Sadness has seeds

I had a dream about my dad early this morning.  In it, he had Alzheimer's, but not how he had it in real life.  He had literary Alzheimer's.  You know how characters in books and movies with dementia always have their moments of perfect clarity, just as you know that in real life, that just ain't happening.
There was the usual weirdness in the dream.  We had a 2,000-year-old Roman tool for digging trenches that had belonged to a guy whose name was something like Placebo.  My dad and I went to the railroad tracks near Krauser's and we were stealing bushes, digging them up with the old tool.  My dad had driven there so he was in pretty good shape that day.  Obviously we were in yardwork mode.  I saw a person I know who does yardwork and suggested that my dad go and talk to him about working in his yard.  My dad refused and then he slipped from literary AD to real AD and I couldn't understand at first why he wouldn't talk to the guy.  I said "Why won't you go talk to him?" and he said, "Because sadness has seeds."
While the rest of the dream was clearly what I call "taking out the trash" (my brain defragging), that statement was so profound I remembered it when I woke up.  I had to stay in bed and think about it.  It's almost like he was saying that sadness is contagious, that he thought he'd become sad because the yardwork guy would plant a seed of sadness in my dad, and it would grow.
I can only hope that this blog and all my horrible experiences with AD are not planting too many seeds of sadness in my readers.

3 years gone

3 years ago today, I got woken in the predawn hours with the call that my dad was on his way out, and he didn't live to see the light again.
Yesterday we were playing the letter-tile game and my mom was getting all the Rs and we laughed about it and said "Hi Bob!"  We're trying hard to remember the funny and silly things Alzheimer's made my dad do. We don't talk about the knife he was carrying.  The bruises on my mom.  When he tried to kill the ER doctor.   His blood smeared on the hospital wall.  Him in hard restraints.
Some say it gets easier.  I think what really happens is that you forget.  Because I'm fine, until I remember.  Or until I go back and read this blog.  And then it hurts, and I'm angry, all over again.

Hi there

The 3d anniversary of my dad's death is this week.  He's been gone almost as long as he had Alzheimer's. It's blunted now; I don't think about it as much, but when I do, the anger and the grief are still there.
On Sunday we were playing a word game that uses tiles similar to Scrabble.  The first game, every letter pulled was R.  I had every R.  R was my dad's favorite letter, since his initials were RRR.  My first license plate was ORRR because RRR was already taken. (I loved that, as you can imagine.  Not.)  Anyway, as I kept getting more and more Rs, I could only think it was my dad's simple way of saying hi.
Hi Dad.  Miss you lots. 

syndication #3 and award

My award is up.   And I am syndicated onto a third site, ehealth forum.  My link in the sidebar is going to the wrong forum, hopefully I can get the proper code.

Knowing is the worse part

I have now bought a car without my dad.  It wasn't the first or last thing I'll do in life where I feel cheated, that he should have been involved.  I think the experience would have been a little smoother with him along.  But that's immaterial, because he wasn't there.  Because Alzheimer's stole him from me.
My mom and I spent a couple of hours the other day cleaning out my husband's Santa Fe and making into MY Santa Fe.  My dad, of course, sold us that Santa Fe, back when he still had a functioning brain, so it is a tenuous link to him.  Mom and I did a pretty crappy job cleaning the car's insides.  Not much better on the outside.  Cleaning cars was Dad's thing.  He always offered to wash my car, or at least clean my windows and my dashboard, right up to when he got taken away by the police.  Mom and I were joking about my father, and how he would have come outside and taken over and the car would have been spotless inside and out.  Instead I ended up taking it to a detailing place and paying an outrageous sum of money for someone to do it uncaring when my dad would have done as good a job for free out of love.  At one point I said to my mom, "Tell him to get his lazy ass down here and help us with this car!"  and she said, "I wish it could happen."
It's weird that we say similar things about my grandpa and my yard (he had the greenest of green thumbs) but I never feel cheated out of my grandpa.  He was 70 when he died of cancer (I was 19).  I miss him, but it's different. I feel like he got a good run.  My dad was 3 years younger but his last years were bad.  My grandpa had a couple of bad months--he was diagnosed in April and died in July.
When my dad got diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I don't think I really UNDERSTOOD.  I cried, but I didn't know yet what I was crying for, or how many tears would be in my future.  I started this blog, not knowing it would be a roadmap for so many other people on the same journey.
When Terry Pratchett got diagnosed with AD a week or so after my dad died, I was hysterical. Because by then, I KNEW.  I had seen the end of the road and I hated (hate) to think of the mind that made Discworld going down that path.
Today, via Facebook, one of my oldest friends contacted me.  We've been friends since 7th grade, almost 30 years.   Her mom, who is about the same age as my mom, just got the word:  Alzheimer's.  Worse, my friend lives in another state than her mom.   And she, like me, is an only child.   Oh, my friend, I wish I could spare you this pain.