has taught me anything it’s not to get caught up in any kind of emotional gambit.
It’s a losing proposition at best.
So maybe it is a sign.

For my father maybe it’s a sign that simply says ‘stop’ . . .

Dear Dad,

I know you’ll never read this but I wanted to take a few minutes
and tell the world how very much you mean to me and Maureen.
We miss so many things about you; your laugh, your smile, your once bright eyes,
the way you used to drive Mom nuts whenever you tried to sing,
how proud you were of your wonderful grandchildren,
even the way you used to wrap yourself up like a mummy whenever we went to the beach so you wouldn’t go all ‘lobster’ on us.
I’ll be visiting you this Sunday and will undoubtedly feed you lunch,
maybe give you a shave if you need one.
It’s really sad that there isn’t more I can do.
But at least I can do that.
I haven’t been keeping up with the Red Sox like I used to either.
That was something I did when you were better so we’d have something to talk about besides the weather.
These days the weather isn’t worth talking about anyway.
I saw an older man sitting on a bench on the Boston Common the other day that looked just like you.
I absentmindedly started walking faster towards you him before I caught myself.
He wasn’t you.
He could never be you.
Then again no one could ever be the man I call my father except for you.
On Sunday, Maureen and I pray a small part of you knows how special you have always been to us
and will continue to be.
Maureen says it best when she gently puts her hand on your cheek and says,
“You are the greatest Dad ever, you know that don’t you?”
And so I will say, “Happy Father’s Day, Dad,”
because in my heart I know you’re still in there somewhere.

Much love, Papa Wally
Much love . . .

Our Mom would have been 81 today.
It was on my mind from the minute I got up today.
For her wake, I made a CD with a slew of tunes that I thought she would like.
This was one of them.
Unfortunately, the audio quality on this is real sub par for Take Six.
Get out the headphones.
It helps.
Whoever was mixing them that night needed to boost the ‘soprano’ vocal.  Helllllooooo?
That said, my mother would have loved these guys.
Happy Birthday, Mom.
Maureen and I miss you every single day.
Dad will be there when he’s ready or until you at least yell, “Wally! Get here! I’m lonely!”
Hope they have YouTube up there in heaven.
Miss you and love you every single day.
Dad does, too . . .

There is a quiet place
Far from the rapid pace
Where God can soothe my troubled mind

Sheltered by tree and flower
There in my quiet hour
With Him my cares are left behind

Whether a garden small
Or on a mountain tall

New strength and courage there I find
Then from this quiet place
I go prepared to face
A new day with love for all mankind

Everyone knows that I am the ultimate theme junkie and that’s an understatement.
I found this current theme called KillerLight created by Simon Smith sitting peacefully in the WordPress.Org
‘new themes’ archive.
I had to have it for a number of reasons.
I decided to visit Simon’s website this morning and I left a brief comment regarding
the animated background (which is simply incredible).
His response was swift and gracious.
I noticed something else while I was there though.
Simon and his sister are planning a skyjump on April 7th to aid the Alzheimer’s Society and Cancer research
in the UK.
How fitting is it for me to be using a theme by someone raising money for a cause I so deeply believe in?
That said, click on the sky above and visit Simon’s website.
If you can’t donate anything, at least offer a few words of support to him and his sister Becky.
This is a great cause for an even better reason.
Thanks for the template, Simon!
There are reasons why things happen the way they do though there’s no reasonable explanation.
Can you say ‘Godwink’?

No one knows what it’s like,
maybe even him
the days are like carbon copies of days gone by, yesterdays passed;
more of the same, the blooming of a thousand shades of grey
And life is grey; maybe it’s the only shade he knows . . .

No one knows what it’s like
maybe even me
as I take in his awkward smiles, I wonder just who they’re really meant for
Does he miss her?
Yes, he does, and he tells me so, in sotto voce syllables
I’m still unsure of what I must believe and choose to believe in him because
what’s left is all I have to believe in

No one knows what it’s like
Perhaps, God does, but He is forgetful too;
like the saving grace of His mercy, of dignity and compassion,
the sadness of detail, the complexity of why
And He cries,
for all fathers present and past, but maybe for a world He ultimately created
in love . . .

My father knows what it’s like
when it’s time for me to leave and
long forgotten tears of understanding reach his tired eyes,
tears I can no longer wipe away
because unlike him,
I already know what it’s like to say goodbye
And I do . . .

I don’t make a point of posting email I receive but this one, well, this one was different.
It was from my friend, Lynn.
While reading it, I couldn’t get my sister out of my head because she’s a nurse and has probably been in a situation very similar.
Though my mother and father’s story reads a bit differently, the sentiment is very much the same and my thoughts were of the both of them as well.
Thanks, Lynn.
This was a beauty.

. . . It was a busy morning, about 8:30, when an elderly gentleman in his 80′s arrived to have
stitches removed from his thumb. He said he was in a hurry as he had an appointment at 9:00am.
I took his vital signs and had him take a seat, knowing it would be over an hour before someone would to able to see him.
I saw him looking at his watch and decided, since I was not busy with another patient, I would evaluate his wound.
On exam, it was well healed so I talked to one of the doctors, got the needed supplies to remove his sutures and redress his wound. While taking care of his wound, I asked him if he had another doctor’s appointment this morning, as he was in such a hurry.
The gentleman told me no, that he needed to go to the nursing home to eat breakfast with his wife.
I inquired as to her health. He told me that she had been there for a while and that she was a
victim of Alzheimer’s Disease. As we talked, I asked if she would be upset if he was a bit late.
He replied that she no longer knew who he was, that she had not recognized him in five years now.

I was surprised, and asked him, ‘And you still go every morning, even though she doesn’t know who you are?’

He smiled as he patted my hand and said, ‘She doesn’t know me, but I still know who she is.’

I had to hold back tears as he left, I had goose bumps on my arm, and thought, ‘That is the kind of love I want in my life.’ True love is neither physical, nor romantic it is an acceptance of all that is, has been, will be and will not be . . .

Sometimes email can surprise you, huh?

I received an email a week or so ago that I almost sent to the spammer.
Something made me open it.
It was from a woman named Jody Simpson, of WEGO Health, an online resource for health related issues.
She had been reading my Memory Lane blog and was curious if I’d be interested in doing a “spotlight interview” regarding my personal experience with Alzheimer’s Disease.
I agreed and was contacted by Toni Kistner, the assigned editor for my interview.
Jody and Toni were both incredibly helpful in ultimately getting this thing down on paper.
I thank them both dearly.
Click on the picture above to learn a few things that you may not have known about me.
To leave a comment on WEGO, you may have to register.
If that doesn’t work for you, feel free to leave a comment back here.
As always, thanks so much for reading.