When I first started blogging, there was a small group of us exchanging stories about caring for parents with dementia through our blogs. Mike Pritchard in Sydney, Australia, joined that group in 2006. Both of his parents were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and his blog Fading From Memory chronicled his family’s struggle to care for them.
More than two years after his parents died, Mike has published Fading From Memory: what happens to a family when both parents have Alzheimer's?
Early in the book, he includes his mother’s journal entries about the family’s emigration by boat from England to Australia. He tells how they traveled the world, living on every continent and following his father’s work in the aviation industry. To Mike, his parents seemed larger than life, until suddenly they weren’t.
“I never expected my parents to be immortal,” Mike writes, “but to see them now, two slow-moving stooped old people, unkempt and inarticulate, pottering around their unnecessarily dark house, arguing about cups of tea, is sometimes unbearably sad…. Where did all that life go?”
Dad: Ah, Mike, it’s, um, Dad here.
Me: Hi Dad, how’s it going?
Dad: Mike, are you coming over today?
Me: I wasn’t planning to.
Dad: Oh. Well, it’s not that we need you or anything. I was just wondering, you know, if…
Me: Yeah, I’ll probably be over….
“At their peak, Dad’s calls were arriving more than ten times a day,” Mike writes. “They drove me nearly insane at times. I would finish The Standard Conversation (see above), put the phone down on my desk, look back at the screen to find my place, and the phone would ring again. It would be Dad, initiating The Standard Conversation all over again.”
Everything about his parents’ lives annoys and worries Mike: the way they walk, the way they eat, their lack of personal hygiene. But when Mike injures his Achilles tendon and is on crutches, he quickly finds himself in the same position. He can’t get around very well, and finds it difficult to cook. As for personal hygiene, “I didn’t shower today because I want to keep my hospital dressing dry,” he writes. “Tomorrow I may have a bath. Where have I heard this before?”
By 2008, Mike and his siblings are overwhelmed with caring for their parents, even with professional help. One day, his dad leaves him more than 80 messages. The messages go something like “Hello?...hello?... is there anybody there?...hello?... why don’t you speak to me?... I’m alone here….I don’t know what’s going on…hello?”
“What is it all about? Being lost and lonely,” Mike says. “It’s so terribly pathetic and sad-sounding. The value of ‘staying in your own home’ has all gone.” The rest of the book is about the move to a retirement community, hospitalizations and his parents’ deaths at the end of the year.
Even though I’d already read all of Mike’s journal entries on his blog, I can’t stop reading this book. Mike captures the surprise adult children feel when they’re not able to “fix” everything for aging parents, and the sometimes surreal quality of day to day life with a person with dementia. If you’re caring for a parent who has cognitive problems, you’ll find comfort, sympathy and humor in Fading From Memory.
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