A Most Sinister Villain
Alzheimer's is a most sinister villain. It is one that cannot be pursued and apprehended. It cannot be incarcerated or brought to justice. No correction nor reformation is possible. Retribution and satisfaction are elusive to the victim and the weary family. If it was a man, I would challenge it to a duel. But it has no honor. It also has no mercy nor comprehension. The incessant pain it inflicts goes unexplained.
My father has always been a very active man, even into his eighties. His body deteriorated, and he got slower at standing and walking, but he remained in motion until recently.
We began seeing the mental slips over the years. He would misplace items and accuse us of hiding them from him. He had trouble finding things that were located where they always were. He forgot his home phone number which he had had for over forty years.
He began falling. Many times when assisting him up he would halfway smile and tell me, “These golden years ain’t what they’re cracked up to be.”
Life can be cruel. Aging is one of its most powerful yet subtle weapons.
Many times in my life now I will come upon someone I have not seen for some time. Often it is an old friend, or someone I went to high school with or worked with long ago. When I l see them my first thought is, Good night, you look old! My second thought is, I bet he/she is thinking the same thing about me.
Gorgeous cheerleaders become divorcees with double chins and wrinkled skin. Football stars become grey-haired beer bellies, limping around on shot knees when they used to bolt like lightning and grapple like rams. Like many of the dreams of our youth, our bodies decay to the point they are almost unrecognizable to us as the years become decades.
My dad was still walking, driving, cutting grass, and doing other physical tasks (albeit slower than ever) on June 13. The morning of June 14, he fell in his bathroom, hitting his head on the bathtub, fracturing a bone in his leg, and having what the cardiologist termed “a small heart attack” somewhere along the way. Covid, E. Coli, and a urinary tract infection soon followed.
One day the discharge planner walked into the hospital room. She was a widow of a man my dad worked with long ago. She reached down, caressed his hand, looked into his haggard eyes, and asked, “When did we get old?” No doubt she was remembering a jollier time, like old Ebeneezer Scrooge, accompanied by The Ghost of Christmas Past, gazing at his younger self dancing and making merriment with “ol’ Fezziwig.”
My dad was a rock. When I was a child, he rose early, worked in his auto body shop the first half of the day, ate dinner (as traditional Southerners we still referred to the midday meal as “dinner” and the evening meal as “supper,” as the Good Lord intended), showered, and went to work as head of the police department’s vice squad. The hands that patted my back or twirled me in the air were the same ones that wrestled with some of our town’s most violent criminals. The extended digit used for the “Pull My Finger” flatulence joke was the same finger that pulled a trigger that resulted in death.
Now I see that finger clutching the side of a hospital bed rail as I roll him over while my sister and I clean him and change his diaper. The steely eyes that used to command respect now are laced with fear of falling off the bed, even though I tell him (as I do every time) that it’s okay, I am not going to let him fall. That same weathered, bent finger will point out the window as he questions things he thinks he sees occurring that are not.
I sit and look at him as he tries to contemplate an answer I just gave him to some nonsensical question. I watch him as he stares into space at whatever scene his mind, warped by the villain, has laid out for him. I watch him in restless sleep with labored breathing and pray, asking God what purpose this all serves…asking for Him to help me understand the meaning behind all this. Why has the superhero of my youth been reduced to the equivalent of a special-needs child?
At times, he will say something that makes me think, yep, there he is, just as he was. Then he will follow it up with questions about the whereabouts of his mother, who died forty years ago.
Am I conversing with my father, or an apparition? He appears to be a combination - a mixed-multitude creation spanning several decades with no timeline to restrain what comprises the present.
I wrestle with my thoughts and my prayers. I want God to heal my father. I want him better, or at least as he was, or even just able to function and enjoy life to some degree. If that is not going to happen, then, for mercy’s sake, I ask that he be taken. For there are many things on this side of the grave that are far worse for a man (and those who love him) to endure than death. Death escapes no man. But it happens, and it is over. Suffering can go on and on and on…
My mind hearkens to Dr. Jack Kevorkian and the controversies associated with him. My position against him remains… but it does not come as easily as it once did. There are reasons the Almighty in His providence allows what He allows. Those reasons may not be revealed to me right now, but I know His ways and thoughts are higher than my ways and thoughts.
