Road Trip w/ Mom and Dad

This was sent to me by my oldest sister Kathy. She took a road trip recently with my parents. This is what she had to say:

October 2008--Road Trip

I spent my two week fall break from teaching school taking my parents on a road trip to visit family. I drove my car to Mesquite where my sister Michelle lives with her husband and three kids. The next day, Michelle, Seth, baby Eli, and I drove to Gilbert, AZ where our parents live. Mom has diabetes from obesity and can barely walk. Dad has moderate Alzheimer's. Michelle and kids stayed at their home and visited with our sister Krista, who also lives in Gilbert with her husband and children.

I drove my parents to Las Luna, NM, a 7 hour drive, to visit my youngest brother Curtis, his wife Megan and their baby Ethan. This would be the first long trip for my dad since he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. The 2 day visit was pleasant. I was surprised that Mom agreed to go out to dinner in "Old Towne" in Albuquerque with all of us and Megan's parents. Mom usually doesn't want to go places because it is hard for her to walk and get out of chairs. We all had a lovely dinner together at a Mexican Restaurant. After the dinner, we waited by a fireplace with wonderful smelling pinon wood crackling in the fire, as Curtis went to get the car. A fireplace is one of Mom's favorite things, so it made the half hour trip there even more worth it.

All this time on the trip, Dad was pretty quiet. He used to tell stories from his childhood, over and over. But not any more. Once in a while, he would read a road sign out loud---which amazes me how well he can see without glasses, now that he has had lasik surgery. Only once did he ask where we were going.

Dad was really cute with Michelles' baby and Curtis' baby. He whistles a Beethoven sonata or makes funny squeaky noises or quacking noises as he holds the babies. When we would hand him one of the babies, his eyes would light up. They don't cry when they are given to Grandpa. They smile and pat his face. It is a wondrous thing to see.

I am pretty sure he knows who I am when I come to visit, even though several months go by between my visits. Last time, he asked me if I still taught school. This time, he didn't say much. But one night, we were sitting in Curtis' living room and I was hemming my pants. Dad was sitting there quietly, when all of sudden he said," Well Kathy, how are you doing?" I said, " I am just fine, Dad, how are you?" Not much more was said, but it was a nice moment. It was like he was saying, "Oh there you are!"

As we were getting ready to leave Las Lunas, I put a few sacks of things on the floor next to Dad's seat in the back. One sack held cookies. Dad seems to have a real craving for cookies lately. It used to be ice cream, but now it's cookies. I had taken him to Walmart with me a couple of days earlier, and when we got to the cookie aisle, his eyes lit up. I asked him which kind he liked and he replied, "All of them!" Anyway, we left Las Lunas for the return trip to Gilbert. After awhile, I asked Dad to find the cookies. He rummaged around the sacks on the floor and just couldn't find them. Mom was getting rather impatient with him. Finally I asked him to hand me each sack. I was driving, so when he handed me a sack, I put it on my lap. He put all the sacks on my lap except for the one with the cookies. They were creating a mountain between me and the steering wheel. I asked, "Are there any more sacks?" He held up the cookie sack, "Just this one." Hurray, he found the cookies! It is funny that he picked all the other sacks first. We stopped a few minutes later for a break. Mom went to use the restroom first and I stayed in the car with Dad. He leaned over to me and said, "Mom gets so cranky!" It surprised me because he doesn't seem to remember from moment to moment, and a bit of time had passed since she had gotten frustrated with him for not being able to find the cookies. He used to make the same comment from time to time when I have visited with them in the past. He used to say that he just lets it go because he knows she comes from a German background and her father was very cranky. So this time I said to Dad, "Well maybe that's because she's German." He replied, "Oh?"

Throughout the whole trip, Dad wore only one pair of shoes--shiny brown leather "church" shoes. When we first left Gilbert, I commented that Dad would be more comfortable in sneakers. Mom said that he insists on wearing his church shoes. So off we went, church shoes and all. After the Las Lunas trip, we stayed overnight in Gilbert and then drove two and half hours north to Prescott, AZ where my sister Kim lives with her husband and five children. Their sixth child--their oldest boy Zach-- is on a mission in Tennessee for the next two years. The day after we arrived in Prescott, Kim took Michelle, her two little boys, myself and Dad to site see in downtown Prescott. We parked and walked about two blocks. After one block, I asked Dad if he knee felt Ok. He has knee problems. He said it felt alright. In the middle of the second block, he started limping and asked if we could sit down. We were almost to the ice cream parlor, so I encouraged him along until we got inside the parlor and sat down. By then, he was dragging one leg along. After we had our ice cream, he seemed to have recover some. Kim went to get the car and we waited behind the parlor so he wouldn't have to walk back. A few days later, I asked him if his shoes pinched his feet. He said, "Yeah, they kinda do." I don't know if his knee was really giving him problems, or if it was his squished feet.

One of my biggest concerns about this long trip was Dad getting disoriented because we stayed at three different houses. He did pretty well over all. He seemed to get the most confused at Kim's house. Her house is quite large. I think too, he was very tired. There were 7 seven children and 6 adults in that house so the noise level was pretty high. We stayed there two days. Somebody told me he couldn't find the toilet so he used the bathroom sink. I don't know if he did or not. (That would be a little tricky--he'd have to stand on his tip-toes). I have heard of people with Alzheimer's Disease doing crazy things like that though.

