Category: Uncategorized

Snippet 1:

Saturday night Grandpa had another bedroom-bathroom disaster. I somehow was exhuasted enough, or he was quiet enough, that I slept through the unfolding disaster and only woke up to face the results.

I first started waking up when Grandpa sat down on my bed to lay back down. Dragged into a half-awake state by the sensation of someone almost sitting on me, it felt like too much work at that moment to explain to Grandpa that he was on the wrong bed. So I lay there waiting for him to realize he had made a mistake. He seemed to realize something was wrong with the bed–a funny lump or something–because he kept trying to re-situate himself. Finally, seeing as he wasn’t going to quickly realize his mistake and get up, I made some groggy comment about how he would have more room in his own bed.

Grandpa made some comment, (probably about his mistake,) laughed, and got up and moved to his bed. When I am awake enough, I always try to tuck Grandpa in for him because while it makes me a little more uncomfortable to get out of my nice bed I actually suffer more disturbance if I must lay listening to him wrestle and mutter at his blankets for ten minutes as he tries to cover himself. However, that night I was still only half away so I lay listening to him mutter and struggle with his blanket. I reached over with one hand and turned on my bed light, hoping that would be help enough, but the light shone in his eyes and he asked me to turn it back off.

In the darkness once more, I heard him say, “Ahhh, it’s all wet.”

Okay . . . time to check on him, I thought. Groggily, I sat up in bed and swung my feet over the side and set them on the linoleum covered floor.

. . . And set them right into a cold puddle of urine. That will wake you up quickly. Eeeyaaah, I think, (or something like it,) and reach over to turn on the light, wishing I had something handy to wipe off my wet foot. A good look at the room shows it has become a disaster area. The sheet is half off Grandpa’s bed, and his blanket is half on the floor and various items are scattered about on the floor. A quick check confirms that his blanket is only wet where it has fallen on the wet floor–Grandpa only peed all over the floor, not all over his bed. One small mercy.

Next I try to discover the extent of the damage on the floor. Grandpa’ winter hat is lying on the floor, and his glasses are wallowing in another puddle of urine over by the commode. After picking my way about I manage to determine that it seems all the pee has been contained on the linoleum in the bedroom–he never made it out into the hall to track his trail of wetness to the bathroom. Time to move into damage cleanup.

I wadded up the slightly wet blanket with the other wet clothing items and chucked them into the corner. I took one of my spare blankets and gave it to Grandpa. I put him back to bed, cleaned up the floor, and cleaned up his glasses.

I’ve now decided to keep a roll of paper towels permanently in the bedroom. I don’t want to have to walk all the way to the kitchen when I need something desperately for cleanup.

Snippet 2:

Sometimes Grandpa is completely unaware of his difficulties, but I am still a little surprised by the other times when he shows such clear self-awareness of his problems. Yesterday afternoon Grandpa was trying to communicate with me and was having the usual difficulty . . . he would use the wrong words, or sputter and stutter and be unable to get any words out. Finally he stopped and said, “I don’t know how anyone can understand what I say.”

He knew he was sitting there and speaking nonsense. What it must be like to open your mouth and know that all that comes out is babbling foolishness that means nothing–to see yourself so clearly and be unable to do anything about it.

Snippet 3:

Last night was a tough night. It is actually easier for me if Grandpa has an accident than if he has a hard time sleeping. If he has an accident I can put him back to bed, quickly clean him up, and get back to bed myself. If he gets agitated in the middle of the night I can only wait until he exhausts himself again. Thus it was last night. He initially woke me, and got up, to go to the bathroom. For nearly the next hour he was up and down, in and out of the room, turning the light on and off . . . all trying to take care of various things . . . or find something that needed taking care of. Since he was simply agitated . . . he didn’t know what he wanted or need, and if he did latch on to something and I resolved that problem he simply moved on to another, I had to ride it out until he finally tired himself and went back to bed.

These type of situations are what take on a nightmarish hue to me. When there is a midnight mess that needs to be cleaned up I’m in control of the situation and while it might not be fun I can at least clean it up in my time and go back to bed. But when Grandpa is simply agitated and five minutes runs into ten, and ten into fifteen and fifteen into half an hour . . . you start wondering how much of the night this is going to take, and imagining being up all night watching Grandpa go about trying to set things right. It’s a situation where I’m not in control . . . I can “fix” the situation, and I can’t ignore it. I can try to prod Grandpa in the direction of bed, but mostly I must simply sit there and wait for events to run there course.

