My father and Alzheimer

My father’s memory began to retreat on the afternoon of Feb. 24th, 2002. That day Canada was playing the United States in the gold medal hockey game at the Salt Lake City Olympics, and our family had convened at my younger sister’s house to watch. It was our preferred venue for big games: Stanley Cup playoff games involving the Leafs, the occasional World Cup tournament and, of course, this, the Olympics. Ramping up the national pride stakes was the then-recent scandal involving Canadian figure skating pair Jamie Salé and David Pelletier and the infamous “French judge,” who’d colluded with the head of the French skating organization to deny them a gold medal. In addition, the Canadian women’s hockey team had three days before come back (improbably, in the face of a favoured American team and terrible officiating from a home-town referee) to win the gold in women’s hockey. From a Canadian clannish-family, hockey-oriented view, the drama couldn’t have been more perfect.

My father — and my memory of this is perversely clear — was sitting in his usual seat at my sister’s, a green upholstered armchair to the left of the kitchen door. I was on my less-than-comfortable good-luck kitchen chair jammed beside the couch, with a loonie under my ass. This was an innovation seized on by my sister; it was meant to mimic the loonie that had been buried under the centre red line at the Olympic arena. At first, neither loonie seemed to be working. The Americans had a 1-0 lead, despite being outplayed. But then Paul Kariya scored for Canada, and when teammate Jarome Iginla scored less than four minutes later, my sister’s living room — and presumably the nation — went wild.

“Is this happening now?” my father asked.

The dawning of something irreversible

Everyone looked at him. A little switch had been thrown; it hung there in the air, the dawning of something begun that could not be reversed.

“What do you mean now, Abe?” asked my brother-in-law.

“Isn’t this a tape of an old game, something that happened awhile ago? I think I remember it awhile ago, no? What is this?”

“It’s live, Abe,” my brother-in-law said. “It’s the Olympics, in Salt Lake City, you know. This is the gold medal game. So it’s happening right now.”

“No kidding,” my father said. He didn’t look at all disturbed, just mildly bemused. He was regarding the screen with a certain fixation, but not one fixed precisely on the game. It was as though he was seeing through the TV to another locale, hearing a private voice we weren’t privy to. “Isn’t that a kick in the head?”

It got a big laugh: my father the cute, my father the impish. He still has it, our collective inner voice said. He’s just getting old. He’s 80, what do you expect? Old people forget things. The important point was that the Canadians were scoring goals in bunches now, and winning the Olympic gold.

But I knew.

They came with increasing regularity after that, the moments when we knew. They always followed the same pattern: an awkward hiatus of disorientation on his part, that fugue-like, fog-like detachment from reality, followed by a question, bemusement, then the whole suspension of time rescued by a clever wisecrack pulled from the bag of tricks that was his sense of humour and that seemed, even in desperation, be inexhaustible. You see, my sisters and I would shake our heads at each other when it happened, he’s always there, he’s in there. He was a dapper, lightning-fast man, not so much slowing down as bobbing and weaving now in circles.

There was the first time he forgot who I was. We’d gone for lunch at the Gladstone Hotel on Queen Street, a favourite street of his, the one he’d grown up on, and he’d correctly guessed that we’d been there before to check it out for a brunch my sister was throwing. I did what I usually did when we were in “old Toronto” — asked him about his early childhood, and he regaled me with stories of his older brother, who had a habit of lowering him into the window wells of the Ukrainian church a few doors down from their store when my father tagged along too relentlessly, and leaving him there. On the drive home I took him up Shaw Street, along the edge of Trinity Bellwoods Park, where he’d played ball — his self-explanatory nickname was Bunty — past a church that had originally been the synagogue he’d attended on High Holidays. He was in fine form, remembering the ravine that had been filled in, and the precise view you got looking out of the synagogue windows at the park. It was dusk by now, and it had started to rain, and in the car beside me on the way home he was peaceful and quiet. And then at one point he looked over at me and said, “Excuse me, but who am I driving with?”

“It’s between you and me”

“Jay,” I said. “Your son.”

“Jay Teitel?”

“The one and only.”

“Son of a bitch. I apologize profusely,” he said. “It was just that looking at you from this angle, I didn’t recognize you for a second. I’m sorry.”

“Dad, it’s okay,” I say.

"No, it isn’t.”

When we pulled into his apartment parking lot, he caught my arm before I got out. “Jake,” he said, “when we go up please don’t tell your mother what happened before. That I didn’t know who you were.”

I felt like weeping. “Don’t worry, Dad. It’s between you and me.”

We went up the elevator like that, me with my arm on his shoulders, still feeling like weeping. And at the door to the apartment he strode in ahead of me, and greeted my mother with: “Shosh, you’ll never guess what just happened! I was driving in the car with this guy for two hours before I realized who he was.”

Thus is pathos laid low, on the cutting edge of a laugh. And everyone did laugh — me included. But I knew.

There was the first time he was rude to a stranger. This was a true first: Except when he was provoked by injustice or maybe bad driving, my father had always been the most civil and affable of men. It happened when he was with my mother, and her degree of mortification was a measure of its uniqueness. She’d gone with him to the program he went to each day for people with conditions like his, when one of the other “clients” at the program, a garrulous old guy, sat down beside them at lunch and started bragging about the myriad virtues of his progeny.

