Well, hello there.
It’s been June of last year since I posted here.
Contrary to rumor, I’m not dead. But it’s been a wild ride.
A brief synopsis is probably in order.
Dad’s dementia went from mild to profound in the first six months of 2019. We kept him at home as long as we could. But even staying with him was sufficient to prevent wandering, and after a couple of escapes we had to place him in a facility.
He spent some time in a memory care unit about an hour away. When time ran out there, we were lucky — a room opened up in a place about a 15 minute drive from home. He’s been there ever since.
The toll all this took on my family was enormous. My wife and I became, almost overnight, the primary caretakers for a physically very fit gentleman who was convinced demons with machines on their faces were roaming his house. That bands of screaming, pale women hovered in his yard all night. He hid food and papers, many of which were never found. He took to roaming.
I awoke one night to find him gone. After a frantic search in the snake-infested woods, I found him sitting in the plastic lawn chair he took with him. “The man told me to sit here,” he said, pointing to something only he could see.
That’s life with a dementia patient. You’re exhausted and there is absolutely no way to explain to the sufferer that the things they see aren’t real. So you have to accept their reality. Make the bad things go away with a bit of acting. All the while knowing that there is no cure, no treatment, no light at the end of the tunnel. The only comfort you may offer is your presence, and that dubious comfort is tempered by the knowledge that the time will come when they simply don’t know you anymore.
Watching the brutal progression was horrific. Especially when it came practically on the heels of Mom’s doomed battle with ALS.
So yes, I dropped off the web. Stopping blogging. Some people might have turned this horror into something beautiful.
That was simply beyond me.
Now we’re all in the grip of a virus that sweeps invisibly among us. The risk is real, even if the agent is unseen. What we all considered normal six months ago has been swept away. When and if we’ll ever see that again is simply unknowable.
That’s me shopping in the image above. I found the mask in my attic. It’s still good, so I wear it out. People laughed at me until the CDC suggested last Friday that people start wearing masks in public. I wear it not so much to protect myself, but to keep my family as safe as I can. I don’t mind being laughed at. That’s something writers have considerable experience with.
Speaking of writing — yes, I’m still writing. Very slowly. It’s been difficult. Yes, I know the utility of pouring one’s own fears and pains into a book. But, as in all things, that practice too can be overdone. No one wants to read a relentlessly dark and utterly hopeless howl spread over a few hundred pages. I’m here to entertain; no one needs to be subjected to a therapy session but a paid therapist.
I posted on my Facebook page a couple of weeks ago that if anyone wants my books for free, I’ll email them straight to you in either mobi (kindle) or epub (everything else) format. That offer stands here, too. It did take me a couple of weeks to get all the Facebook batch out, but I will do it faster this time around. So hit me up at franktuttle at franktuttle dot com if you want free books. People are broke and sales don’t mean that much to me now anyway.
So. How are you doing?
