Seeing dad hurl his walker left a permanent impression on
my daughter. Not an aide he threw it at, or a maid, no, he flung the thing at
his wife. He was too cold, or too hot. The thermostat wasn’t set to his liking.
Blood boiling, he threw the walker. Emotional responses in the brain are a
factor in Alzheimer’s.
No surprise then when the walker went flying. Haywire physical outbursts wove their way through dad’s story. Still, there were windows of warm openness in his later years. These seemed to be on the increase as he entered his sixties. Full change never came. The demons and dementia kept the edge.
One of those windows of calm opened with my dad, in his home. Watching old westerns on an old TV. Hard the silence when the TV wasn’t on. He said something. I asked something. Years past merged into yesterday. A painful break-up: she dumped him. High-school wound remembered. The window; open.
To get my dad to talk is tough. Casting scattered pics of his life as a teenager to the present day. Jumbling together snapshots from his life and others. He wasn’t in New York on 9/11 but thought he was. He spoke of a bad break-up with a girl in high school. A picture I hadn’t seen, a story I’d never heard.
A lifetime in; still I didn’t know my father. “What kept you going,” I asked. “The sun rises every morning,” he said. God’s mercies brighten the coming day. Bad as it got, could it be, that this tethered to some sanity?
There is a witness to good in the universe, to beauty in
creation. Seeking this good enables us to keep at life. For life will throw
much at us that is neither good nor beautiful. Basking in beauty; nature, music
and the arts opens the heart to hope. Losing sight of these we will find
ourselves hurling much more than walkers.
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