“And of course my son,” he said at one point, “has the biggest rice-importing business in Canada.”

My father just looked at him. (“Your father just stared at him,” was how my mother put it, incredulous.) “I couldn’t care less about your son,” he said. “And furthermore, I can’t stand rice.”

A punchline with a horrible price

The perfect putdown, perfectly deserved. What a character! But it came with a price, this punchline, and the price was our knowledge.

There was the first night I got a phone call to come to their place. I’d gotten into the habit of putting a pair of shoes and socks by my bed for a year or so, but the phone ringing at 4 a.m. was still breath-stopping. It was the doorman at their building. My father, unable to sleep for maybe the thousandth time since he’d started to decline, had woken my mother up one too many times, and she’d fled the appartment for the refuge of a nearby Tim Hortons. My father had appeared in the lobby, bereft and in his pyjamas, and given the doorman my number. I asked the doorman if I could speak to him. On the phone he sounded afraid and worried but remarkably clear-headed — as though the moment of crisis had leapfrogged the plaque in his neurons. He and my mother had had a fight, he said, although he couldn’t remember or divine what about. Could I possibly come and help them work it out?

A half-hour later I was there with my older sister (my younger sister did the Tim Hortons detail with my mother). We had a pleasant enough breakfast with him, although he kept asking about my mother, who, we explained, just needed a day and possibly a night off. Sometimes it happened with married couples. But married couples worked these things out, my father said. Very true, we said, but married couples sometimes needed an intermediary. He calmed down enough to go into the den to sit down, and my sister left to rendezvous with my mother and other sister to decide what would happen that night. Five minutes later my father came out of the den and demanded to see his wife and, in the bargain, to know who I was. I told him I was his son, and he told me I was full of shit (the second time he’d ever sworn at me in my life). He told me he wanted me the hell out of his apartment, and grabbed me by the arm to show me out (the first time he’d ever touched me forcefully in my life). I said I wasn’t going anywhere, feeling weirdly light-headed (what could I do other than lean against him?) and that if he wanted, I’d call my mother, his wife, and she could attest to my identity. I got my mother on my sister’s cellphone and handed it to my father.

“There’s a guy here, a jerk, who claims he’s my son,” he said.

He listened, glaring at me with suspicion. “How can he be my son? He’s half a head taller than I am.” He listened some more. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “If this shmegegge is my son, I’m not having any more children.”

The last phone call

And there was the last time I got a phone call to come to their place. The phone rang at 4:30 a.m. this time, and it wasn’t the doorman on the other end of the line but the police. They’d received a 911 call from my mother — apparently my father had woken up in the middle of the night and started to get dressed to “go to work.” My father’s live-in caregiver, a lovely young woman who was devoted to my dad, had caught him going out the door and suggested that he wear his MedicAlert bracelet. My father, thinking she was trying to stop him, had become violent, threatening her and my mother, and picking up a vase and breaking it. The two women had locked themselves in a bedroom and, as previously instructed, called the police.

When I got to the apartment my sisters were already there, and my father was sitting calmly on a couch in the living room. The police officers (one male, one female, both very young) were basically hiding in the kitchen, so he wouldn’t see them and become agitated. They couldn’t force him to go to the hospital, they told us; the only thing they could do legally was arrest him, which they were dead set against. “The last thing in the world I’m doing,” said the female constable, “is putting my hands on an 85-year-old man.”

I went into the living room. My father was sitting between my sisters.

"How are you doing, Dad?” I said.

“Fine, now that you three are here,” he said. “There seems to be a bit of commotion going on.”

“Dad,” said my younger sister, “I don’t know if you remember, but you have a doctor’s appointment at the hospital this morning. For a checkup, and some tests.”

“Well, if you say so.”

“I do,” she said. “So should we go?”

He had always known

He called goodbye — ever loyal, ever polite — to my mother, who was in the kitchen with the police, and we took the elevator down to the lobby and outside. Dawn hadn’t broken yet, but even in the dark the police car parked in the driveway circle was impossible to miss. My father did a little double take between us, a classic buck and weave, a vaudevillian whoa. “I’m not getting in that,” he said. No, we assured him, that was for someone else; he was coming in my sister’s car, just to the hospital, for his appointment. Good, he said, and came peaceably. But it was at that moment, when he resisted the sight of the black and white car, that the realization started to dawn — the realization that would grow over the course of the long day to follow, which he tolerated with remarkable stoicism and good humour: the waiting in the emergency room to see the social worker, the controlled frenzy to find a bed for him in a locked facility, the countless interviews by countless young doctors, the walks around the hospital, which he was convinced was a cross between his old high school and Eaton’s (not a bad likeness at that), the three lunches he ate (peppy throughout), his hilarious, flirtatious routine in the shopworn psych ward that night that got everyone — the charmed nurses and my sisters included — laughing uncontrollably, the way you laughed at Jackie Mason or Robin Williams at their best, his perfect equanimity when we left, the gratitude he called out to us from beside his single bed, and the restraints they had to put him in an hour and a half later when he got agitated and belligerent, the sedation that rendered him a Parkinsonian and mumbling shell of himself.

Caring for aging parents can take more than just an emotional toll. Read Caregiving: Big career impact for tips on how to balance your career with caregiving

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of More