I remember the first time I realized that something was wrong with my dad. It was 2004, when I called to give him the good news that I passed the California Marriage & Family Therapist licensing exam.
“Hey Dad, I passed my exam. That was the last test. I’m licensed now!”
My father, who had always been so interested in the details of my life, responded by telling me random facts about Chinese military fighter craft. My mother took the phone from him and said he wasn’t feeling well.
I’ve always been proud of my dad. He served first in World War II in Army Special Intelligence in Germany and later in Korea. He earned a civil engineering degree from Cornell University and was part of the team that designed The Great California Aqueduct. After that, he went on to earn a master’s, get his law degree, put my mother through law school, and open a law firm with her. He was always the smartest person in the room, and yet he chose not to flaunt this. His sense of humor put everyone at ease.
My dad enjoyed his career, but he always said his calling from God was to be a father. He married late in life and didn’t become a father until he had me at 45. Whenever I’d get discouraged, my dad would mention this, exhorting me to “have faith.” We may have had differing opinions about religion, but I always had faith in him.
When he became a father, he devoted himself to our family. He was the one to pick us up from school when we were sick and take us to the doctor. He was at every soccer game and karate match. He was the homework police. While many men put career first and kids second, he refused to cave to societal pressure. (I guess you don’t need to prove your manhood after fighting Nazis.) He knew what was truly important; his family was everything to him.
My dad had always been my rock. Nothing seemed to faze him, and he had an incredible sense of right and wrong; I could always count on him to be my moral compass. He acted as confidant and adviser, friend and father. Somehow he did it all with an incredible sense of humor and optimism. Then Alzheimer’s insidiously chipped away at my rock, hollowing him out until all that remained was the body of the man I loved and relied upon.
When I was told of his diagnosis, my heart sank. I was personally acquainted with Alzheimer’s because his mother had Alzheimer’s. She was bedridden and was not able to mentally function. She didn’t recognize my father and at the end couldn’t even open her eyes. My grandfather cared for her in their home. On the long drives to my grandparents’ house, I used to contemplate how hard it must be for my dad to see his mother like that. Years later, I found out just how hard it really is.
I remember that there was a period of time that he was still Dad. For a while, he understood that he was losing his mind — just like his mother had. How painful. How frightening. But then he slipped further, and the horror of losing his mind was also chipped away.
From time to time, flashes of his former self would appear. The Irish twinkle in his eye (that my son Connor also has) would return. His intelligence; his sense of humor; his love for me. I gratefully soaked in each occurrence and mentally cataloged them, always fearing this would be the last time I caught a glimpse of my real father, the man he used to be.
Every year without fail he would call me on my birthday and regale me with stories about the day of my birth. My last birthday, I had to call him, and this time I told him the stories he had told me for years. It was if it was the first time he had heard any of them. He didn’t even understand he was the “dad” I was talking about in the stories. I wondered if there was anything left of him to be chipped away.
The next year, a couple of weeks before my birthday, I got a call from my younger sister. It was the call I had been dreading for years.
It was time to come home to Georgia.
My father died at home, surrounded by his loving wife of 44 years and his children. He received his Last Rites. I had never imagined death could be a relief, but it was. It was a relief to all of us. To him, to my mom, to my siblings, and to me.
I spent the first several months following his death coping with the trauma of watching him die. There was nowhere I wanted to be other than at his bedside, but that experience came at an extensive and excruciating psychological cost.
Then one day it hit me. His death was difficult, but the years of his slow decline into full Alzheimer’s were much harder than his death.
I realized that as Alzheimer’s chipped away parts of him, I adjusted to the new normal. After each decline, he would plateau for a bit, and each time I would tell myself that it wasn’t that bad. Then another piece of him would fall away, like a chunk of a glacier falling into the ocean, and again, I would get used to the latest, lesser version of what was once my dad.
In this moment of realization, I thought of all the parts of him that Alzheimer’s had taken from him. Parts that I hadn’t even cataloged were gone. It wasn’t until he was dead that I could evaluate the amount of damage that had been inflicted as the years passed.
First, it took his ability to remember the name for things.
Then his short-term memory.
His sense of time.
His sense of humor.
My name.
Me.
Him.
When he died, I was able to get my dad back again. The happy memories of when he was younger and healthy returned. I found myself telling a friend one of his stories and realized that I hadn’t even mentioned my dad to anyone in years. It had been too painful to talk about him. I had shut down and tried to compartmentalize my grief because I couldn’t explain who he had become without the pain overwhelming me, but once I accepted his death, I could reach back into my memory bank and enjoy better memories of who he was back when he was healthy.
This will be my third Father’s Day without my dad, but I am closer to him now than I was in the last few years that he was alive. I’m able to smile and remember the good times. Not going to lie; I still cry when reliving those memories, but they are there. The good times exist again.
Alzheimer’s doesn’t have my dad anymore. My happy memories do. He is whole again. He is loving, funny, and strong. He has returned as my rock, the man he truly is. I can clearly see what he stands for. How much he enjoyed being my father. How much I enjoyed being his daughter.
When I look at my two sons, I see my father’s traits in them and I smile in recognition. Being a parent now, I better appreciate the depth of my dad’s love and pride for me and my brother and sister. I hope my kids see in me my dad’s pure joy of parenting. And in their recognition of my love for them, my father lives on.
Caroline Madden, PhD is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and the co-author of When a Spouse Loses a Parent: What to Say & What to Do. Follow her on Twitter: @CMaddenMFT