Now, onto the main story:

This past Thursday I took Grandma and Grandpa to their “normal” doctor for their regular checkups.

Grandpa’s appointment was a non-event. He had gained five pounds from the last time I took him in, and since he is underweight that is a good thing (and make me feel pleased that at least I am feeding him well). His blood pressure was back down to only 7 points above what the doctor wanted, which wasn’t worth doing anything about, she said. And that was that. Grandpa was hale and hearty . . . except for the fact that his mind is falling apart.

Which is the same thing they said last time I took him in three or four months ago. Grandpa refuses to take pills for a long period of time, so there is really nothing the doctors can do for him. Last time I took him in they gave him a battery of tests to see how advanced his Alzheimer’s was–I thought the test was interesting. It showed that, at that time, his “time sense” was completely shot (year, time, age, etc) but that his sense of place was still intact. There were other aspects of the test as well, and I was interested to see how well he did on them again, now three months later. However, the nurse told Grandma that she wasn’t going to test Grandpa anymore. He was only going to get worse, and there was nothing they could do for him. It is probably for the best . . . the testing only embarrassed Grandpa and did nothing for him, and there is no point to make him suffer it just so I can track his slide into oblivion.

And really, for the same reason it is pointless to take Grandpa to the doctors. It is a source of stress, agitation, and embarrassment for him, and they can do nothing for him. He body is, more or less, hale and hearty and they can do nothing for his mind. Why take him to the doctors so they can check his weight and blood pressure?

Even Grandma is agreeing with me now, so this was probably the last of Grandpa and the doctors for a long while. Grandma, on the other hand . . . there are a lot more doctors in her future.

I really should be going to bed, not writing this. But I forgot to start my laundry earlier today, so my bed sheets are still in the dryer. I was running a slightly larger than normal sleep deficit last week and last night I was really tired and tried to go to bed early . . . that didn’t work out, and then I had trouble sleeping throughout the night, so I was exceptionally tired today, and so by this evening I was laying on the floor in the dining room beside my computer and thinking it felt like a wonderful place to fall asleep.

In reading to Grandpa I’ve worked us through Caddie Woodlawn, then Moccasin Trail, and now we’re working on Maniac Magee. Grandpa continues to enjoy the stories and the reading in equal measure. He usually falls asleep before I finish reading so I wonder how he can keep in the story, but somehow he does, at least enough for himself. Some notable highlights:

I wondered if Moccasin Trail was too difficult for Grandpa. The chapters were longer than Caddie Woodlawn and the interaction more complex and the conflicts between characters more subtle. But in spite of my concerns he seemed to enjoy the story very much. At one point he asked, “How much do we have left? Is it almost over?”

“No,” I said, “We’re only about halfway through. Are you getting tired of this story?”

“No,” he said. “I was afraid it was almost over.”

I don’t want to give the story away for anyone who hasn’t read it, but at the end there is a final gripping conflict when a particular character is in danger. The chapter ends with one character screaming, distraught, at another character and the other character running off to attempt a daring rescue. Grandpa was gripped. I looked up and he wasn’t lying on the bed drifting off into dream land, he was sitting up watching me intently. When I closed the book and said that was the end of the chapter for tonight he said, “Awwww . . .”

Recently we started Maniac Magee. I was a little uncertain because this is a story about a kid in modern times and I wasn’t sure Grandpa could really relate to any story set beyond the Great Depression. However, I suspected that any story that dealt with the struggles of people Grandpa could relate to in some way, and further (as I’ve already said previously) I suspect half of his enjoyment is just to hear the reading, not the particular story. In any case, he seems to be enjoying Maniac Magee as much as the last book.

Sunday was a bad day for Grandpa. When I got back from my visit home Arlan was cleaning up a mess in the bathroom and told me he had to get Grandpa two pairs of new pants during the course of the day. The rest of the evening while I was back home Grandpa was very agitated and confused. It was a bad day for him, but I think part of his evening trouble was from his exhaustion. When I finally got him into bed I left the room briefly to get a drink and a quick bite of dessert before I started reading to him. I stuffed a bit of food in my mouth, took a quick drink . . . three minutes later I was back in the room and Grandpa was already sound asleep. Talk about falling asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow. It was only 9:00 PM.

