Tonight was interesting. I was getting my father ready for bed and he said something I didn’t understand. I spoke up and said “What did you say?”
Please understand my father wears hearing aids, and the Parkinson’s interferes with communication regularly.
He suddenly responded “I don’t know why you’re mad at me. Never mind!” and I was slightly stunned.
Partially because I rarely raise my voice in anger – I rarely get angry in the first place. But also because it was an entirely innocuous scenario with no opinions involved. I realized that despite the known hearing and communication problems we’ve had for close to 3 months, he was misunderstanding my volume as emotion sometimes.
I waited until things settled a bit and clarified for him “I promise I will never raise my voice in anger, and if I’m suddenly louder it’s only in hopes of making things easier to hear.” He understood, but it was a bit weird for me. One of the most dissatisfying aspects of this disease for me is that randomness of losing my sense of who my father is, and also realizing he doesn’t process me the same way either. The combination of physical and mental decline regularly creates a person who is no longer the father I remember and our relationship loses any feeling of shared history. He’s never known me to yell in anger, or even be emotional in any way, yet suddenly he is feeling like I’m reacting to him so negatively.
Earlier in the evening, he urger me to come to the living room. Once there, he asked for a flashlight with a voice in emergency mode. I calmly asked why. He said because “Mom dropped something under the table and needs it to see.” My mother died in 2010. So I held his hand and patted his side a bit until he looked directly at my eyes. I said, “It would be nice if Mom were here and dropped something huh?” and he realized the situation and responded “Yes it would.”
Fuck Parkinson’s