Citizen journal: Alzheimer’s robs victims, their loved ones

If you are past middle age, you may have the opportunity to reconnect with a dear friend from decades ago. If the friendship was deep, you and your friend pick up right where you left off back in the olden days.

Last spring, about the time the new coronavirus began ruining our lives, I found out the location where my former friend had ended up after leaving Spokane decades ago. I scoured the internet for his telephone number and had success.

I called him out of the blue. We were both overjoyed speaking to one another again. We recounted enjoyable moments and asked about old friends from those days.

My restored friend was a guy who spawned enjoyment and humorous occasions without using alcohol, drugs, belittling others or a sense of superiority.

Back in those days, we were both fathers with families of several small children. Raising children seemed like such a hassle, so busy that delightful moments with other adults were rare. But when you are escaping the duties of parenthood for a moment with someone who shares your warped values and obsession with humor, those events are memorable.

This reconnected friend of mine was a large man and a powerful singer. He had a gift of unmatched lung power. Often in the old days, when we were driving along a Spokane avenue, we arrived at a congested intersections with cars braking for no reason, left turners, right turners, and other confused drivers. At these times, my friend would stick his head out the window of our car and produce the sound of an ambulance siren, with the volume required to make the mimic plausible.

Cars ahead of us pulled to the curb, and we breezed through the intersection.

We laughed ourselves to tears at each of those events.

Our renewed telephone calls became weekly. Lots of old silliness needed to be recounted.

Then one day during a phone call, my old friend spoke seriously and told me that he had begun treatment with a psychiatrist.

I went quiet, shocked but also waiting to hear more of his situation. My friend continued on about the psychiatrist helping him with self-discovery, that his mother’s death, some 40 years ago, had left him so damaged that he was suffering a gradual mental breakdown now.

I don’t know anything about psychological matters so just listened and spoke some sympathy when I felt it was appropriate.

Not long after that, my friend began calling me twice a week, but no discussion of the good old days like we had done before. Now he asked how my day was going and a brief comment on his local weather and then he begged off the conversation. I was dumbfounded. Why had he even called me?

Soon his calls to me became more frequent and more random, late at night sometimes. I began to not answer whenever I saw his name on my incoming calls.

Then one day when I was in a meeting, he called me five times, right in a row. I did not answer the first time, so he had hung up and called again and again. I was angry.

After the meeting, I called him and confronted him with the five calls in a row. “If I don’t answer, then I am busy,” I growled through clenched teeth.

He denied making the phone calls. That further infuriated me.

“I’m blocking your phone number,” I told him.

He begged me not to block him but his intrusive phone calls and denials were too much for me. I hung up on him in the middle of his pleading. It had come to this.

The next day, my friend’s wife called me. She told me that her husband had been inconsolable since I had blocked his calls. He kept dialing me over and over, then cried after several failures to get through to me. And she said the psychologist treating him was actually a “cognitive therapist” trying to help my friend manage with losing his mind to Alzheimer’s.

I apologized but explained to his wife that the phone calls had become a huge nuisance and were repeated at all hours, day and night. And that her husband didn’t have much of anything to say when I answered.

The wife answered, “You did the right thing to block him. He is suffering from rapid progression Alzheimer’s. Obsessions and repetitive behaviors are bad for him. He is obsessed with speaking to you, you are one of his memories from time in his life that was better for him. He is so confused.”

My own mother succumbed to Alzheimer’s after years of losing her beautiful mind. She was so broken by the disease that she quit taking food. She starved herself to death in order to escape the demons in her head.

Like my friend, she got needy. Every time I visited Mom in her last years at the care facility, she would speak my name and then beg me to do something about the horrible things the hospital staff was doing to her. “Please take me with you?” I checked with my siblings and father, her request had been repeated to them. All of us took time to watch the staff, secretly and behind doors. Nothing evil was going on, it was her disease speaking. But I would challenge anyone to brush off your own mother’s earnest cry for help, even when the help is not needed.

After my friend’s wife explained the Alzheimer’s, I was not comforted. I felt like I had let him down.

My old friend died not long after I talked to his wife that day.

If you’ve had someone dear to you perish from that malicious disease, you know that the tentacles of Alzheimer’s reach out and cling to those of us who loved the victim. Each one of us is left with the feeling that we did not do enough.

—

– Darin Z. Krogh can be reached at kroghdz@msn.com. He is the author of “Lilac City Confidential,” available at lilaccitybooks.com.