SHIT – Something He Intends to Teach!

My father has Dementia and I am my father’s primary caregiver for the past 6 years now. In the initial stages, things were not that tough and I was able to work and still manage to take care of him. So all was good.

A little over 3 years ago came a time when I had to choose between Dad and a career. I chose Dad. Again, it was the initial days of not working and I was able to look at it as a blessing in disguise. I could tell myself that this is a well-earned break after having worked my arse off all this time etc. Back then I had not yet realized that being my father’s caregiver was nothing less than a real/full-time job!

Around 2.5 years ago came a time when my oh so burnt out arse, which was now well rested and growing, was twitching to get out and work again. This twitch that I developed soon became my source of frustration! What was once looked upon as a blessing in disguise now became the noose around my neck. I started getting into fights with my sisters over the lack of support. I started feeling miserable and hopeless and angry and frustrated and all things negative. And I still had to push myself to appear happy and chirpy and all things positive for my father’s sake. I was on an emotional roller coaster and how!!!

Around this time is when my father had started scooping his shit out of the pot and throwing it out of the window. Something in his head made him go all ‘cave-man’ who felt that he could literally throw his shit around!!! He forgot the use of the flush!!! I did happen to notice one perfectly shaped piece of shit sitting on his bathroom’s window sill when I was playing detective and figuring out where the foul smell was emanating from and it still didn’t strike me that dad was throwing it all out and hence this little piece of shit was sitting up there instead of flowing in some mass of water somewhere. Some detective I was!!! I wondered what it was doing up there for a total of 5 minutes at most and then gave up thinking God alone knows what goes on in dad’s head.

My building security guard and neighbors are also such empathizing souls! God bless them! They knew what was happening because the people whose vehicles the shit fell on would confront the security guard (there are some commercial flats in my building and the staff working there park their cars/bikes in that space that’s right under my dad’s window…. And I live on the 4th floor….imagine the splatter!!!). My neighbor happened to be around once when someone was screaming murder and she also helped the guard explain my father’s condition and calm that fellow down. For some odd reason, none of them brought it to my notice for about a week! When they finally did tell me about it, I almost laughed (I can be quite mad that way!). I assured them I would have his window sealed in another 2 days’ time max. It’s a different story that I was shitting bricks inside wondering what I would do if dad started throwing the shit inside the house when the window was sealed. Anyway, I called the relevant people to come and seal the window in another day or 2 max.

That same day one man walked up to my door screaming murder. He was shouting like a mad man and he quite looked like a mad man too, with shit splattered on the front of his shirt and shoulder and hand. I refused to look at his face for long because I was not able to figure out if what I could see on his face was freckles or splatters of shit! Me being me, I would have probably roared with laughter and that would definitely have been really shit timing!!! He kept screaming and saying, “I could see his hand hanging outside the window…. I could see that he was about to throw something! I understand he is not well but you need to fix this…” In my head, I was saying, so if you could see his hand dangling out there and you did realize that he was about to throw something, why in the world were you still standing there? To test his aim???? Of course, I didn’t say that out loud to him. By now I had learned the art of looking apologetic pat down! I apologized and assured that the window will be sealed…. Problem solved!

THE MOMENT of EPIPHANY!

After this poor man left, it struck me! Around me, I will find a set of people that pass SHIT around and I will find a set of people that wait for SHIT to happen and then wonder why SHIT happened to them and whine about how SHIT happened! And then there’s a set of people who probably didn’t participate in the act of passing SHIT around or weren’t waiting for SHIT to happen but still ended dealing with SHIT anyway. Can’t do much about it, right? SHIT happens! It happens with everyone!

I don’t know what made me write the word SHIT on a piece of paper but I did, and I kept circling it with my pencil and suddenly the way I looked at that word changed. POOF! To me, SHIT now looked like Something He Intends to Teach!

‘He’ out here could be anyone, anything, any experience/situation. The point is, every piece of SHIT or SHIT situation can teach you something if you are open to learning. If only we could start looking at every situation/person/thing that looks like SHIT as something/someone that’s trying to teach us something. Imagine the amount of wisdom we could all gain, and peacefully too!

Before this moment of epiphany, I used to think that at some point my father’s dementia is probably going to make me into a demented person! I now realize that the main things it has taught me or rather enhanced in me are, 1. Creativity, 2. Empathy, Compassion and Patience 3. Ownership and Responsibility.

Every day is a new day. My father has become extremely creative and does something new/different every now and then. I have to stay a step ahead so I need to be more creative!

My father is literally losing is mind and what’s worse is, his illness makes him forget things….so he forgets that he is losing his mind. He thinks there’s nothing wrong with him and I catch him looking at me like I am some degree of a demented person for behaving the way I do or for giving him as many medicines as I do. He gets very angry, even abusive and violent when I try to assist him or force him to take his medicines or when I refuse to let him step out of the house on his own. And quite literally the very next minute he could turn from a raging angry person to a vulnerable helpless person and start crying like a baby. One minute I’m his best friend and the most amazing daughter and in the next, I’m a sworn enemy! I have to keep switching between the roles of a mother/daughter/caregiver/friend.

The communication between us is quite like ‘fill in the blanks’ or ‘guess who’ because he is losing his sense of words. For example, while eating his meal if he wants a spoon, he tells me he wants a ball pen and it is up to me to figure out what it is that he is actually asking for. He talks gibberish at best most of the time now and I need to respond to that gibberish like it’s the most normal conversation so that he does not feel like he is being weird.

He does not realize that everything that I do is for his own safety. He can appear to be ungrateful and unappreciative of all that I do for him. The icing on the cake is, someday soon, he will not even remember me. But I know him and I know the man that he really was before this illness took over his mind and I remember that he is my father and that my very existence is thanks to him. I can choose to be there for him, just like he was there for me all these years. I can choose to be the responsible adult now while he is being the child.

I still have my days when I feel low or angry or underappreciated. The difference is, I now also have a new perspective towards SHIT and some really amazing people around me and that helps me bounce right back!