Happy Thanksgiving & Merry Christmas, Dad

The all-consuming progress and irreducible scope of Alzheimer's Disease continues. We have few illusions left about how our family might be different, how we could somehow rise above the inevitable accumulation of aggravation and loss, with coping skills superior to families without so many relatives with various medical backgrounds and our very own hospice chaplain. Instead we're along for the ride, long past the point of no return, courtesy of the family patriarch.

Recently, Sandra Day O'Connor's husband has been in the news, memories of his former life (and wife) falling away in the path of advancing disease. According to the media, he found new love in his dementia unit. How sweet.

For a few days, one family to another, we could commiserate however briefly and vicariously and brace ourselves for a possibility that had not even begun to cross our minds.

But by the time we realized "Oh, that's what Dad may be doing when he looks at his new dementia unit neighbor like that," our father was already moving past one stage and on to the next. The layers of his mind and personality blew away like so many leaves stripped from a tree in the onslaught of a hurricane-force Santa Ana wind.

His prodigious memory, once his refuge as he struggled to cope with the indignities of the present, eventually began to fail him. From day to day, we could only watch helplessly as be began shrugging off the present before it could take hold, then went on to shedding the past at a faster and faster rate.

For his sake, I can only hope a few memories are still there, locked away for safekeeping.

On my way to a family Thanksgiving gathering recently, I stopped to see my father along the way. He seemed unaware of my presence, no hint of recognition at my voice. His hands were stiff and trembling, his fingers spastic and curled. Throughout the visit, his head leaned first back and then forward, his eyes closed, his jaw slack.

Just a few weeks before,  I had seen my father after he was hospitalized with a broken hip. Even then I sensed my upon my departure that it might truly be a "goodbye." At the time, I thought he would likely develop pneumonia or suffer some other complication. Though I had braced myself, his physical and mental deterioration seemed to proceed at an unexpectedly accelerated new rate and trajectory.

Now he is having difficulty swallowing anything other than liquids. So as I sat there on Thanksgiving massaging his hands, I  spoke to to him, praying that he would dream of  family gatherings past, once again feasting on all his favorite foods and surrounded by all the people who love him and have ever loved him, freed at last from the limits of space and time.