New Progress

The dad saga continues to unfold.

Today we had a breakthrough. Generally, when people tell my dad he has dementia, he uses profanity to dismiss their remarks. If you gently remind him that he doesn’t know his address or have a driver’s license, he comes up with explanations. This morning, he finally listened and accepted the diagnosis.

He was trying to start his day, which took two hours of OUR time. He started asking me things about his condition, so I laid it on him. I said his doctors believed he had vascular dementia. I said he wouldn’t improve. I told him he would continue to get worse, in discrete steps. I told him the worst part: it shortens lives. I said he could be looking at a couple of years.

I don’t believe in soft-soaping people about their medical problems. It’s disrespectful, and it’s a way of controlling them and ignoring boundaries. He needs to know his time is short. He needs to accept salvation and understand his limitations.

I don’t want him to go to bed thinking he has all the time in the world and then die in his sleep and wake up in hell. It’s not a joke or a fable. It’s real, and I know people who are there right now.

Oddly, he wasn’t disturbed at all by the notion that he might not be here in a couple of years. He was much more upset by the increasing difficulty of functioning. He said he might as well kill himself.

He doesn’t mean that. For some reason, he and my sister are incapable of self-harm. Neither of them could seriously entertain the idea. But he’s not happy about his situation.

He still speaks of God, heaven, and hell with total contempt. He thinks it’s all a fairy tale. He says that if heaven exists, he’ll go because he’s a good person. He doesn’t think about bad things he’s done. And being “good” won’t keep you out of hell. You have to accept Jesus.

I’m happy for any improvement in his attitude. If he can accept his diagnosis and prognosis, he can also accept salvation eventually.

I also tried to make him understand that his life can’t necessarily be made easy or comfortable. We may not be able to get rid of his back pain or maintain his mobility, and I can’t promise him he won’t be bored. He has been blessed so far, but God never promised us we wouldn’t have chronic pain or boredom. He may end up in a home where he lacks stimulation. Society provides mechanisms for caring for the demented, but it doesn’t guarantee their entertainment. And entertaining demented people can be difficult or impossible due to their inner limitations.

After he’s gone, I will not accept involvement with other unsaved people, except to tell them about God and move on. I will not become intimate with people who reject God, and I won’t partner with them. I’ve had enough. My relationship with my dad will be the last unequal yoking in my life. And I’m the kind of person who means it when he says things like that. Ask anyone I’ve cut off. I never go back.

A buddy of mine started turning to God, and then he got into a relationship with a Jewish lady. It’s a real mess. She has a mentally ill son who complains and talks about suicide all the time. He’s in an institution right now. My buddy can’t get them to consider prayer and church, which would help. It will never happen. Many Jews conflate Christianity with Nazism, which is insane. You can’t break the spell with persuasion, because it’s supernatural.

Missionary dating doesn’t work. It’s disobedient, so you can’t expect God to honor your choice. Also, he will not violate free will and force an unbeliever to change.

My friend cuts his girlfriend’s grass and helps her out in many ways. He comforts her. He had to cancel a visit to Florida because her son was committed. He has been holding her hand for a week or two, but she won’t take his advice. It’s like he’s watching a ship sink and he can’t do anything to help. Meanwhile his own life is on hold, as if it has no importance.

This is what happens when you yoke yourself to people who reject Jesus. Me, I’m all done with unequal yokings. I can’t take it any more.

On top of all these issues, she appears to do absolutely nothing for him. He was laid up a while back, and she was nowhere in sight. He had to fly to Mexico for dental surgery before that. He went alone.

Here’s what happens when you have vascular dementia: you get worse in steps. You lose the ability to recognize familiar people and perform basic tasks such as bathing. Then you die. It may come from a stroke or heart attack, or your brain may just shut down from lack of blood flow. My dad is several years into an illness that usually takes 5 years to kill. My guess is that blood pressure pills are the only things that have kept him alive. Statins don’t help.

I don’t know whether my dad will wither over a period of weeks or die suddenly. I don’t know whether he’ll last long enough to go into assisted living. I can’t plan that well. I can’t say, “I’ll need to move him into a home on September 5.” Maybe he’ll go to a home, or maybe the coroner will pull up to the house one day and take him. I have to look at the possibilities and plan as well as I can. I count on prayer to make it work.

Honestly, a sudden departure would be easier on everyone concerned. In a facility, he will be reminded of his status every day. He will be powerless. He will be surrounded by people who don’t care about him all that much, and he’ll know it. His desires won’t matter much at all. He’ll do things on their schedule, at their convenience.

I’m not afraid of death. Not even a little bit. I’ve seen a lot of it. You miss people, but losing them doesn’t ruin your life, especially when they go after a long period of sickness or infirmity. When a person has been ill long enough, his relatives will start to feel that death is better than what he is going through, and when he goes, they will feel relief as well as grief. People don’t like to admit that, but it’s true. Suddenly the house doesn’t smell like diapers. You can leave for a day and not worry. You can get rid of the ugly, depressing medical equipment. You can sleep a whole night. You no longer worry about the patient’s future.

When my mom died, my aunt and I put her clothes in the car the next day and gave them away. BANG. Like that. That’s how you do it. You don’t sit around in your moldy, cobwebbed shrine and worship the dead.

I can’t relate to people who are afraid of death, so maybe I don’t understand how they feel when I write bluntly about it. Maybe they think I’m inhuman. Fear of death is a symptom of immaturity, though. It’s not something we should cater to and encourage.

My dad will never drive again. He will never ride the bicycle I bought him. We will never go fishing again. We will never have another real conversation. We are done traveling together. There isn’t much to hope for while he lives. All I want is to see him receive salvation. That will satisfy me.

I don’t like to think about his wasted potential. How different our lives should have been. But if he makes it to heaven, a hundred years from now we won’t be concerned about the things that happened here on earth.

At least he’s starting to acknowledge his mortality. That’s a start.