I Didn’t Do Drugs Until My Parents Became Elderly

From the Caregiver

I want to be clear that I was a good person before this. I recycled. I flossed. I had a savings account and a reasonable bedtime. I had never once, in forty-seven years on this earth, considered that a gummy bear could be medicinal.

That was before Dad’s stroke.

Now I keep a little amber bottle in my glove compartment, a second one in my desk drawer, and a third one that I tell myself is “for emergencies” in the kitchen above the refrigerator, which I access approximately every Tuesday.

My therapist says I’ve developed “healthy coping mechanisms.” My therapist has not met my father.

From the Father

I had a stroke. Everyone keeps telling me this like it’s news. You had a stroke, Dad. Remember? The stroke, Dad. Yes. I’m aware. I was there. Sort of. The details are a little - what’s the word - gone. But I know I had one because my caregiver looks at me the way you look at a smoke detector that might go off at any moment. Permanently braced.

I feel fine, for the record. Mostly fine. Some things are a little shuffled around up here, like someone went into my filing cabinet and reorganized everything using a system I wasn’t consulted on. I’ll be reaching for a word - a perfectly normal word I’ve used ten thousand times - and it’s just… on a different shelf now. In a different room. Possibly in a different building.

Yesterday I couldn’t remember the word for refrigerator. I called it the cold food cabinet.

My caregiver wrote it in their little notebook. They have a little notebook now. I don’t know when that started.

From the Caregiver

The notebook started in March.

It was either that or start narrating his life like a nature documentary, which, honestly, I still do sometimes in my head. Here we see the elder male approaching the television remote. He holds it with great confidence. He points it at the dog.

The dog, for his part, has never changed channels. Though he looks hopeful every time.

The stroke did something specific to my father’s memory that I have come to think of as The Shuffle. Long-term memory? Locked in like granite. Ask him about 1987, he’ll give you the entire year in chronological order including weather. Ask him what he had for breakfast? Gone. Vanished. Ask him the name of his nurse? He’ll say “the tall one.” Ask him my name? He’ll say it - correctly, immediately - and then look mildly surprised that he got it right, like he won a small prize.

But the things he used to know - practical things, modern things, things that kept him functional in the world - those are floating around in there loose, bumping against each other in the dark.

Last week he called me at 7am because he couldn’t figure out why the television was “broken.” The television was on. The channel was in Spanish. He does not speak Spanish and was furious about this. I drove forty minutes to change the channel.

That is when I first considered the gummies.

From the Father

I maintain the television situation was not my fault. There are too many buttons now. There used to be a television with an on button and a volume button and a channel button. That was a complete system. That was a finished product. Someone, at some point, decided that was not enough buttons and now there are four remotes and a device called a dongle, which is not a word I will be using.

Also, I want to say, for the record, that I knew perfectly well how to make coffee for forty years. Forty. Years. Every morning. Same process. It was not complicated.

But the new machine is different. The new machine requires a pod. I don’t know who decided we needed pods. The old machine needed coffee and water and you knew what you were working with. The pod machine needs a pod, and the pods live in a drawer, and there are seventeen varieties of pod, and apparently the decaf pods are important because of my heart, and I cannot tell the difference between the pods by looking at them because they’re all slightly different shades of brown that look identical to a person who does not care that much about pods.

My caregiver has labeled the pods. They have labeled them with a label maker. They brought the label maker specifically for this purpose. I am a grown man with a graduate degree and my coffee is labeled.

From the Caregiver

I labeled the coffee because he had full-caffeine espresso at 9pm and then called me at 2am to report that his heart was “doing a thing.”

It was racing. Because of the espresso.

I explained this. He did not believe me. He thought it was something new. Everything is potentially something new now. Every symptom, every odd feeling, every minor bodily event - all of it gets escalated to Possible Emergency because he can’t always remember what’s already been diagnosed, what’s already been explained, what we’ve already handled seventeen times.

This is not his fault. I know this is not his fault. I remind myself of this constantly.

I have it written on a Post-it note on my bathroom mirror: Not. His. Fault.

Right below the Post-it that says Call pharmacy before Thursday and the one that says He doesn’t remember telling you that story already. Laugh anyway.

I am running out of mirror.

From the Father

My caregiver worries. I know they worry. I can tell because of the face they make - a specific face, which is their normal face but tighter, like they’re holding something in place by sheer will. They’ve had that face since approximately the hospital.

I don’t like that I caused that face.

I was never supposed to be the one who needed taking care of. I was - I was the one who did things. Fixed things. I used to fix things. I built them a bookshelf once. It’s still standing, that bookshelf. I remember building it. I remember every step. I could build it again right now, tell you every measurement.

But I couldn’t tell you what I had for lunch.

My caregiver says this is normal for my type of stroke. That the long-term stuff is all still there - all the good stuff, they say, all the important stuff - but the short-term is like a chalkboard someone keeps erasing.

I told them that was a terrible system. They laughed. They have a good laugh. I’ve always liked that laugh. I remember that laugh from when they were small. I remember a lot from when they were small.

From the Caregiver

He called me last Thursday at noon.

“I think there’s a man in the backyard,” he said.

I went very still. “What kind of man?”

“Suspicious man.”

I was in a work meeting. I muted myself, stood up from my desk, got my keys, and started driving.

“Dad, don’t go near him. Stay inside. Can you see him through the window?”

“He’s just standing there.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Nothing. Just standing.”

“What does he look like?”

“Older fellow. Gray hair. Kind of heavy.”

I pulled out of my parking lot.

“Dad, I’m coming. Don’t open the door.”

Silence. Then:

”…It’s the garden gnome.”

I pulled back into my parking lot.

The garden gnome has been there for eleven years. My mother bought it. My father helped put it in the ground. He has walked past it approximately four thousand times.

It’s two feet tall and wearing a red hat.

I sat in my car for a moment in silence.

Then I went back inside, got back on the call, unmuted myself, and said I’d had a “minor family thing.”

After work I ordered more gummies.

From the Father

I knew it was the gnome. I was testing their response time.

From the Caregiver

He absolutely did not know it was the gnome.

But here’s the thing - and I mean this completely sincerely, in between the gummies and the notebook and the label maker and the four remote controls - here is the actual true thing:

He told me a story last week. A story from 1974, when he was young and my mother was young and they’d gotten a flat tire on a road trip and ended up spending the night in a town so small it had one restaurant that was also a gas station. He told it perfectly. Every detail. The name of the waitress. What he ordered. The way my mother laughed when the tire iron rolled under the car. He laughed telling it - really laughed, not the performed laugh, the real one - and for about twelve minutes he was completely himself, all the way through, nothing missing, nothing shuffled.

I wrote it down in the notebook. Not because I was documenting a symptom. Just because I didn’t want to forget it.

From the Father

They think I don’t notice things. I notice things.

I notice they drive forty minutes every time I call. I notice they label things so I don’t have to ask. I notice the notebook. I notice they laugh at the gnome story even though I can tell, a little bit, that they’ve heard the gnome story before.

I notice they’re tired. I notice they love me anyway. Some things I still know right where they are.

End of Chapter One.