Fitness Files: When a loved one slips away mentally, all we can do is cry

Home from shopping, I dropped packages on the counter and hit the blinking phone message button, finger poised over “delete,” to erase robocalls.

Instead I heard the anguished voice of Julie, my friend since college.

“Please call me,” she said.

Without putting the frozen stuff away, I called.

“Julie?” I asked.

“Thank you for calling,” she said as she began to cry. “I keep getting mad at John for things he cannot help. He asks for tea, I brew it, take it to his recliner and he bats me away. This happens all day. I try to help him but…..” Her voice dissolved into sobs.

Just a few years ago, John was a test pilot, precise, buttoned-up and yet impishly funny. His steep decline into dementia is incomprehensible. I don’t have to see his day-to-day deterioration. Julie lives it.

Four years ago, when Julie first revealed John’s diagnosis, she said, “John and I will figure this thing out. No way he’s going to a nursing home. Can you imagine John in one of those? He’d be kicked out for dirty jokes or telling off an incompetent.”

I remembered Julie’s perfect characterization of her quick-witted, exacting husband.

Julie continued our phone conversation, “It just makes me so mad. I try to give him relief, and it blows up in my face. And I invited all the kids over for his birthday, because John seems to pull it together with family around … but I can’t do anything to please him or get ready for our so-called party. I’m going to shove his wheelchair into the street. Really!”

I listened, empathized, consoled and hung up, carrying the desperate tone of Julie’s voice with me. Finishing my shopping at Mother’s Market, I stopped mid-aisle and wept. I am not a weepy woman. I go years without crying. And public crying? Never!

But the reasons for caregivers’ anger at helpless people suddenly became clear to me. I’d been mad at my mother near the end of her life, when she cried out repeatedly “Help me” but couldn’t explain what was wrong. Standing there, I cried for friends, caretakers and for my sister’s future with Parkinson’s.

Tears helped me realize that anger is the default setting behind sadness too vast to confront. Anger usurps the realization of a lost future together, the unraveling of years of shared experience and common understandings. And anger comes from being unprepared to cope with the present.

Months ago, my neighbor Pam handed me Abigail Thomas’ memoir, “A Three Dog Life.” The small book joined others in a pile behind my bed until I got the flu last week. I read it right through. Thomas’ husband suffered a traumatic head injury. She and her three dogs spent 181 pages adjusting to altered lives. Almost halfway through the book, she faced the fact that she could not care for her husband at home.

Thomas explained, “I remember how quickly my husband’s tenuous grasp of reality slipped away. He was for all intents and purposes a madman … psychosis, paranoia, hallucinations, aggressive behavior, rages.”

She struggled to overcome guilt for placing him in a care facility. It took her almost five years to accept the fact that “no single person, no two people” could have taken care of a man in her husband’s condition. Still she asks, “Why did I feel so ashamed? What standard do we women hold ourselves up to?”

After years of soul searching she says, “I can finally say the words I want my life without feeling unnatural, selfish, cowardly.”

Julie feels unequipped to answer the needs of a loved one in the grips of a neurological crisis. She depends on their former logic in communication, but her loved one’s logical response is in shreds. She blames herself.

It’s been seven years since I lost my mom. To this moment, I regret being short with her.

We women have been able to “make it all better” so many times that we can’t stop trying. When it doesn’t work, we’re failures.

I’ll call Julie back and listen. I will recognize her efforts, remind her of UCI Mind’s support group referrals. I will bring food. I will write notes. I will back up her decisions. Maybe I will ask her if she’d like to read Abigail Thomas’ short book.

Newport Beach resident CARRIE LUGER SLAYBACK is a retired teacher who, since turning 70, has run the Los Angeles Marathon, placing first in her age group twice.