It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon. My wife, Toni, and I have just arrived at St. Joseph personal care home, where her 83 year old father, Emilio, now lives. Emilio is down the hall in room #138. He is sitting in his wheelchair, staring out the window. But he’s not really looking at anything.
“Hi, Dad,” my wife calls out to him. “How are you doing?”
Emilio slowly turns around to face the source of the interruption.
“Oh, hello,” he says quietly, not making eye contact. Emilio looks at his daughter but he’s not really sure who she is. Once uncomfortable at not being recognized, she’s quite used to it now and brushes it aside with, “Who am I, Dad?” while sitting down opposite him on the bed.
He looks at her, familiarity playing out in his expression but not to the point of recognition.
“I…I don’t know,” he admits truthfully.
She looks into his uncertain eyes as she picks up his hand. “Come on, Dad, I’m your daughter, Toneta,” using the shortened version of her Italian name, Antonietta.
I detect a slight smile on his lips, not sure it’s in response to her voice or the term of endearment. If it’s a good day, Emilio can distinguish Toneta from her sibling, Carmela. Only one year apart in age, the two sisters don’t look alike at all. But if he’s not having a banner day, he supposes she’s just another health-care aid that’s come to take him to the toilet.
A painter by profession and the patriarch of his family, Emilio was always active and one of those men that rarely sat still. Having only completed a grade six education in his native Italy, he found speaking his newly adopted tongue difficult enough and didn’t devote much time to learning how to read and write in English. He made up for it by working at extra jobs to provide for his family.
Weekends were spent at the family cottage on Lake Winnipeg, but even there, he wouldn’t relax and sit down. I’m still amazed at how hard he worked— splitting wood, then stacking it, and moving onto another project. He never wasted his time being idle.
As I watch my wife interact with her father, I witness the limited communication. It’s usually one-sided, mostly coming from Toneta. She’s patient, by now used to her father’s changes in mannerism—his changes in personality. One of these typically is memory loss.
If our visit comes during supper, Toneta takes the opportunity to feed him. After taking a few spoonful’s he looks at her and asks, “What about you? Aren’t you having any?” She smiles at him, his kind words a reminder of how he has always looked after his family, particularly at meal times.
One of the emotions we’ve often experienced while visiting him is sadness. That sadness comes from seeing a once vital man having given up his driver’s license in favor of moving around in a wheelchair. As he struggles with reduced mobility and a diminishing memory, different things become his priority, become his comfort. One of these is his room.
We like to wheel him from his small room and take him outside or to a spacious common area set aside for visiting families. But before we’ve had a chance to enjoy the already short visit, he becomes restless, wanting to be wheeled back to his room.
We all long to have the ‘old’ Emilio back, the father who shared with us stories about life in Italy, his military service, and his vast family connections back home. Now, unfortunately, the family that he interacts with most often are the patients in the care home, most of them also confined to wheelchairs and oblivious to his plight with dementia. Sadly, many struggle with the same disease. As he calls out to anyone that will listen with a succession of ‘hellos’, I wonder if there’s a part of him that still longs for fellowship, friendship, for the feeling of belonging.
We visit as often as we can, family members taking turns as our hectic schedules allow. We hope that the familiarity of a friendly face will rekindle a distant memory. And if our visit doesn’t, we take comfort in just being with him, reassuring him by our presence that he hasn’t been forgotten, that he matters to us all, that he always will. Emilio will always be remembered as the man who immigrated to Canada, hoping to fulfill his dreams of raising a family. I’m happy to say that he succeeded, and succeeded well.
I don’t want to dwell on what dementia is doing to him. I want to remember him as he was.
He will always be our dad.