Grandpa Today

Today was a bad day for Grandpa. Somehow, I had some inkling before lunch–maybe it was the fact that he couldn’t find his clothes to get dressed when he got up in the morning–but by lunch it was quite evident. With an effort he managed to struggle through eating most of his lunch, but when it came time to eat his little tub of yogurt to finish up his meal he hit a bad spot.

I think he got really derailed when he started eating his yogurt but then decided his bottom false teeth needed to be cleaned. He pulled his dentures out and splashed the remainder of his coffee over them, and then looked confused as he stared at his coffee covered teeth and the mess on the table. Seeing what he had intended to do, I said, “Grandpa, would you like to clean your teeth?”

“Yes, that’s what I was aiming to do,” he said.

“Here,” I said, “give them to me. I’ll do it for you.”

I went to the sink and washed off his teeth and then brought them back. He had to turn them around several times before he finally got them oriented right, but he finally got them back in his mouth. But by this time he was completely derailed from the process of eating his yogurt. He pawed around the table, fiddling with everything but his yogurt. Grandma and I tried to nudge him in the right direction until he finally said, “I feel like I’m a spectacle that everyone is staring at.”

“Okay,” Grandma said. “I’ll leave you be.”

She walked out of the room to go do something else and I stepped out far enough so Grandpa couldn’t see me, but where I could watch him and help in necessity. Grandpa continued to grope around in bumbling confusion. He latched onto his coffee which he struggled with for a bit, straining to bend the ceramic mug into a different shape. When that was unsuccessful he set the mug down and finally lighted upon the tub of yogurt sitting right in front of him. He promptly turned the yogurt container upside-down and tried to stuff it into the coffee mug and then when that didn’t do what he wanted he pulled the contain back out and turned it upside down on the table. Seeing the situation rapidly heading toward an end result with yogurt all over the place I intervened again.

“Grandpa,” I said. “Do you want to eat the yogurt?”

“I want . . . I . . . Make things . . . to do . . .” as usual when he is in his worst state of confusion, he was completely inarticulate. At that point I wasn’t sure if he could even remember what he had been trying to do. When failed action can snowball into another until Grandpa can no longer remember what he had been trying to accomplish.

“Here,” I said, removing the coffee mug and setting the yogurt tub upright in front of him. “All you need to do is this.” And I stuck the spoon into the yogurt.

Grandpa stared at the spoon in the yogurt and then laughed. “How did you do that?” he said. “I was trying and trying and it wouldn’t go in. How did you make it go in?”

“Well, I . . . stuck it in.”

“How is it so easy for you? I couldn’t get it to do that.”

“Well, actually, Grandpa, you were trying to do things with the coffee mug. That doesn’t work so well.”

“I don’t understand how you did it,” Grandpa said with a little laugh. “I guess there are a lot of things I’ll never understand.”

Then he ate his yogurt.

It is getting increasingly hard for Grandpa to feed himself. The specter of the time when he no longer will be able to feed himself is raising its head. Most of the time he can still manage–thought making coffee for himself is something he lost the ability to do months ago–but some times he is confused where to through his garbage, often tossing little bits of food onto the floor right next to the garbage can instead of in it, or else getting distracted into carefully cleaning his plate with a tissue instead of eating his food. Rarely, but now to become ever more common, he becomes utterly befuddled and eating becomes a task that can’t be accomplished. A week or two ago I gave him a muffin to eat. He chopped the muffin up with a fork and then looked at it and said, “Okay, now what do I do with this? What am I supposed to do with this thing?”

“Well,” I said. “You spear it with a fork and eat it. Or else you can pick it up with your hands and stuff it in your mouth.”

“Oh,” Grandpa said, looking at the chopped up muffin. “That’s all? Nothing more?”

“Nope.”

So he at his muffin. But times like that, and now today with his yogurt, will become increasingly common. Eating is becoming a battle.

****

After lunch Grandpa laid down on the couch and I went to my room. But no more than a few minutes later I heard tell-tale clattering coming from the kitchen. A little later I went to investigate and found Grandpa fiddling with the dishes. I guess he had decided to take a few minutes rest and while lying on the couch it occurred to him that the lunch dishes had not yet been taken care of, and so he got up to do it. My Grandfather was always an orderly man, and that deep seated impulse remains with him, thought Alzheimer’s’s had twisted it so that he no longer can neaten or clean properly, and sometimes doesn’t even recognize what truly is put into order.