Nice, I thought. Grandpa was down early for once and I was so tired I needed to go to be early myself. A chance to catch up on my sleep. So I finished up what I was doing at my computer and got into bed by about 9:30. I get under the covers, lights out, and am trying to go to sleep . . . and Grandpa wakes up. It about 10:00 now. He has to go to the bathroom. So I get back out of bed and help him to the bathroom. He finishes his business in the bathroom and I help him back to bed.

Grandpa sat down on the edge of his bed and said, “Well, I guess it’s probably too late to read me any more story.” Fallen asleep before his story reading that night, and somehow he managed to remember it.

“Yeah, it’s too late I agreed,” thinking about my intention of getting to bed early, and how it was already heading toward quarter after ten. “It’ll half to wait until tomorrow . . .” But then I started feeling guilty. He had pretty much come right out and asked me to please read to him and we were both awake already and I probably wouldn’t have to read all that much before he fell asleep and besides what difference did it make, anyhow?

So I read him some Maniac Magee. But I didn’t catch up on my sleep last night.

Tonight I was preoccupied (not to mention tired) so I wasn’t keeping up with Grandpa as much as I should have, so he was already lying down in bed when I came to check on him. He was dozing lightly and I touched his leg and asked him if he wanted me to read him the story.

“Sure,” he said. “I’d love it if you’d read . . . I mean, if it isn’t too much trouble and if you don’t mind . . .”

So tonight we read about McNab the giant bully and his confrontation with Maniac Magee over baseball. Toward the end of the conflict McNab leaves the field, supposedly to take a wizz in the forest down by the creek. “He took a long time,” the story said, “but the kids supposed that someone as big as McNab needed to take a long wizz. They figured he might make the creek rise.” I glanced up and saw Grandpa grin. He was following the story at least that well.

****

I am finding it interesting to discover that, from my perspective as the reader, there is a definite and distinct difference in the quality of books for reading out loud. As I have said before, I am not a good out loud reader. I struggle with pronunciation even when I’m simply speaking my own thoughts–much less trying to verbalize whatever words the book is throwing at me. It feels like I constantly have two different threads of activity going on in my mind at once when I’m reading aloud . . . one part of my mind is reading the book, another part of my mind is trying to get my mouth to form the appropriate words . . . and then my mind is trying to keep both of those parts working is pretty good coordination.

Reading aloud requires real mental effort from me, a real linguistic workout, and this comes off better with some books than others. I’m not sure if I am such a poor reader that I simply do better with 4th grade reading material and anything harder gets progressively more difficult, or if quality of writing is really the key, and I can handle any level of reading so long as it is well written.

I’m not sure. I think Moccasin Trail was a slightly higher reading level than either Caddie Woodlawn or Maniac Magee, but how it struck me when I was trying to read it was how the writing quality struck me as so much poorer. I don’t recall noticing this when I read the story to myself. But now it seemed that whereas the two other stories read snappy and clean, with writing that felt as if it flowed so naturally, by contrast Moccasin Trail seemed to meander, the writing not as clean or sharp, the words not what you expected to follow, as if the writer didn’t chose the best turn of a phrase. I did a horrible job reading Moccasin Trail.

The reading itself was more difficult so I couldn’t keep slightly ahead in my reading of what I was supposed to be pronouncing, (and thus be prepared in advance for what I would have to say,) so I was pretty much winging it through the whole novel. If I try to pronounce words as I read them I go very slowly and haltingly. So instead I would make an educated guess what the next few sentences would say, and start saying that, and then quickly read on ahead to myself as my mouth started down the pre-programmed path. This was less than completely successful, as I would anticipate wrongly, and would have to either correct myself in mid-stride, or else (when I feared correcting myself would get my flow of words hopelessly mixed up) I would simply winging my way, no matter that the actual book said it slightly differently. Yes, that was something of an abomination of reading out loud, and striking to me the how I found the other two books noticeably easier. But I don’t think Grandpa noticed too much . . . though he actually did correct my mangled mispronunciation of one word (yeah, he was listening).

In closing, a note to the family back home: Make sure I bring Heidi back with me next weekend. I think Grandpa would really enjoy that.

