I Got the Horse Right Here…

I’m not sure how to grade today’s visit with my dad. On the up side, he was fascinated by the things I told him about God and the supernatural. On the down side, he seems to think he’s living at a horse track.

I got to the ALF and caught up with him, and he told me he had had a crazy day. He said he had had a delusion. He used the word “delusion.”

He said he had had a conversation with a few people about horse racing. He said he had had a hard time making them understand the meaning of the word “parimutuel.” Then he started talking about his time working as a ticket clerk at Keeneland. He worked there part-time when he was in law school. He remembered the names of other law students who worked there. He thought it was strange that he remembered them.

From there, he somehow got off on the topic of Flagler, one of Miami’s dog tracks. I’m not sure, but I think the track’s owner, a man named Izzy Hecht, had been part of the imaginary conversation. I looked Hecht up. He died in 1977.

My dad may have represented the dog track at one time. He had a tremendous number of clients.

My friend Mike called during our talk. My dad usually has a hard time remembering Mike, but this time, he knew who he was, and he remembered his father, who was the attorney for all the horse tracks in Florida. My dad thought it was amazing that Mike had called while we were discussing the horse track delusion, but then Mike and I talk often.

We started talking about God, and I told my dad a lot of things. I told him how the fallen angels had descended on Mount Hermon and bound each other with mutual curses before taking human wives and having half-breed children. I told him we were surrounded by spirits that wanted to rule us, and that this was the reason we needed to be filled with the Holy Spirit. I told him that in the Bible, hair represented glory. I said that when Samson was shorn, it symbolized the loss of the glory of God.

He was very interested. It has always bothered me that my dad could not share my interest in Christianity and the supernatural. I doubt we’ll ever recapture much of what was lost, but today, it was nice that we talked about these things a little.

One of the problems with going to the ALF every day is that the other patients recognize me and sometimes want to talk to me. As I was walking in today, a lady in a wheelchair looked up at me with a very serious expression and said, “You’re a very good-looking man!” My dad says this all the time. Maybe she overheard him. I thanked her.

I’m very attractive. To people I do not want to attract. I’m used to it. When I was young, I got lots of attention from the mothers of girls who wanted nothing to do with me.

Another lady had a man with her, and she asked me for help with him because he refused to go home. Of course, they can’t leave. Dementia patients have quirks and back stories. I did not know hers. I got a staffer to talk to her.

I also heard from Frank. He’s a nice old man who is very serious. He stands and talks as though he’s trying to explain something very important, and all the sentences make sense, but when you add them up, you get nothing. “They had the big glasses there. Like a big bowl, about this big. The guys on my crew, I have complete faith in. Anyway, this is the problem. All of the doors are locked.” Frank came up to me several times and started expressing his concerns, and I had to extricate myself without offending him.

It would be very relaxing to listen to Frank before bed. If you could get him to talk for half an hour and record it, you would have a useful thing to replay on nights when sleep won’t come. He’s very polite, and he has a pleasant, comforting voice, but nothing he says goes anywhere.

If you’ve dealt with mentally ill people, you may know what it’s like to talk to irrational people who sound completely logical for the first 30 seconds. They can really suck you in. Now that I think about it, Lyndon Larouche was like that. “How do you know George Bush and Lawrence Eagleburger are astrally projected spies from a planet in the Crab Nebula?” “Oh, there’s plenty of documentation on that, up at the compound. Unfortunately, it can’t be unsealed until the judge rules in the Ferguson matter. Meetings have been held. Contacts have been made. Arrangements scuttled. Of course, we can’t ignore the agitprop from the Somali contingent. We can’t even discuss the matter until that has been debunked. Colonel Lamberson has kept me quite up to date on that operation. I guess there’s no need to even mention Bermuda.” Nutty as a fruitcake, but he had the ability to make people take him seriously for surprisingly long stretches.

Things went well, but when I got ready to leave, my dad could not remember the ALF. He acted like he had never seen his room before. He said I couldn’t leave him there. He said, “This is a gambling joint.”

I spent maybe 10 minutes reassuring him. A staffer tried to put him together with Frank–an inspired tactic–but it didn’t work.

While I was talking to him, I had to make myself give the problem the importance it deserved. It’s a little funny when a demented person has a crazy idea, but to my dad, the situation wasn’t amusing. He really thought I was leaving him in a gambling establishment he had never seen before. I tried to imagine how he felt as I talked to him. It was frustrating. I could not make him remember the ALF or feel comfortable about it. I could only try to help him resign himself to sleeping in a strange place without me. I kept reminding him that I would be back the next day.

The experience serves to remind me of one of the big problems with mental illness. You can’t explain things to people who suffer from it. You can explain injuries and diseases to patients, but when a patient’s problem is mental, the doorway through which explanation enters is closed.

If you manage to explain something to such a person, your explanation may evaporate from his mind in a day or 10 minutes.

I tried to say comforting things instead of things that made sense. I kept telling him his bills were paid and that he had nothing to worry about. Things like that. I tried to use a tone of voice that made it sound like I was completely sure he would be all right.

I know he’ll be fine eventually, but I wonder what he’s going through in the meantime. Is he over there now, exploring a strange new world with trepidation and dread? I hope not. The staff is very nice, and I know they’ll work with him. Maybe the delusion has already passed.

I can’t do anything to help. Not in the natural. I can’t stay there all night, every night, holding his hand. I’m doing the best I can. There are things I can’t fix. There are problems people have to face by themselves or with God alone.

This is why I pray with him.

Things could be worse. America is full of demented people who never get visits.

I don’t know how much longer we have. They called today and said his ankle was weeping. The swelling from heart failure caused it. Is it an important sign? Can you live with swollen, weeping ankles for a decade? I don’t know.

I always feel like God is telling me he will be gone by April 1. I’m so glad I get to have pleasant conversations with him while I wait.