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If you have never experienced this disease within your family, consider yourself very fortunate. 

They call it the long goodbye and it is. It is losing someone in slow motion. I've been watching my dad slip away for better than a decade. I know plenty of guys who have lost their dads and I'm not envious of them. @847badgerfan talked about his experience with that a while back.  I'm now in this bizarre in between where my dad is still physically with us but for all practical purposes, I've already lost him.

I've been watching Ohio State football games with my dad since the Michigan State game on September 13, 1975 when I was just a few months old (Ohio State won 21-0). He took me to my first Ohio State game. He and my brother and I watched the Buckeyes play in all 14 B1G stadiums plus the Rose Bowl. Some of you met him on some of those trips.

Saturday afternoon he and my brother and I are going to watch the Nebraska game together. My brother and I will talk about meeting @FearlessF in Lincoln back in 2011 but dad won't remember that.

Unfortunately, Saturday will probably be the last time I get to watch an Ohio State game with my dad. His disease has progressed to the point where my mom can't handle it and she fired the home health aids that my brother and I arranged for (don't get me started on that mess) so dad is about to be moved into a memory care unit at an assisted living facility. 

Even in pre-COVID times this is a big event but it is even bigger in this pandemic. We can't go there to watch games with him and if we "check him out" for a game he has to quarantine for 14 days.

I don't want this to be a thread of everyone feeling sorry for Medina, but I consider you my friends and I have some advice for anyone who finds themselves heading down this road with a family member. 

First:
When you start to think that maybe they shouldn't be driving anymore, you probably should have taken their keys a long time ago.

I'm not going to sugar coat this, taking dad's license was a horrible experience. My dad was the kind of guy who swore maybe once a year. I heard him swear more when we took away his license than I did the whole time I was growing up and I deserved those.

With that said, the difficulty of taking his license away was nothing compared to how horrible I would have felt if he had run someone over after I knew he shouldn't have been driving. Don't put yourself in that position. 

Second:
The person suffering from dementia/alzheimers just doesn't see their limitations. The best example I have is that not long after we took his license I took him to an appointment with his Cardiologist. While in the waiting room he was ranting and raving about not being allowed to drive. It was BAD. He had his coat in one hand and the hanger in the other and he literally could not figure out how to get the coat on the hanger. He interrupted himself in mid-sentence of raving about not being able to drive to hand me the coat and hanger and say "here, you do this" then kept on raving about not being able to drive. 

I'm not laughing at my dad here, but the situation was hilarious. I just looked at him thinking " you can't operate a coat hanger and you think I should put you behind the wheel of an 8,500 gvwr truck that we plow snow with?" I didn't actually say that to him, obviously. 

Third:
You have to learn to deflect and divert. This also, as a practical matter, involves lying to the patient. For years every time I visited dad would tell me that he needed me to help him get his John Deer garden tractor set up with the plow/mower and it took me a while to learn that the best way to handle it was to tell him that my brother and I would do it "next weekend".  "Next weekend" never came because it wasn't safe for him to operate that machine. 

Fourth:
Fake keys. I got this idea from my neighbor. If they obsess about wanting keys for house/car/whatever go get a handful of blanks and give them those.

Fifth:
Most important, enjoy every day that you have with them. 

Damn, that's rough. I feel for you Medina (and HB).

Honestly, I don't know what is worse. A long, slow death or a massive heart attack (my dad) going fast.

Not having a chance to say goodbye still sits with me, 8 years later. So I don't know.

I had an Uncle that passed away from this about a month ago. His wife was my father's sister, so not a blood uncle but one by marriage. 

His was pretty quick. About 5 years ago it was becoming noticeable. He'd ask you what you had to eat about five minutes after you just got done telling him about it. Fast forward a few years, and he doesn't even recognize his own children. My aunt also has an adult daughter that lives with her due to mental incompetency. So they made quite the trio. My 80 year old aunt would have to drive them both around and order their food at a restaurant. She had to do all of the thinking for all three of them. 

There was a certain card game that he liked, he remembered how to play it all the way up until the bitter end, and he really had a great time playing it. He would start cracking jokes and interacting on a fairly normal level again. So I recommend trying this. Break out the Uno cards or whatever game they might like, and see if they can still play. If it works, you won't regret it. 

My Aunt never put him into a care facility. She wouldn't hear of it. It was admirable, but might have led to an earlier demise as he eventually fell down the stairs a few months back and only lived about six weeks after that. But he got to die at home surrounded by loved ones. We just buried him last week. 

Medina,

I really appreciate you meeting with me on your trip to Lincoln back then.  Moments and memories like those are what life is all about.

I don't think there's a "better" way to lose someone, quickly or slowly.  Maybe better for some people that deal with loss differently.

Hang in there!

Having lost both parents and missing them dearly, I advise to spend as much time as you can with them while they are here and able.

My buddy lost his dad recently to this same thing. The man was a shell of himself, but he was still kind. He was in the harbor every weekend until he couldn't, and even though he couldn't remember much, he always remembered his neighbors at the harbor (me and Mrs. 847 particularly, and some others). 

When he no longer could, he was in memory care. He passed in March (not Covid). My buddy is a saint for giving his dad 3 really good years after the wife passed.

Great post BaB.

And yes, you speak for all of us.

I lost my grandmother to Alzheimer's. The hardest part for me was to see my family fight over how to manage her end of life and her meager possessions.

Condolences Medina.