My sheets better be done now. It’s waaay too late for someone who is trying to catch up on their sleep.

When I came to live with Grandma and Grandpa I came to help Grandpa by taking care of him, and I came to help Grandma by taking care of Grandpa and cooking. Grandma has never enjoyed cooking, and now that her health has declined enough it is physically too tiring for her to cook. Since Grandma never liked to cook she never put much effort into cooking good things to eat. For Grandma, my arrival has meant better eating for her.

For me, cooking is a balancing act. I want to

• Make something I enjoy eating
• Make something Grandma enjoys eating
• Make something Grandpa enjoys eating
• Make something, if possible, that Melinda and Arlan enjoy eating
• Make a variety of good and interesting things to eat
• Make something that doesn’t take very much of my time

This is a balancing act where not all things can be balanced equally. Grandpa likes eating so few things that it is very hard to completely satisfy him. For him I am pretty much reduced to trying to make sure there is a dessert for him on the meals he really doesn’t like.

In the end I primarily balance making something Grandma likes to eat against what doesn’t take a lot of time to make. Grandma doesn’t have refined tastes, so it is actually easy to make her happy. Basically, all she cares for is sweet and sour, meat and mashed potatoes. I have been slowly adjusting what I make for meals to more align with her tastes. Since she has such mundane tastes satisfying her doesn’t take an undue amount of work from me, and she thinks I’m the greatest cook.

I have two basic points of guilt relating to my cooking. After supper I lose what little energy and ambition I have so I try to squeeze in what work I can on my own projects and goals in what part of the afternoon I can get to myself. If I were to get supper on the table at a decent hour I would clean up after lunch, maybe have an hour to myself and then start on supper. It’s hard to get much done in an hour or less, so I usually very deliberately put off working on supper so I can have two or three hours to do something for myself. I don’t start on supper until 5:00 PM and this means supper isn’t served until 6:30-7:00 PM (and of course if I didn’t make such quick and easy suppers I wouldn’t even be able to pull this off).

I feel a bit guilty because this is a blatant act of selfishness. To get something done for myself I put off everyone’s supper. I guess somewhere done inside me I must feel that this might be a legitimate compromise because I don’t feel so guilty that I start supper at 3:30 to get it on the table by 5:30 . . . most of the time. But if I feel it is truly necessary I will.

My other point of minor guilt is that I feel a bit like an accessory to Grandma’s attempt to kill herself by eating. She likes to eat salty, sweet, and fatty foods. As a diabetic with severe heart disease should be eating nothing of these three “food groups”. But Grandma has an elaborate delusion going over what she can and cannot eat and I am feeding it (pun intended).

I make things that taste so good (to her) that not only does she not want to give them up, but she wants to have them every week. Eat and drink today, for tomorrow we may die. I find her relationship (or attitude) toward meat particularly appalling. Grandma’s kidney’s are failing and around a year before I came to live with them her kidney function became so bad she had to give up all meats except fish for awhile. I guess her kidney function recovered to a degree because eventually she returned to eating meat. But since I’ve arrived we’ve started to go hog-wild. Grandma has discovered that I can make meat taste so darn good she don’t want to stop.

It seems I am constantly surprising her with the delicious methods I come up with to prepare food. In truth, I’m doing nothing any moderately trained cook would know as the basics. It all started with a steak Grandma said was in the freezer and maybe I could cook up. Apparently she always cut the meat into thin strips and then broiled it in the oven. It wasn’t a very good cut of meat to begin with (which meant I had to deal with toughness at the start) and I knew broiling often can make meat even tougher. So I marinated the steak for several days and then cooked it whole in some liquid. It turned out much more tasty and tender than her preparation of the meat, and Grandma pronounced that she wanted to have this every week.

That was the beginning. Eventually Grandma got tired of having that particular steak marinate, but she still wanted to have her piece of beef each week. I, knowing that beef was hard on her kidneys and all round not the most healthy thing to be eating, was willing to let it simply drop out of the menu. For awhile I managed to keep the beef to simply a bit in a stir-fry, but soon Grandma got her hankering for a hunk of meat again. So she had me buy a huge chunk of cow which I split for two separate meals and slow cooked the first portion and finished it off in a savory sweet and sour red sauce. One thing you have to give me, I know exactly what Grandma likes to eat.

