Father-in-law who beat the odds now in another fight
The phone call from my mother-inlaw last week at first felt like another that had come from her on a summer morning seven years ago.
That call in 2014 was the kind you pray you don’t receive but know you eventually will, most likely more than once, because we all do in some form or another.
It was the kind of call where the floor falls out from under you, where you feel the need to steady yourself as the world grinds to a halt, then lurches forward in a new and awful direction.
We were upstairs when my wife answered that earlier call.
“Your father is in the hospital,” her mom told her. He had a brain aneurysm.
He had felt ill the previous day and gone to bed early, thinking perhaps he was having a bout with a stomach bug.
Born and raised on a dairy farm, Pop never shook the routine of farm life. Long after his retirement, he rose at the same time every day, and that time was early.
That morning he didn’t, but my mother-in-law, figuring he was under the weather, let him sleep in.
Eventually she got to thinking that this late start was unusual, so she went upstairs to check on him. By then he was unresponsive.
We dropped everything and rushed up to Buffalo.
The doctors gave him about a 5% chance of survival. It was a number so small that we struggled with its usefulness.
My father-in-law was a proud Scot and an avid golfer, and things looked bleak enough that I took up the task of finding out whether you were allowed to scatter ashes at the Old Course at St. Andrews.
It turned out there was no need for that.
Maybe it was all the raw milk and hard work on the farm as a kid. Maybe it was the skill of his surgeons and nurses, although they confessed quite openly that their efforts couldn’t really explain what happened.
So maybe it was a miracle; it certainly feels about as close to one as I’ve ever been.
Pop recovered, quickly and with almost no obvious ill effects. He was a lit
tle slower and his golf game slipped just a bit. But his mind, his dry sense of humor, his demeanor all seemed unaffected.
After a few years, we noticed little things. He didn’t read as ravenously as he used to. He had moments of forgetfulness. But you could also ask about his youthful exploits on the farm or his time in the Navy and he’d remember the details lickety-split.
Those moments of forgetfulness and confusion became more frequent and obvious in the past two years. He would forget my wife’s name, or remember it but not that she was his daughter. When I picked them up for my son’s high school graduation, he asked me twice where I’d driven in from.
At Thanksgiving his hands shook and he was mostly quiet. But he had always been quiet, and a few of his trademark chuckles were well-timed enough that I thought to myself, “He’s still here. He’s listening. He’s Pop.”
Last Thursday he had a follow-up to his latest neurology appointment.
My mother-in-law called that evening, and from my wife’s tone I felt the floor move again.
He has Alzheimer’s, she told me after their call.
The floor steadied itself. Obviously, this was not good news. But it also wasn’t the worst news. I would find out later that my reaction was almost identical to that of my wife’s brother.
We kind of knew that already, didn’t we?
Yes, my wife said, but my mom is really upset, hearing it really upset her.
And of course it would. They’ve been together forever. She desperately wants to fix things, and this formality underscores the reality that she can’t.
I remembered my own mother’s denial in the face of my dad’s Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. And that denial came from a woman who had spent her working life in hospitals.
The news could be so much worse, I told my wife.
I know, she said.
Then she said: “His mom had Alzheimer’s. Now he does. This is what you have to look forward to with me.”
But we’re all getting ahead of ourselves.
Right now all we know is what, in a sense, we already knew. His mind isn’t what it used to be, and it will go places we can’t always know or follow.
But he is still with us. Miracle of miracles, Pop is still here. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker