Failure to Thrive

"A failure to thrive."

So read the words on my father's death certificate two years ago.  He had been diagnosed a few years before with Alzheimer's dementia.  The "official" diagnosis came after he had already slipped into the twilight that is Alzheimer's, but he knew what was happening.  He never confided in me about how he was feeling; he never did.  But the tenor of our conversations changed, and he began "preparing."  I was made privy to more financial information and the status of legal documents.  Subtle preferences about how things should go after he passed made themselves known to me.  It seemed almost normal and orderly.

But the journey we were all about to take was anything but normal, even for my dysfunctional family.  His grasp on his surroundings was starting to slip.  Minor memory lapses, repeating himself in conversations, very brief moments of "checking out."  We all saw it and heard it.  And none of us was surprised.  Decades of alcoholism apparently did nothing to his liver or other organs.  But with that much booze, there is going to be a price to pay.  That price was a rapid descent into a living hell.

After not too long a time, he would forget who I was while talking on the phone.  These episodes were usually brief, but they became standard occurrences in our conversations after only a short time.  It is an odd sensation when your father forgets your name and how you are related to him.  Now, my father and I were never that close, per se; but he was my father, a constant presence and burden in my life.  To have that connection not cut, or lost, but erased is unsettling.  Reality has just changed around you, while you were watching, and there was not a damn thing you could do about it.

This was just the beginning.  This was not just forgetfulness, as we knew.  Well, when I say "we" I mean everyone except my father.  He was caught in it at that point.  You could see, if you were observant, the briefest glimpse of panic in his eyes, when he understood what had happened.  I imagine that during these lapses, when he still had some inkling of the reality about him and the past behind him, he was faced with a sudden realization that his mind had "winked out" for a moment, losing his place in the universe.  I would find it terrifying.

What if your mind slowly shuts off links to your past, shoves memories of your life and who you are into some mental version of a storage facility locker that is destined to be abandoned?  Who are you then?  You don't know.  You don't know where you are.  You don't know how you got there.  You don't know any of these people around you or what they want.  You become angry and belligerent in self-defense.  You're lost among strangers in a strange world.  You strike out, scaring those around you who don't understand.

At some point in the progress of this disease, your mind must lose not just memories of self and surrounding, past and present, but also of fundamental blocks of knowledge.  Mathematics, language, the ability to reason itself.  You are trapped in a world, a universe, that makes no sense, because you are incapable of making sense of anything.

A failure to thrive.  How can you thrive when the very will to do so is no longer even part of your being?  Even if you wanted to, you wouldn't understand how.

I do not know of any more complete and terrifying description of Hell than this.  Thus passed my father two years ago.