Grandma was practically walking on air after she tasted that meal. It was pronounced as another meal to have every week.

And now she has decided to add pig to the menu. Last week she asked me if I could find some pork that I thought I could cook in a nice way, and spare ribs was the chosen cut (Grandma considered them sufficiently cheap and tasty). I accomplished the spare ribs with such success we’re having them this week, too.

The cook in me is pleased that Grandma enjoys my cooking so much, but the other part of me knows that as a diabetic with failing kidney’s Grandma should not be eating beef or pork–at the very least she should give those things up, and if she was really wise she would content herself with eating beans and gruel.

But I tell myself it is not my place to tell Grandma what she should eat, so I have kept my mouth shut. Grandma is well read about health foods and health matters so it isn’t as if she doesn’t know what she is doing–whether she is trying to delude herself or not. Grandma is a competent adult, and the grocery money is hers to spend as she pleases, so if she wants to have roast beef, pork spare ribs, and pizza every week no matter the consequences for her health, then we’ll have them. But I know it is a bad decision based upon the enjoyment of passing pleasures.

Grandma likes to eat every week the same things that she like so much lot. This is a convenience to me because it means I must do less thinking about what I cook. Dinner preparation becomes a simple repetition. However, unlike Grandma, I do get tired of the same food over and over again. The cook part of me likes to eat different things, and to experiment with something new. Most of the time I keep to the same old foods because this means I have more time to do the other things that I want. But sometimes I break down and make something different like this past week when I got tired of making pizza pizza pizza every Thursday and instead made pizza roll ups. It took more of my time, and more effort, but I wanted the change.

A few days before the recent big snowstorm Arlan went out one night to dump the compost. There is a deck on the back of the house and as he was going down the rather long flight of stairs he slipped on the ice on the steps. His foot went through the stair railing and snapped two rail spindles like toothpicks. He escaped unhurt.

The next day Grandpa noticed the damage and I explained to him what happened. He promptly began agitating. I wasn’t surprised since by this time I know pretty well how Grandpa’s mind works, but if you think about it it does seem weird. A man who can’t remember how to use the bathroom is considering the possibilities of being liable if someone should get hurt on his back steps. This man who can’t remember how to use the bathroom is giving me elaborate instructions on how to cordon off the back steps so no one can use them and end up suing him if they get hurt.

The concern might not have been completely on target, but it certainly was a thoughtful concern with a thought out solution which one would think would be harder to think about than how one takes a leak in the toilet. Nonetheless, such is the oddity of how the disease works.

****

This morning Grandpa had serious trouble shaving again. He wouldn’t have got through it if I hadn’t been there prompting him along . . . he didn’t get through in any case . . . I had to finish up. I kept trying to prompt him, but he simply tried to shave whatever his eyes rested upon. He started with the newspaper and when he wouldn’t stop at my gentle prompting I took the newspaper away. A little miffed, he gamely started shaving his place-mat. So I finally took his hand with shaver and started him on his cheek. He shaved that for about a minute until his eyes rested on the radio sitting on the corner of the table. His mind thinks, “Hmmmm, I’d like to turn on the radio.” So he begin shaving the radio. I got him to stop, but his eyes kept going back to the radio and he kept returning to try to shave/turn it on.

Grandpa is finding it increasingly hard to cope. Things he used to try to fight his way (or attempt to fight his way) through, he now gives up and starts out by asking me to figure it out for him, or tell him if it is right. Pride is choked out by inability and confusion and just plain exhaustion with fighting with it all. He can turn his radio on 10-20% of the time. The rest of the time he simply tries to unplug it, or adjust the volume and wonder why nothing comes on. Instead of leaving him to his fruitless war I turn it on for him. Cleaning, and dealing with his teeth is another area that is rapidly heading down this path. If somehow he tries to clean and put away his teeth and I’m not there (and he realizes that he is utterly mixed up) he will leave his teeth by the sink and come ask me to “Deal with the mess at the sink.” He is paranoid that someone will break his teeth, which is part of the reason why he was always very reluctant to let anyone else touch his teeth. But now if I bring up the tub and ask him for his teeth so I can take care of them he surrenders his teeth without complaint. I almost think he dreads dealing with cleaning his teeth and trying to figure out if he has done everything right.

Today he had a very humiliating incident. It was lunch time and Grandpa’s older brother Doug was over for lunch. We were eating the leftover pizza-roll things I had made for supper the night before. A few difficult mouth-fulls into the meal Grandpa realized he had taken out his teeth sometime in the morning and it was very hard to eat lunch without his teeth. Once he realized his problem and made clear his need I went to the sink and fetched his teeth and rinsed them. Then I brought them to the table and offered them to him to put on.

But he couldn’t remember how to insert his teeth.

“You put them in upside down?” he asked, turning his top portion the wrong way around. Everyone was watching.

I tried to prompt him but it was one of those situations that all the words in the world would do no good because he didn’t understand what the words meant, at least in relation to the objects he was dealing with. So I tried to start over, taking back the upper section and giving him the bottom portion of his teeth. The bottom portion he inserted in his mouth okay, but when I gave him the top portion again he still couldn’t remember how it worked.

By this point the whole thing wasn’t helped along by the fact that Doug was trying to offer words of encouragement and Grandma was both laughing her head off and trying to give instructions as well. Grandpa started pushing the teeth about on his plate as if trying to get them to scoop up food. I saw this was another dead-end moment, so I picked up the teeth, righted them, and inserted them in Grandpa’s mouth for him.

Grandma felt bad for laughing, and Doug tried to make him feel it was all just fine, but requiring someone else to stick your false teeth in your mouth for you is a pretty low feeling . . . and all the worse when your incompetence is put on display before company.

I think Grandpa was feeling his ailment in particular today. After lunch when he tried to say something and lost the words he asked, “What is wrong with me? What is my problem? What causes it?”

“Your Alzheimer’s’s is what causes it,” I said. “You have Alzheimer’s’s Grandpa.”

Grandpa looked at Doug. “Did you know that?” he said.

“Yes,” Doug said. “I knew that.”

Sometimes I wonder what Doug thinks deep down in his own thoughts as he watches his younger brother slowly lose his mental ability. Doug is well into his 80’s and still exceptionally sound of mind, so he has no danger from the disease himself, but there must be particular sadness watching your younger brother lose everything he had–mentally and physically. In a man’s sort of way I think Doug has a lot of compassion for Grandpa. He comes to visit every week, and is willing to do anything for Grandpa that he asks (even showing him how to pee in the toilet). And Doug comes over and sits right next to Grandpa, which is the sort of thing Grandpa likes. He wants to have people near where he can feel them.

Grandpa has struggled with shaving for a long time. Before I came to care for him he was forcefully switched from a razor to a cordless electric razor both for his own safety when shaving himself, and so if someone else had to shave him it wouldn’t be unduly difficult. Grandpa will usually shave every other day or so, and has good days and bad days. Sometimes it seems like how well he manages with his shaving is a litmus for how the rest of the day will proceed.

Shaving is a struggle for Grandpa–turning on the shaver, using it on his face, and cleaning it when he is done. I try to help him as much as he needs, but not too much more. I try to have mercy on him and fetch the shaver and clean it for him, but for the sake of his dignity I bite my tongue and restrain myself while he fumbles with trying to turn it on, and struggles to actual shave himself. He is intimately aware that turning on the shaver is a pathetically simple thing that he should be able to do and to blantly come in and do it for him feels like something of a put-down, even if it would save him a lot of frustation.

But eventually the cruel realities of life collide head-on with Grandpa’s struggle for dignity. Sometimes for all of his efforts he cannot get the blasted shaver to turn off and must let me help. And finally, yesterday, he couldn’t shave himself.

For months Grandpa has face the intermittent problem of shaving the wrong thing. It started before I was here–the first confusion was, I think, shaving the man in the mirror. That is a funny mistake to witness (and you try very hard not to laugh) but that particular confusion is not very surprising. It’s not a total detachment from reality–some part of his mind has simply flipped around and you simply need to gently coax him back around to shaving not the guy in the mirror but himself. His problem with shaving the right thing has progressed from that point. On his best days he still can shave himself, but on his worst days he now will try to shave objects which have no relation to shaving.

Yesterday morning he said he wanted to shave so I fetched him the cordless shaver and the little table mirrior he uses. I immediately knew this wasn’t going to be a good day because when I set the shaving equipment down in front of him at the kitchen table and then moved something out of the way (maybe it was the sugar bowl) he reached out his hands and said, “Wait . . . I need to . . . reach all the stuff.” He looked across the table as if he saw many things he needed for his shaving.

I directed his attention back to the mirrior and shaver and he followed my prompting but he proceed with the peculiar method of someone who is following instruction that he doesn’t full comprehend, and whose mind is someplace else entirely. Proceeding to prove my observation correct, he picked up the shaver, turned it on, and then took his empty coffee mug and proceeded to shave it.

“Grandpa, that isn’t going to work very well.”

“I know,” Grandpa said, in a matter-of-fact tone that showed he didn’t understand what he was doing, or what I said, at all.

“You’re going to have a hard time finishing you’re shaving that way,” I prompted.

“I’m getting there,” he said, working the shaver head around the mug.

“It’s a mug. A cup, Grandpa. You don’t want to shave that.”

I think he vaugely grasped that I had said a negative, the dreaded “Don’t” but he still didn’t grasp what I was getting at. He rather confusedly put down the mug which I quickly took and removed from his reach (noticing that he had made the exterior of the mug hot by running the clipper blades over it).

“Hey,” Grandpa said. “Where are you–I need–”

“You don’t want to shave that, Grandpa,” I said. “You want to shave your face.”

At that point I think he finally realized he was screwing up, or at least finally knew I thought he was screwing up, even though he still couldn’t figure out all the whys. He stopped and held out the shaver and said woodenly, “You want to shave me?”

“No,” I said. “You can do it. You just need to get started.” So I started the shaver on his cheek and then guided him to using it. For the moment it looked like he was back on track.

I got up from the table to take care of something else in the kitchen, but by the time I reached the counter and turned around to check on Grandpa he had finished half of his cheek and had moved on to shaving the table. “Grandpa, that’s not going to work,” I said.

“Why,” he asked, continuing to meticiously move the shaver around in a circle.

At this point Grandma looked up from her spot at the table and took notice of what was going on, and promptly started laughing. There is nothing that cuts through Grandpa’s confusion faster than laughter. If he knows nothing else, he knows when he is being laughed at. You can carry on a deadpan conversation with him about the most absurd things, and extract him from the most embarrassing situations without fuss if you simply respond as if there was nothing particular unusal about what was going on. But laugh the least little bit and that cuts sure and swift right to Grandpa’s heart. He might not know what, or how, but he knows laughter. I admit that sometimes it is very hard to not laugh, and on occasion I will have to quickly excuse myself from the room to laugh quietly elsewhere until the impulse has faded and I can return to dealing seriously with Grandpa and his troubles. But Grandma cannot control herself as well, and sometimes seems to have no interest in even resisting the urge to laugh at Grandpa. In this case she began to alternately laugh and give him instructions about how and what he was supposed to shave.

Grandpa, of course, couldn’t understand. “What do you mean I’m not supposed to shave this? How–What–But–” And as Grandma continued to laugh and give directions he finally just Gave Up. So I came over and took the shaver, sat down, and shaved his face for him. It stopped Grandma’s laughing, and saved Grandpa from the struggle of trying to figure out how to shave.

Grandpa has suffered from back pain most if not all of his life. As best I understand it, he has a congenital back problem which I think Dad has inherited to some degree. As is the nature of such afflictions, what bothered Grandpa some earlier in his life has now become a much greater problem as his health declines.

Quite often Grandpa suffers from back and hip pain that, along with generally being in pain, makes it exceptionally painful to lift his legs as to get into bed or put on pants. He has increasing difficulty walking and while I don’t think it is all caused by his back problems I have noticed that when he is suffering from worse back pain his walking ability goes down respectively.

Over the past week he has suffered some particularly bad spells. I don’t know if this is simply some happenstance, or if he did something to cause his recent trouble. In his times of agitation or confusion he has a tendency to try to move things that it really isn’t a good idea for an old man to be moving. He very commonly exacerbates his pain with exhaustion and excessive moving about. If he has a bad day when he is really agitated and can’t stop moving about the house by the end of the day he is just about unable to stay upright on his feet and will be clutching at his back and complaining about how he has such a bad backache he is just about out of his mind.

This is all just part of the continual worsening that will eventually end up with Grandpa no longer being able to walk. He has complained to me often about the pain in his hips, especially when I am helping him put on his diaper or pants, but recently he had begun making more comments about his increasingly difficulty walking. He has made comments like, “People tell me to pick up my legs but if I could I would,” and complains that he can’t get his legs to work properly.

