Emotional connection, or, I thought I was out…

I am only human, so I abhor stressful or uncomfy situations for the most part. I learned early on that I have a tool in the box that lessens the emotional pain that would come before inevitable split or breakup or traumatic experience.

I’ve learned it’s called emotional disconnection. Gradually, you stop caring. Not about the person, but about the situation. You start looking forward to the end. You become deadened to present circumstances and you focus solely on physical survival. Eventually, when things fall apart, then you’re not as invested, not as involved, and it’s easier to extricate.

Anyway, I’ve emotionally divested from my bio dad a while ago. After being hurt so many times by his actions and inaction, I withdrew. I wanted him to live his life, safe and happy and whatnot, but I couldn’t continue to involve myself with a man who made me doubt my own worth. Was I worth love? Was I worth being listened to? Was I even a good son?

And then the dementia kicked in.

And like that, all avenues for resolution closed. I was left to speculate what he meant, a loop of interactions playing where I could only imagine his intentions and motivations. Because the door of answers had closed; at any point during the day, my father would proclaim that he was just a few blocks from his childhood home, that people around him had worked with him or gone to school with him. All things that were not true, but his brain had told him the truth.

At a few points, though, clarity kicked in, and he remembered. When visiting recently, he remembered me. He remembered who my mother was. He remembered my mother’s brother. And just when things were going really well, he turned to the wooded area that surrounds the facility and proclaimed that he had run those woods as a child.

Anyway, he stayed with my sister for a while before she got him into the facility, and she was cleaning up that room, and found a note he had written to himself.

Text reads (in my father’s pretty decent handwriting):

“Think I have missed appointment for my eye dr

Don’t know what to do now.
May God show me a way because I really need it.”

A moment of clarity from a man who hadn’t experienced it in a very long time. A note of sorrow, a feeling of helplessness, torn out of a notebook. A sense of vulnerability, of fear, amidst his brain fog of mixed memories and electrons not connecting anymore, losing more by the second.

I read this, and I cried. I was dedicated to his care, keeping up with my sister as she served as the local caregiver and working through the issue of his business and resources as those he supported moved on from him or waited in the wings for the windfall they were sure was coming as soon as he stopped drawing breath.

He wasn’t the doddering senior I had convinced myself he was, at least not all of the time. Every now and again, he felt fear. He felt unsafe, uncared for, confused. And once again, I felt that I had failed him.

That’s a bad feeling.