I’ve come to realize that one of my weakness in caring for people is that I have a hard time just being there. If anything needs to be done, or anything needs to be fetched, fixed, or accomplished, I’m ready and willing. But taking care of someone encompasses more than that. Sometimes you just need to be there . . . to sit and do nothing and simply keep the person company. To attend to there person as it were, instead of to their needs. I’m always lining things up in my head to do . . . I’d willing stop and talk or listen to someone if they said, “Hey, I’d like to talk to you,” but it rarely occurs to me to sit around with someone doing nothing and just being there.
I think Grandpa appreciates that. About the only way he can get a thought out it to simply let it pop out when it bubbles up . . . he can’t engage in the more formal communication so he spends most of the day probably feeling a little isolated because no one is just sitting beside him, waiting to answer any question and interpret any event he doesn’t quite understand. It’s hard for me to take stock of this because whenever Grandpa isn’t in need of help for his physical needs I want to run off and get something done that I want to accomplish. But he does want to have someone to listen to him.
Grandpa seemed in a more social mood than usual today. This afternoon he said, “Why don’t you come out front with me.” Usually it is me who suggests going out and often as not Grandpa will decline. But today he suggested we go out, so we went out front where the full afternoon sun was shining. We sat on the front stoop and watched the world and the cars go by. We sat there for 15-20 minutes making small conversation. Then we went inside.
It is at brief times like those that Grandpa can almost seem normal. He talked about how he would never want to ride on a motorcycle and contend with the cars and how his depth perception was bad so he couldn’t tell how low down things were. I asked him if the tall pine tree in the front yard was older than him and he said no, Grandma’s son Paul had planted it (not sure whose Grandma he was referring too, but he didn’t mean my Grandma because she doesn’t have a son named Paul).
After supper tonight Grandpa wanted to talk again. The conversation this time was the complete reverse of the normal conversation we had engaged in during the afternoon. I was sitting keeping him company while he was drinking he coffee and I guess some type of problem came to his mind because he set down his coffee, made an attempt to straighten out the shredded tissue on his place mat and then pointed at the cloth and said, “How do we get this thing working?”
“It’s a place mat, Grandpa.”
“Okay, it’s a place mat. But how do we get things to . . . to . . . line up. Say we have one thing here and another thing here and we want to . . .” he points at different spots on the place mat as he describes but he eventually trails off, probably having not known where he was going with his thought to begin with, and now realizing he can’t reach a conclusion.
But something is bothering him (even if it is just the sensation that something might not be right,) and he tries several more times to articulate some idea about getting things to work continuing to use his place mat as a demonstration peice that does nothing to clarify the muddle for me.
“I’m sorry, Grandpa,” I said. “But you haven’t got it quite far enough along for me to guess.”
“Yeah, I haven’t got it quite far along enough for me to even understand either,” he said.
So we sat in silence a little longer.
After a bit Grandpa smoothed out his place mat again and said, “Okay, I’ll try again. So,” he puts his finger on one spot on the place mat. “Let’s say we have ca . . . ca . . . ca . . . coyotes. Yeah. Okay, coyotes. So they go over this way,” he moves his finger across the place mat to another location. “And they check out this place over here and find that it isn’t commodious. So they say, ‘yeah, okay, whatever,’ and then they go over here to the ca . . . ca . . . caaannnn . . . canvas. So they go to this canvas and they’re laughing at them, but even so they’re trying to help as much as they can and then they go over here . . .” Grandpa moves his finger yet again tracing the continuing route of the coyotes then looks up at me and trials off.
“Anyway, getting back to the main point . . .” he fumbles around with the stuff on the table, separating out the nearby silverware.
“So,” he picks up a knife and draws an imaginary box around the head of a spoon. “So you have a block there and it is a good one and you can use it,” he says.
I’m not making any headway. I know that the story about the coyotes was only language imagery, trying to convey a thought indirectly that he can’t grasp directly. He keeps grasping at words, saying some only to immediately throw them aside, shuffling words and stuttering in-between his short parabolic utterances. Multiple times he gives up only to make another attempt a little bit later. At one point he says, “Ahhh, I can’t describe it.”
“Would you like a pencil and piece of paper to draw it,” I ask.
“No, I guess not,” Grandpa said. “I can’t draw very well, and in any case half the time I don’t understand what I just drew anyhow.” He laughed. “If you know what I mean.”
From everything he said I knew he was concerned about something, something getting accomplished or done, but beyond that I found no touching place with reality. In reflection I see he kept getting stuck on the “Ca” sound, whether that is just his stuttering sound or there was some word he gasped for but didn’t find, I don’t know, but it was the cayotes, the cammodious place, and the canvas.
After another lapse into frustrated silence he spoke up again and said, “So, what do you think? What do you think about anything?”
So I talked a bit about the whether and how spring had finally come, and next week was going to be nice.
Some more silence, then Grandpa spoke up again, seeming to have returned to whatever thought he was restling with. “Is there any law about . . . if you have some problem and you need to go to a doctor . . .” he couldn’t finish the thought, but this time he was hitting close enough to reality that I could make some educated guesses.
“And the emergency room,” I supplied.
“Yeah, the emergency room. And if . . . and if you have the doctor and . . .” but he couldn’t get any further along in the thought and at that moment had to go to the bathroom so he got up from the table, saying, “I’ll be back.”
But that was the end of the conversation. I don’t know if there was a fixed event or question behind Grandpa’s desperate attempt at communication. He may has simply felt ill at ease and wanted to make sure everything was being properly handled. Or, perhaps, his thoughts had drifted back to Grandma’s recent trip to the emergency room and was trying to articulate some concern about handling the insurance. In the story about the coyotes there was definitely a lot about getting things done and handle right, and then there was the laws and the emergency room.
In any case, it is another example of Grandpa trying to communicate. A stranger would think our interaction was madness, but Grandpa knew his story about the coyotes wasn’t literally true. He was trying to use analogy and example to get at something he couldn’t articulate in a direct manner. Unfortunately, it wasn’t successful.
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