Grandpa wanted to neaten up the kitchen and while I was uncomfortable leaving him unsupervised I wasn’t going to order him to stop like Grandma often does, and I didn’t want to give up my quiet time so I could supervise his activities. Generally his cleaning up is fairly harmless–consisting a great deal in turning on and off the faucet, trying to get it to work “right”, and cleaning dishes (and his teeth) in the oddest ways . . . often cleaning dishes with his dentures brush and cleaning his dentures with the dish scrubber. Harmless stuff, if perhaps maddening to some observers.

My concern is always the chance that he might in an unobserved moment veer onto a different and more dangerous course. Today I settled for leaving him to what appeared to be his harmless business and check on him every once in awhile.

I returned to check on him several more times to find nothing dangerous occur. At one point I manged to determine that he wanted to clear the dishes off the table, and so quickly cleaned the up before leaving again. I next returned after I finished my reading for the day. I entered the kitchen to find Grandpa stripped down to his undershorts standing at the kitchen table with a washcloth and a cup of water. I intuited that he had started out somewhere down the road thinking about washing the table and had ended up thinking about washing himself and got the two mixed up. Grandpa often gives himself a sponge bath in the bathroom sink. He sometimes gets rooms conflated together, the kitchen and the bathroom having become the same room before (as the living room and the bedroom have as well) and the kitchen table had become the sink.

Grandpa swirled a rather large amount of water about on the table with the wash cloth and then began scrubbing at his armpits saying, “Ohhh, cold, cold. It’s cold.”

“Um, Grandpa,” I said. “Don’t you think you want to do that in the bathroom?”

“Oh, I’m almost done,” he said. Then he took the cup and splashed some more water on the table (in his imaginary sink, maybe,) and swirled it around some more with his washcloth. Perhaps at this point his brain clicked back in gear and he remembered where he actually was because then without further comment he tottered off to the bathroom with his cup and washcloth and continued his bathing for another ten minutes or so. When he came back out with his hair neatly combed I helped him get back in his clothes

****

Grandpa was agitated throughout the afternoon. Part and parcel of the bad days is an increased level of agitation. It’s almost as if the unease and confusion settles into his bones and he is trying to fight it off by setting everything–imagined or otherwise–to rights. I think these times are some of the most stressful for Grandma–when Grandpa is so physically and verbally agitated and insistent, not to mention nearly if not completely incomprehensible. I try to help Grandma by being the one to deal with Grandpa and his agitation, and I try to help Grandpa by listening to him, doing what I can for him, and answering him as best I can so that in some way–as much as possible–he feels that his concerns were heard, and that somebody his handling all those worrying things that are out there.

So I kept getting up from my computer to go deal with Grandpa. It was getting on toward 5:00 PM and I had just recently finished getting Grandpa a cup of coffee when Grandma finally got up from her easy chair and went into the kitchen.

“Pappa, what are you doing?” she said, staring at Grandpa. He was down on his hands and knees and was studiously running the bottom of an empty coffee much over the front of the cabinets.

“Grandma,” I said quickly. “He is having a very bad day. So long as he isn’t doing anything dangerous, just let him be.”

“I’m removing the burrs,” Grandpa said, and continued to move the bottom of his cup over the woodwork of the cabinets, removing the “burrs.”

Thankfully, Grandma let him be and didn’t turn it into a confrontation.

And that was today. Inbetween all that I tried to get the cover ready for my book. Didn’t get that finished, but I think I know how I need to do it. I can’t use the cover generator from LSI . . . I’ll just use their template guideline and create my own one-piece TIFF file. But then at the end of the day I discovered that I’m supposed to save the TFF in the CMYK color format and GIMP (my image editing program) doesn’t natively save in CMYK color mode, so I need to download and install a plugin.

But then it was time to make supper, so that is where I had to stop for today. Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to install the plugin without trouble, and maybe actually get the cover put together so I can actually get the book out for printing.

Right now it is 11:15 PM, and tomorrow morning starts with Grandpa rising. I’m going to be short on sleep again, and I need to remember to make the bread dough for supper and we’re out of garlic because somehow the last head of garlic I bought disappeared somehow, so we’re not going to have fresh garlic for supper tomorrow night . . .

But there are worse things.

Everyone is in bed for the night, and not it is time for me to turn off the lights.