Last night he had a particularly bad incident. He went to bed with a backache but when he woke up in the middle of the night needing to go take a leak it must have been worse. He managed to get out of bed but he was so weak and trembling and unable to move his feet forward that he basically couldn’t go nowhere. He obviously had to go to the bathroom bad, and just as obviously couldn’t make it, no chance in the world. He made a lunge-grab for the commode and me, having turned the light beside my bed on and becoming cognizant of Grandpa’s desperate need and wavering unsteady condition, scrambled to help.

I helped him remove the bucket from the commode and hold it close for his business (though somehow he still managed to get some on the carpet) then I put the commode back together and got him back into bed. I cleaned up the mess and went back to bed.

Grandpa got up several more times in the night to go to the bathroom but apparently the pain in his back had subsided, because he made it to the bathroom without exceptional difficulty. Which is not to say he used the bathroom entirely properly every time, but that is a different issue.

I have come to the something of a dawning realization that Grandpa is a picky eater. I guess some part of my mind always associated picky-eating with those naughty little boys and girls, in spite of the fact that we all know picky-eaters come in all sizes. But in case one might forget that, Grandpa is here to remind me.

Grandpa is a picky eater, but his problem is exacerbated by the fact that he has false teeth which really should have been replaced years ago. This makes a good number of foods unpalatable for Grandpa simply because they are difficult or impossible to chew. So Grandpa doesn’t like anything difficult to chew, and he doesn’t really care for Italian food, and he doesn’t really care for stir-fry or any ethnic food really of any type. When it comes down to it, there are few things Grandpa really likes for a main course. Mashed potatoes, meatloaf, roast turkey, stuffing . . . that just about summarizes his scope of “good meals.”

Of course we can’t have the two or three meals Grandpa likes in continuous succession so that means Grandpa must suffer with many meals he’s not really happy with. Compounding the problem of Grandpa’s eating habits is his difficulty keeping a respectable weight on his old bones. He hovers around 125 lbs and pretty nearly is a bag of shriveled bones. We have standing orders from the doctor to feed him whatever he will eat, no matter how unhealthy it will be, just to keep some weight on him and I wouldn’t be surprised if when Grandpa finally croaks (in the end) it will be from failure to eat enough.

I am constantly trying to get Grandpa to eat. Every time he has a cup of coffee I offer him something to eat. “Would you like a muffin with that? A cookie? A donut?” Often enough he isn’t hungry and doesn’t want anything, but I can usually get him to eat at least something in between meals. Still, even with his sweets he is picky. He gets tired of donuts, cookies, muffins, and chips. He gets tired of them, and yet at the same times it seems like he can eat such an amount that another person would get fat and still he gains not a pound. Everything he eats seems to vanish away inside him.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if his every eating whim was catered too. Would he gain some weight? Grandpa’s two most favorite foods are chocolate cake and pie, but he will happily eat any baked chocolate dessert, any for him we never have enough of any of these treasured foods. Today I took the time to whip him up a brownie mix and that turned into an example of how much better he eats when he is served the foods that are truly near and dear to his heart.

The brownie’s were done before supper, so since it was an hour until supper I asked him if he would like a piece of dessert with his cup of coffee. Since it was brownie’s (which was a freshly baked chocolate dessert and so constituted one of his favored things to eat) he readily agreed and I cut him a nice sized piece to eat. After eating a decent supper I offered him more dessert which he eagerly accepted, along with a comfortable serving of ice cream. Then, after he finished all that he asked for more more dessert. So I gave him another smaller piece of brownie along with more ice cream. That is Grandpa eating hearty. That is not how Grandpa normally eats.

Since he has such few pleasures in life I don’t begrudge him his favored foods, however unhealthy. By the time you’re nearly eighty who cares how many donuts, cakes, and pies you eat? For the sake of everyone else in the house I can’t pander to his preference in meals because the rest of his would probably go out of our minds. But I wish I could give him his desserts more often because his face positively lights up when he learns that there is cake or pie on the menu. That is something to look forward too. However, it is a hard fact of life that with everything else calling at my limited time I can only occasionally squeeze in even a measly store bought pie or cake mix.

Grandpa savors every one.