28 August 2010
 
The Painter of Battles

 
I have to crash through the morning, so sorry about the brevity and lack of focus this morning. Goes with the territory, I suppose. Life seems to accelerate and gain complexity with all the moving parts. Beats the alternative, I suppose.
 
I was up blurry this morning from the discount price on Pino Grigio at Willow with some of the usual suspects. It was colorful chaos as usual in the warm wood-paneled bar, with Jim anchoring his usual space on the L of the bar, and my pal and me at the apex. Peter was working the room, Big Jim was behind the bar and Sara-with-no-H kept the Pino coming with those innocent-wicked wine-dark eyes.
 
We were talking about Mac, and the process of cognition, since he is trying to coach me through the process of what is happening to Raven and Mom.
 
He lost his bride to this, and spent a third career after the Navy and the Intelligence Community as an Alzheimer’s caregiver, since his had early onset of cognitive problems, and there were a lot of notes to compare.
 
I told my pal that Mac had written me earlier in the day. Conceptually, I had thought we would maintain the house as a sort of base of operations and have the holidays there, bringing Raven and Mom there for special occasions. Mac cautioned against it.
 
“The standard advice when a family is moved to a new "home" or location is to give them time by themselves to get settled in and used to their new surroundings and facilities,” he wrote.
“Many even advise against visiting for the first two weeks or so, and by no means to take them back to their former home.  To do that simply starts an adverse and difficult process all over again.”
 
I read the words and tried to absorb what it meant. I feel weird about starting to clean out the house, divide up the stuff and get it ready to sell if that is what it takes to keep Raven and Mom warm and safe.
 
Mac went on: “I'm well aware that each case can be different, and you have to do what appears best for you, remembering all the while that the primary concern is to get them settled in their new location.  I was surprised that the place lacked a security system to alert someone on Raven's wandering.”
 
I shook my head in agreement.  “If that would happen at the Madison where I live, management would insist that the wanderer (Raven) be placed in a secured place, such as the dementia unit that we also have here.  That, of course, separates the couple and risks adding to the cost of two different facilities.  As long as your father knows his spouse and can converse with her and perhaps understands instructions (my assumptions), it may be best to keep them together.  Given that, it's then necessary to rig a dead-bolt lock on the door (usually up high) and keep the key secured.”
 
I repeated the advice from Mac to the barflies around me at Willow. Jim was one stool away and is a regular. He is one of those acerbic and irascible academics, a sort of Cliff-from-Cheers sort of barfly intellectual, only really smart. He has done some research on this process, and he put down his long-neck bottle of Bud and said: “the progress of the scourge is not linear, but rather, it goes in a series of plateaus with dramatic drops in capacity in between.”
 
I nodded. That is what has been happening to Mom, and Dad vanished into Raven with astonishing speed.
 
To confront the change in the intimate person of your spouse (as Mac did) is several orders of magnitude harder than what we confront with the folks. Or better said, it has been Sister Anook who has had to deal with it.
 
Mom is going to be my problem for a few days. In her cunning mode, she is apparently going to rely on me to free her from relocation, but I am going to follow Mac's advice, and not let them go home even after they settle into some routine at Potemkin Village.
 
I have no idea how this is going to work, but work out it will on its own terms.
 
I got back to Big Pink with just enough time to plunge in the pool. I picked up the ballcap with the water-proof container for the iPod mounted on the back.
 
I said “Hello” to Joanna the Polish lifeguard, who sat languidly by the pool gate and plunged in the water, paddling over to get my hat where I dropped it on the pool deck. I plugged in the earbuds and clicked into Chapter 19 of
Arturo Perez-Reverte’s “Painter of Battles.”
 
It ended not far enough into the swim to quit, and went back from the coppery taste of the end of it to the lyrical account of the completion of the abstract portion of the mural in Chapter 18.
 
It is a hell of a read. It tells you the full and complete story of man, God, love, battle, life and death.
 
Highly recommended, as opposed to the rest of this mess.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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