Finally, my father, Bernard Nayman, went to that fully bought and paid for country from which no traveller ever returns: the old age home.
The waiting list for homes was anywhere from two to five years, which would have made looking after him increasingly difficult for us as his Alzheimer's progressed through the final stage. Fortunately, he fell on the stairs. Not fortunately for him, obviously; I'm not a monster! I'm just exhausted. Anyway, he only fell two stairs, backwards, which required that he spend several days in the hospital until the doctors were sure he hadn't done himself serious damage. (SPOILER ALERT: He hadn't.)
His fall was fortunate in the sense that it woke up the bureaucracy which governs such matters, which put him on an emergency waiting list for a spot in a home. They found one for him within three months.
The first time I visited him at the home, we went for a long walk. This was quite a change from being at our house, where he had to be confined to a single relatively short floor so that he wouldn't fall down the stairs another time (again: not a monster!); the floor of the home he was living on had long corridors that were made for exercise.
Listening to him speak, I sometimes wonder if my father is speaking gibberish in French or English. Obviously, I don't mean to ask which language the words are in: as Herr Doctor Freud once pointed out, sometimes gibberish is just nonsense. I mean which language the thought in his head starts in before it makes its circuitous way through the synapses of his brain, detouring around plaque-ridden junctions (losing important words and/or meaning along the way) before finally reaching his mouth. Not that it matters: when he utters random words and sounds, no matter what language they start in it's as if he's auditioning for the role of Lucky in Waiting for Godot.
Once, when I visited him at the home, he was sitting at the curved counter of the nurse's station in the common room, sorting through random pieces of paper, including: a 10 by 10 grid of simple math problems; uncoloured pages from a colouring book; recipe sheets; a laminated Senior of the Month certificate (in the name of a woman who wasn't him). The sheet of math problems were what killed me: here was a man who had completed the books of multi-million dollar companies who was fascinated by the answer to such questions as 3 + 7 = ? and 4 + 5 = ? He would point at specific numbers on the page and recite them with excitement; at those moments, he sounded like was reading a libretto by Phillip Glass.
There was enough irony here to choke a horse (and if that's your idea of a good time, please stop reading Les Pages aux Folles). There was enough irony that even Alanis couldn't mistake it. There was enough irony to keep a ward of anemia patients healthy for years.
Sitting next to him at the counter was an elderly woman in a wheelchair, speaking in what I am told was Italian. I don't know the language, so I could not tell if any of what she was saying was gibberish, although I assumed that she also had dementia and that, therefore, at least part of her speech must have been. Sometimes, they went back and forth, taking turns talking as if they were having an actual conversation. At other times, they seemed to be talking over each other, like an old couple having an argument that was so well rehearsed that they no long felt compelled to listen to the other side.
It could be that gibberish is the universal language of the elderly with dementia, but that could just be my fancy.
All in all, my father seems to have adjusted well to moving into the home. He no longer repeatedly stands up, finds he is strapped into his wheelchair so he doesn't hurt himself (or finds he doesn't have the energy to move around), and sits back down (like he was back in synagogue, dovening). He doesn't have to be wheedled with to eat the food placed in front of him (as a wheedler, I'm a brilliant sheepdog). He has a much larger audience to “talk” to, one that won't get bored and walk away from him.
He has truly gone to a better place.