I Transgress in my Sleep

The publication date on this post is approximate. It was published months after it was written.

Every day, you learn something obvious which was somehow concealed from you in the past.

This morning while I was praying, I heard my dad yelling from downstairs. Our house is large, and he has a huge bedroom suite on the south end, on the first floor. My bedroom is on the second story at the extreme north. Perhaps you are reading something into that, and if so, you are right. There are things I don’t want to hear or smell.

I use a white noise machine when I sleep, because the crows here show up at dawn every day and have a party in the yard. It also helps block incredibly loud TV noise from downstairs. I was praying with my machine still on, and I also had Julie True music playing on my phone. I was not in an optimal position to hear people yelling downstairs, and this was by design.

When I realized my dad was hollering, I walked out to see what was up. The day had not even started, he was already angry with me, and I had done nothing wrong.

He complained that he hadn’t been able to find me. I always sleep in the same room, because there isn’t one farther away from his bedroom, and it had probably taken less than a minute for me to respond to his shouting. He was very upset with me.

He wanted to know if I had “a plan” for breakfast. This is his way of saying, “I want you to take me to a restaurant to eat.” He never asks me to take him. For some reason, he always wants me to say it’s my idea. He asks about twice a day, and obviously, I say no most of the time. You can’t blow $20,000 a year on restaurant food, and even if I could, I don’t want to spend half of every day in restaurants.

Dining out with a dementia patient is not a wonderful experience. I park. I walk to the restaurant door. I turn and wait, in the sun or rain. My dad gradually makes his way to me. We go in and sit. He asks what I recommend. If I’m trying to read the menu to see what I want, he bombards me with questions, most of which he could answer for himself. “What do they have here?” He asks that while holding a menu in his hand, and he seriously expects an answer. “Veal piccata. Is that any good?” “Eggplant. Have I had that before?” You can imagine what it’s like, trying to choose something while this is going on.

While the food is being prepared, he always complains. He gets very angry. “Damn!” “They’re slow here!” “They must have sent the staff home!” He does this every time.

He always demands that I provide a topic of conversation. “What’s on YOUR mind today?” I always say, “Nothing. What about you?” If I volunteer anything, he will shoot it down as though I had said something stupid, and I will have to repeat myself over and over because he doesn’t hear well and doesn’t listen.

As soon as his food arrives, he seems to forget I exist, and he dives in. Sometimes he will say, “Lotta food,” before he goes at it. While he eats, he will be completely silent. As he winds down, he may say, “Lotta food,” another three or four times.

Sometimes I don’t order anything. I am not that interested in restaurant food. When I do order, I have to be careful where I look while I eat, because he displays chewed food a lot, and things fall onto his shirt. I have to be careful to make sure my beverage is out of his reach, because he may grab it so he can look at it, and if he does that, he will smear God knows what all over the rim of the glass. If there are condiments, I have to make sure I use them first, before he contaminates them.

Once he’s done eating, he wants to talk again. Immediately. He gets cranky if I don’t prevent him from experiencing a brief hiatus between eating and being entertained.

When we leave, it takes him a long time to get to the car, and then he invariably tries to get me to go to the grocery store.

It’s not a recipe for great digestion. It’s why I eat my meals upstairs at home.

Anyway, this morning I told him we weren’t going anywhere, and I went back to my room. Then I had a thought: he was mad at me from the instant we started interacting, I hadn’t done anything wrong, and this was not unusual.

It’s remarkable how much time my dad spends being angry with me.

He gets angry because he’s bored. He’s going to have to live with that. Dementia produces boredom. It’s unavoidable, and it’s going to get worse. He also gets angry because of his medical issues.

He has a back problem. He tried to carry a bunch of stuff up a boat ladder in 2014 because he didn’t want to make two trips to his car, and he fell and injured his back and head. His doctors recommended surgery, but he didn’t want it, so now he has chronic pain. It’s mild, but he isn’t willing to put up with it.

It’s probably too late for surgery. I don’t think any responsible doctor would operate on an 86-year-old man with dementia unless there were no choice. Imagine how hard it would be to care for such a person during recovery. “You have to stay in bed.” “WHY???!!!” “Because of your surgery.” “WHAT SURGERY???!!!”

He watches a huge amount of TV. He always has. He keeps seeing infomercials for quack back cures. A few times a month, he decides to order a Dr. Ho back belt. This is a ridiculous belt gullible people buy. Dr. Ho says Medicare will pay for it, and my dad likes likes the idea of getting free medical supplies. Old people love free stuff, and Medicare scammers know it. I guess they’ve seen old people at restaurants, emptying the napkin dispensers into their purses and pockets.

He has managed to get on the phone a couple of times to try to order it, and I have always succeeded in putting the kibosh on it. I don’t want these people calling me on the phone, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life helping my dad with a back belt that doesn’t work.

He has called other quack outfits in the past. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent on the phone with Chinese people in boiler rooms, telling them to stop calling.

According to one customer, Dr. Ho charges Medicare $1300 for his belt, which appears to be worth about $25, and then you get a copayment bill which may be in three digits. The belt has a 57% one-star rating on Amazon. I am not sure why Dr. Ho is not in prison.

This week my dad got mad because I couldn’t fix his back problem. There are only two options, according to his doctors. The first is surgery, which is not realistic now, and the second is opioids. That’s it. There is no third choice. If magical back belts worked, he would already have one.

He asks me for painkillers, and I tell him not to take them unless the pain is severe. I explain that they cause addiction. This makes him angry. As if addiction were my invention.

He asks me how many pills he’ll have to take before he becomes addicted, and I tell him I don’t know. I tell him no one knows, which is true. It’s common sense. He gets mad and tells me I refuse to answer his questions.

