Sept 19: Sing-Sing

“Many horses are going by. They’re ready for their daily dessert,” Dad says, projecting his dessert obsession. Last night he kept insisting he wasn’t going to eat dinner – he wanted to have plenty of room for dessert! We got him through the meal by convincing him to have “just a little” soup, “just one piece of bread,” etc.

Tonight Dad is kind of down. “I’m not the guy who used to be here,” he tells me, settling beside me on the couch. It turns out that he’s having an attack of awareness about his condition. “The last two or three days have been a real shock to me,” he says. “I don’t know what I’m doing half the time, the last two days.” “I’m scared,” he says – a statement that always brings tears to my eyes when he says it. I get the cat and she and I snuggle close to him. “I’m going to land in Sing-Sing,” he says. “They don’t put you in Sing-Sing for being confused,” I reassure him. “What do they do with people who are completely dumb? They have to put them someplace,” he wants to know. “They just take care of them,” I say, hoping this will make him feel better, but the issue is still on his mind.

Later, he repeats his theory about the “vision utility” turning him off and making him blind, but this time it has a new twist – the motivation for doing this he tells me, is to get new customers for old-age homes, since people keep dying and they have to be replaced, so they make older people blind to get them to go into the homes. “I don’t want to be in an institution. I DON’T WANT IT!” he says.

I don’t know what to say to this – I’m definitely committed to keeping him at home as long as possible, but I don’t want to get trapped by promising him he’ll never be in a facility, because I don’t know what path all this is going to take. All I can do is assure him that he’s not – and won’t be – alone.