Meanwhile, the rest of life does not stop. I have a wife and children (his grandchildren) who depend on me. I have a career and a vocation that demands my time and my energy. There are homes to be maintained and grass to be cut. My mother is living alone for the first time in over fifty years and she needs love, attention, and support. I am a deacon at my church and have responsibilities associated with that. My spiritual life needs constant attention.
I am now seen as the rock. I am supposed to know the answers, provide the leadership, and keep it all together. But my brain is cloudy. I am fatigued. I am slipping. I am weak.
So, I gird my loins. I pray for strength and wisdom and ask for prayers from those I love for the same. I accept that this another in the line of trials of life, which no man can enter Heaven without facing. Perhaps the nurse treating my father as just another body in the stream of duties that occupies her shallow life is supposed to hear me proclaim the Gospel. Maybe someone is watching how this professing Christian handles this tribulation and is basing their view of the Holy Ghost’s indwelling influence on a believer on how I navigate these waters. It is one thing to be a Christian soldier when the battles are being won or when periods of peace persist. It is another when the Villian is making an orchestrated onslaught on the defenses of the city.
I love my father. And I love the Lord. My faith in His goodness has not been shaken by this ordeal. That does not dismiss the difficulty in dealing with this situation. But it does bring comfort and peace.
We press on.
Really enjoyed this piece Josh. It’s a perennial theme and you properly captured the reality of it. The charity, honor and duty is often diminished in our age but the necessity, desire, and the thing itself remains. My wife’s simple advice after going through the final years with both of our parents is to just do the best you can. It doesn’t last as long as it sometimes seems and one will never regret having tried.
It truly is a sinister villain because it is so degrading to a person’s being. Other diseases, even those which corrupt the body horrifically, respect the mind. Not this one however and that is sinister.
God grant peace, rest and health and everything needed for the salvation of you and yours.
Dr. Christopher Exley, perhaps the foremost expert on aluminum in the world (especially its affects on biological systems), did research on the brains of people who had died of Alzheimer’s disease. He found very high levels of aluminum in their brain tissue. His conclusion was summarized in saying that without aluminum in the brain there is no Alzheimer’s. Aluminum also seems to be implicated in ALS, Parkinson’s and autism. Exley’s university department received a donation to study the brains of deceased sufferers of autism to confirm if this was likely. Before he could begin, a pharmaceutical company came in and essentially bought the university, giving an enormous sum on condition that he be fired. He was. Exley discovered during his study of Alzheimer’s that aluminum can be chelated from the tissues of the body using organic silica. He recommends drinking water from volcanic aquifers, such as Fiji, to accomplish this. After drinking the water (he used an Indonesian brand not available here but available in Great Britain where he worked) urine was tested for aluminum. I am summarizing here. Anyone interested can check out his work easily enough.
Bruce Fife promotes coconut oil for protection of the brain and central nervous system. I think that his writing on the subject has merit.
I don’t know if any of this will reverse extensive damage at an advanced age.
We all decline but the sorts of degenerative diseases that we have increasingly been seeing over the past century are horrendous and, I would say, unprecedented. Longer life span does not account for it as much of it is being suffered by the very young. There is much in our modern lives that contribute to this, but industrial agriculture and the standard American diet (s.a.d.) would seem to be key.
Mr. Doggrell,
I am so sorry to learn of your dad’s illness. I think my two uncles had this same illness, and indeed it is a “most sinister villain”. Your dad’s soul is perfect.
Dot
Having lost my mother to Alzheimer’s long before her death (the proximate cause of which was cancer) well before her passing because she lost the ability to move her limbs and to talk and otherwise communicate years before, I appreciate how much the gradual death Alzheimer’s inflicts can hurt a family. I hold you in the Light.