Caregiver Chronicles III: What to Do
Douglas, in his prime, had a hyper-engaged life with a million friends and a zillion interests. Even after retiring, he never had trouble filling his day. With his huge appetite for the tiniest details of just living, he never looked back on his career as a Washington lawyer. After exhaustively reading the paper, of a morning, Douglas had to round up enough tennis players for the Saturday and Sunday morning games; to attend to the details of the household — getting broken things fixed, the lawn mowed and the bushes trimmed; to dispute bills with Verizon, using his most lawyerly tone; to launch an aggressive pursuit of anything that had captured his fancy. He saw, in the paper, a photo of a Texas longhorn bull named “Wow,” whose horns spanned eight feet across. Connected through the paper and the photographer, he engaged in a correspondence with Wow’s owner, who sent him an 8 x 10” photo of the bull that is still posted on our refrigerator. Then there was the weekly exchange on the phone or by mail between Douglas and his law school friend Ed over some point of contention — the vodka wars, for example, a longstanding debate about whether vodka was the same old vodka, no matter what label or price tag it had — which obviated the need, in Douglas’s opinion, to spend a lot of money for fancy vodka.
Douglas still had a great social life, even after he stopped working. There were the weekly tennis games, of course, on our court, with an agile, though aging, group of men (and women, when they got desperate) — six or eight on good weekends, rotating between the court and the little tennis shelter where they would trade jokes and gossip, leaving to pee behind the forsythia bush. The court is now in sad shape, with a tree growing up through a crack in the asphalt.
He loved to travel, to entertain and to be entertained, which made us a busy couple. He had board meetings and phone calls with old pals and lunch with the boys at the club downtown on Thursdays. When the boys began to die off, he still had his bi-weekly Pulse Group lunch (as in “if you’ve still got a pulse…”) and semi-annual gatherings to which the Pulsettes were invited — until he was about the only one left with a pulse.
Now moving into his late nineties, Douglas is the only one of his contemporaries left with a pulse, and that must be a lonely place to be. Though he has a few acolytes (everyone loves Douglas) and devoted children who call, his caregiver Amy and I are his social life, in a world telescoped down to the essentials — safety, nourishment, shelter. These we can provide quite capably, but what about the social part, the entertainment? What do we do with him?
Thank God for his caregiver Amy, a pro, who manages his daytime hours. Amy believes in routine, so she organizes Douglas’s day with an eye on the clock. Shaving, dressing, teeth, hair, and breakfast take up most of the morning. Food intervals punctuate the rest of the day — a protein shake at two pm, broccoli and cheese soup at three, some tuna and cottage cheese at four, fruit around five-thirty. The same menu every day. Why this particular menu, and the timing? Because after much curating, it works. This is what he likes and will eat.
It’s the rest of his day, yawning ahead, that defeats me. I gratefully walk away from the dreary scene in the kitchen, Douglas stooped over in his chair (barricaded on both sides so he won’t fall to the floor while sleeping), his head nodding down to the table, and the television on whatever ESPN station offers the most promise: baseball games (and now that the season is over, reruns of old games), horse racing…
Amy was very ambitious at first, accustomed to taking her clients, as she calls them, to a variety of adult day care programs in the area, about which I was, frankly, dubious (could we really get Douglas to cut out maple leaves to string up around the room?). But the pandemic foreclosed all those opportunities to get out of the house last year, and she suggested we invest in a supply of puzzles and books of games…or try playing card games. She tried to institute an exercise program, and we even had a physical therapist come to visit with a set of exercises. None of those efforts lit a flame of interest in him. He is a very stubborn man. Now we are investigating some adult programs that have reopened. He’s made it pretty clear that he’s NOT GOING TO ANY PROGRAMS, so we’ll see if can make that happen.
There are some successes. On warm days, Douglas goes outside to the terrace, where he can watch the planes overhead and, in season, we have plenty of bird activity. I’ve put up a couple of goldfinch feeders and a little birdbath, and the birds sometimes accommodate us with pool parties at the birdbath, splashing around extravagantly. He has a favorite blue spruce in his vista that gratifies him when, in the setting sun, it gets just the right light to set it off from neighboring trees. Some afternoons we see a moonrise in daytime, and that feels like a triumph to him. We’ve been identifying cloud formations — cumulus, cirrus, etc, for some brain exercise. On Amy’s day off we go out for long drives, doing errands while Douglas sits in the car listening to classical music, then driving around in the country. These are companionable times. And sometime the old rascal comes back. The other day he asked me, in French no less, to come over for a kiss.
The question I am always asking myself is: Is this enough for Douglas? Is he bored? Desolate? Trapped in this moment? Or am I projecting on him my own sense of defeat, my own helplessness, my own inability to rise to this occasion?
“What do you want me to do now?” Douglas asks with some agitation at dinner time, the time of day when he is most alert and restless and agitated. The awful truth is I don’t want to be in charge of what he does. What I want him to do is sit and watch the news on TV while I am cooking. Then after dinner I want him to do more of the same, this man who has spent the whole day in front of a television set. The answer to his question is that I don’t KNOW what I want him to do, except to be at peace, to be content. Or is that just what I want for myself?
