Understanding Viewpoints

Although Daddy died of Alzheimer’s in 1988, I’ve mentioned before that it did not have the same impact on me as it did on my children.  As I’m going through this journey with Mom, I am beginning to understand the different viewpoints from which various people see the situation.

After writing that I wasn’t impacted as my children were, I thought readers may have thought his death didn’t impact me.  Oh, it did!  I cried for days after his death and at times when I would be driving to or from work it would hit me again and I would cry.  To this day, 23 years later, tears will come when I hear a particular song or see a particular scene in a movie – or sometimes it just hits.

My comment was more about the impact of Alzheimer’s.  My children were directly impacted because Daddy was a huge part of their world.  He was the person who accepted them as they were and loved them fully – until the disease caused his life to disintegrate before their eyes.

I, on the other hand, when Daddy headed deep into the abyss that is Alzheimer’s, was in the midst of raising those two children while going through a divorce.  My marriage of 12 years was falling apart and I was devastated by the hurt and embarrassment.  With Mom and Daddy as the example, marriages were supposed to be for life and yet there I was.

From lessons learned in my past, I was determined to make the divorce amicable and allow our children to love freely.  The girls and I helped their daddy move into an apartment so that they would feel it was also “home” and I tried to keep our lives as calm as possible, all the while falling apart inside.

I was lucky at that point to find my soul mate, a man in the midst of a separation and divorce that I would later marry and with whom I would live happily ever after.  Before the happily ever after, though, we went through the worst two years of our lives.  We always said if we could make it through that time, everything else was a piece of cake. 

In that time, my divorce was final and Daddy went into the nursing home.  I moved my children to Kentucky.  I fell in love with the two little ones that would later become my stepchildren but on the day my soon to be husband’s divorce was final, they were ripped away from us.  Mom had a brain tumor which was luckily benign.  We married and shortly after I ended up in the hospital after three bouts of the flu.  I changed jobs and then my daughter was diagnosed with epilepsy.  I could go on and on…

All of this happened while Daddy was spending the last two years of his life in the nursing home.  Two times we were called to the nursing home because Daddy was not expected to make it through the night.  The first time, Daddy’s blood pressure was 30/16 and the nurse asked Mom if she wanted Daddy to receive pain medication because he was moaning.  I’ll never forget Mom, my sister and I standing over Daddy’s bed commenting that he would get the pain medication and the next day he would be up chasing a nurse down the hall.  Well, we knew that wouldn’t happen but sure enough, he rallied and it was another month before the second call and he actually died.

That year held more problems for my new family:  my husband’s broken arm, my daughter’s emergency appendectomy, buying and moving into a new house and my hysterectomy after the very real fear that I might bleed to death.

Please don’t get me wrong here – I’m not looking for sympathy.  The things that happened during those years aren’t any different or more difficult than things that happen to others.

My point – the light bulb that lit up in my head this morning – is that everyone sees the situation from a different viewpoint or perspective.  My little girls experienced Daddy’s decline more keenly because they lived it every day.  It was their life.  I, however, was too caught up in what was happening to my family and managing to keep us going day to day to fully feel the pain of Daddy’s decline.

What made these thoughts swirl through my mind?  The question posed by one of my children, “How long are you going to keep doing this?”  I realize that my viewpoint is now closer to that of Mom’s when she was taking care of Daddy.  My child, on the other hand, is looking from the perspective I had way back then.