The last leg of the trip was the 8 hour drive to Michelle's house in Mesquite, NV. I drove so she could sit next to her baby. The baby fussed a little and had only one screaming fit. Dad seemed to handle it OK. We stopped a couple extra times to walk the baby. Michelle lives next door to her husband's aunt's house. They are on a mission in New York this year, so they let us stay at their house. It was good for Dad to have a quiet place to rest and recover from all the visiting. It is interesting that at home, he gets up early in the morning, gets dressed and sits in the living room in his recliner. He didn't do that at any of the houses we stayed at. Maybe mom told him to stay in bed. However, at the Aunt's house he wandered around in his underwear a couple of times. I woke up and took him back to his bed. I wonder if when he got back to Gilbert, if he started "recliner sleeping" again?

I did notice that Dad gets annoyed with "frenetic" children. Michelle has a three year old boy names Seth. He is an active little boy. We were sitting in Michelle's living room and Seth was rolling around on the floor making 3 yr. old noises. Dad picked up a sneaker that was near his chair and leaning over so he was eye level with Seth, he raised the shoe and waved it back and forth in front of Seth like he was trying to swat a fly. He had a wide-eyed intense look on his face like he wanted to really swat him. Seth thought it was funny and burst into giggles. Mom asked him if he was really going to hit him with the shoe, and he said he was thinking about it. But everything calmed down after that. Mom and Dad stayed over at the Aunt's house most of the time from then on. I have seen him try to stop Krista's kids from running around by holding one with both hands at the shoulders and just stop them when they are running. I think the quick movements and noise gets to him. I can't blame him, sometimes it gives me a headache too.

While at Michelle's, we had a family baptism for her eight year old son, Alex. Our brother Jeff came from Enterprise with his wife and 2 sons. His oldest daughter, Crystal, is away at college, and their other daughter Jessica had to work. I don't know if Dad remembered any of them, but he let everyone hug him, and didn't question who they were. I think he recognizes people but can't remember their names.

The morning that I was getting ready to drive back to Bountiful, Mom got upset with Dad. They were in the kitchen and Mom asked him to get her purse on the counter. There were sacks of items on the counter too, but the purse was obvious. Dad went over and held up each sack and Mom said, "No, get the purse". He just couldn't find it. Finally Mom got up and went over to Dad, tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Here is the purse, right here. I think you did that on purpose because you held up everything else instead!" At first I thought, he was just disoriented. But then as I was driving back to Utah, I wondered if he did do that on purpose. Maybe it was a passive aggressive thing. It seems as though Dad is Mom's personal "fetch and carry guy". I can understand that she needs help getting off a soft couch or getting her shoes on. But she can get up from hard chairs and recliners. She can get up to get things for herself, but tells Dad to do it instead. I wonder if deep down he resents that? For years he has been there for her "beck and call". After he lost his drivers license, he lost his independence too. The only thing he is allowed to do on his own is get the mail. He gets lost finding the refrigerator, but he can find the mailbox. When we were in Gilbert, between trips, I wanted to see if he could find the mailbox still. I asked him to show Michelle and I where it was because she would be picking up the mail while we were in Las Lunas. We followed him across the street and around the corner to the community mailbox. He went right up to the correct box and put the key in. Then we followed him back to the house. He said, "The door has birdies on it." Their house looks like all the others on the street--except their screen door has "cactus wren" decorations. Years before he told me that I could find their house easy by looking for the cactus wren. This time I asked him what kind of birds those were, he just said, "Birdies". Mom still allows him to go get the mail by himself, and he always comes back.

I can see the progression of the Alzheimer's in the changes that have happened since my last visits. Last Christmas we were in Mesquite. Dad and I were sitting on lawn chairs in the front yard enjoying the nice weather. Ever five minutes or so he would ask me how many miles away was Gilbert and the name of the town we were in. This time, he didn't ask at all.

He used to go on and on about childhood experiences. Now he doesn't talk about that at all either. In that sense, I am glad that he doesn't talk about it. Only because he seemed to remember the most negative things and talk about that. When all of us kids were growing up, Dad told us reams of stories about his childhood on a farm in northern Montana. His stories were fascinating and fun. He did talk about how his Dad was harsh with his boys and once he used a switch on his legs that made them bleed. But overall he talked positively about his Dad and his family. A few of his negative stories had to do with his older brothers that tormented him. Even those stories were kind of funny. Over the last few years, as Dad began to repeat things over and over again, he would talk about negative things about his Dad. That disturbed me to hear that. The "switch incident" happened when he was about six or seven. All the wonderful things that happened in his life after that seemed to be forgotten and all that he talked about was how awful his Dad was and he hoped he was rotting in hell. More than once I asked Dad if he had forgiven him for what he did. He said, "Oh yeah I forgave him years ago." Yet, he would tell the same story over and over. Another time I said, "Wow Dad, that was just awful what your dad did to you. How can you ever forgive him for that?" He said, "I just put it out of my mind and don't dwell on it." Then an hour or so later he would tell me the "Switch Story" again. When his knee recently began to hurt because it had been too long between treatments, he would blame the pain on something his Dad did to him. I told him once, "Grandpa didn't kick your knee, you hurt it in Simi while doing yard work in our backyard." He said, "oh?". I repeated some of his negative stories to his older sister, Barbara. She told me that yes, her Dad was harsh with his boys, but not very often. She had very positive childhood memories and was sad that he couldn't remember all the many good times they had. I hear that is typical with Alzheimer's Disease. So now that he doesn't talk very much at all, I am glad that those bad thoughts have gone to rest.