At least my father was wearing clothes when I visited him at the home.
My brother Phil, who had visited our dad Bernard the day before, discovered that he had decided not to wear clothes. Somebody in the home had convinced him to wear a surgical gown; you can write your own jokes about what parts of his body that were exposed by that decision. When he was still living with us, my father exposed worse parts of his body to me, things that years of therapy will not make better, but this was bad enough.
As I watched him roam around the common area of the home, trying to engage elderly people in wheelchairs who were trying to sleep in conversation, it occurred to me that he was beyond the politics of the moment. He was, for instance, blissfully unaware of the imminent demise of the American democratic experiment. Sucks being somebody trying to sleep, but kind of good for him.
We should all be that blissfully unaware.
My father seemed to be hungry while I was there. He tried to take half a sandwich off a tray in front of one of the other people in the home. The person did not seem to be aware of the food - for all I know, it could have materialized there out of the quantum foam a moment before my father saw it. Still. I did my best to steer him away from sandwichnapping; you never know when the food will be on the other tray.
Soon after, he became fascinated with a fruit cup on one of the mobile nurse's stations. I gathered that it contained drugs for a patient, which would explain why the attendant was so loath to let my father have it. Eventually, a different fruit cup was procured for my dad. He ate half of it, then tried to give it away to other residents, none of whom seemed all that enthusiastic about the offer. (Twenty minutes later, I would reintroduce the fruit cup to him, which he would enthusiastically finish. In elder care, as in comedy, timing is everything.)
Was my father being an altruist or a spoiled child who, after demanding being given something for several minutes, grows bored with it seconds after getting it? I leave it to better minds than mine to judge. I will say, though, that, in his primal quest for sustenance, my father was clearly not thinking about how global climate change would soon make the planet uninhabitable for human beings. Don't you wish you could stop thinking about it? I know I do.
Bernard was restless during my visit. I did my best to steer him towards his own room, but he would sit on the bed in his Martyred Elder pose (hunched over, his face in his hand, quiet moaning optional) for a couple of seconds, then get up and walk out of the room again.
I would do my best to restrain him when my father tried to enter the rooms of other residents, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder. This worked the first couple of times, but eventually he grew belligerent, forcing me to relent. Fortunately, the rooms he entered were empty, so there were no witnesses to my mortification.
What was he looking for? Clues to who he used to be? Ways of getting back to the life he used to live? A sandwich? Like Yoda, a mind being eaten away by Alzheimer's Disease is inscrutable.
On one of his circuits through the hallways, my dad stopped in front of four garbage bins and raised a couple of their lids. What was he looking for? Clues to how he ended up living in this home? Ways of overcoming his memory loss? A fruit cup? Like god, his mind works in mysterious ways.
My dad's searching kept him busy, of course. While he was engaged in it, he wasn't contemplating the horrendous war crimes Russia had committed in Ukraine, or the moral quandary Israel's genocidal treatment of Palestinians posed for diaspora Jews, or...or..or. If it weren't for the whole loss of personal identity thing, his condition would almost be enviable.