I tell him there are some problems doctors can’t fix, and he gets even madder. He says we need a second opinion. He doesn’t remember the doctors he has talked to already. I have to remind him. Then he says we need to go to more doctors. Obviously, I can’t go along with this. I can’t get in the car and go to a new doctor every time a dementia patient forgets or refuses to believe his diagnosis.

When I refuse, he gets mad because I refuse.

He has decided all medical problems can be fixed. I remind him that my mother died from cancer. I remind him of other people we know who died from incurable diseases. He doesn’t care. He’s positive I’m wrong. All diseases can be cured.

Sometimes I tell him we’re not going to the doctor or a restaurant, and I leave and refuse to talk any more. I go upstairs, or I run an errand or work on the tractor. He’s still angry, but I take off, and I don’t give him any explanation. It sounds awful to leave a grown man standing there, irate and demanding answers, but I do it, and when I do it, I think of the terrible truth: when he sees me an hour later, he will have no recollection of what happened. In reality, it doesn’t matter what I say. I could refuse to talk to him at all, and he would forget.

This is one of the weirdest things about dealing with demented or insane people. They sound a lot like the rest of us, but you can’t take them seriously. When they talk, it’s as if it were raining. You don’t reason with rain. You wait for it to end, and then you go on about your business.

We’ll be discussing Dr. Ho again within the week. Probably today.

Dementia is insanity. Above, I said, “demented or insane,” as if there were a distinction, but to be demented is to be incompetent, just like a schizophrenic. If you’re demented, people can’t treat you with the same dignity they give rational human beings. They can’t let you take the lead, ever.

In normal relationships, you listen to what others say, and sometimes you do what they want to do. This is true even when you deal with children. When a demented person offers ideas, suggestions, commands, and threats, it’s different. You may get useful information you can use to improve their quality of life. You may realize something is bothering them, and you may be able to fix it. But you don’t let them tell you to do this or that, because their ideas are almost always off the wall, and they will repeat them several times a week.

I’m getting pretty far afield. To get back to my original topic, the revelation I got was that my dad is a very angry person, and it’s not good for me to be around him too much.

I knew that already, but I didn’t feel it the way I feel it today. I feel a little bit like I’m living next to a factory that gives off dangerous fumes.

My dad is usually, not occasionally, angry when he is dealing with other people, and he feels no compunctions about venting on them. When the food comes too slowly or his back hurts, it’s okay to yell at me. It’s okay to curse and bark and make lunch unpleasant. It’s okay to say mean things to waitresses.

This is nothing new. My dad has been like this all his life. My sister the felon is the same way, only much worse. I can’t comprehend it. How can you feel entitled to be nasty to people all the time? If I behaved that way, I would expect to get punched in the mouth about twice a week. It reminds me how difficult it is to pick a fight. Lucky for some people.

It’s remarkable how bad behavior works against demented people and others with disabilities. The amount of time able people will want to spend with you will diminish in proportion to how badly you treat them.

The other day I had to tell my dad something obvious, which he doesn’t seem to think about. I said, “No one is obligated to spend time with you.” I was trying to get him to work on one of his bad habits, and I had to tell him people complained about him. Instead of thanking me for telling him, he demanded to know who they were! They were the problem!

I didn’t tell him, of course. I’m not going to spy on people and betray confidences. Besides, he would forget.

My dad has gross habits, and I had to tell him he simply needed to do what other people do. That was the solution. He didn’t have to climb mountains or slay dragons. He just had to do what the rest of us do all the time, every day, without complaining or even thinking about complaining. I said, “You’re not special.” I felt like I was feeding him a big, bitter pill. Most people wouldn’t have had a problem with it at all.

He’s really in a pickle, and I can’t do much to help. I can’t fix it, and it’s not my fault if I have to limit the time I spend with him. His ship is destined to sink in the near future, no matter what medical science does for him. I’m going to go on living for quite some time. I can’t strap myself to him and sink with him.

When I was in law school, there was a crippled student in my class. His name was Andrew. He was horribly deformed. He was about three feet tall, and he had very short arms and legs. He lived in a wheelchair.

Andrew was obnoxious, or at least the people I knew felt he was. He seemed to feel his condition entitled him to favors. Clearly, that was wrong. Life doesn’t work that way. People aren’t nice to the handicapped because they have to be. It’s a choice made out of compassion.

I didn’t really know Andrew, but some of my friends did. I remember watching one of them interact with him. Her name was Carol. We were eating pizza in the student lounge. Andrew rolled up and said he wanted some, in a presumptuous way. Of course, he hadn’t been around when we paid for it. Carol told him we were eating all of it ourselves, and she was very blunt about his bad manners. Andrew said, “Well then I might just leave.” He thought that was a real threat, but he was making a pest of himself, so the thought of him leaving was hardly distressing.

Carol said, “Okay. Goodbye.”

She was absolutely right. This young man thought he was going to be a lawyer. Supposedly, he expected to be treated like other people. He wanted the same rights and courtesies. If you want to be treated like an adult, you have to act like one. He was acting like a spoiled child, and Carol treated him like one.

Carol did him a favor. She gave him a wake-up call. If he was really going to practice law, he was going to have to get used to a world in which people held him accountable every day. Disability can get you a lot of favors, but in the end, you have to make some effort to do what’s right, because your disability is not someone else’s obligation.

When you get old, even if you’re disabled, people will only go so far to make you happy. You will have to work with them a little, because a person’s capacity to put up with bad behavior is limited. People need to get away and recharge. They can’t put up with abuse around the clock, even if they want to.

Other people aren’t your diapers. That’s just how it is.

I want to be a pleasant person when I get old. I really do. I don’t want to be the old guy who hurts people’s feelings. It’s bad enough, being the guy who cares for the old guy who hurts people’s feelings.