Episode 6: Dream World and Party Time
Season 1: Surviving Alzheimer’s
Week 28: I’ve been having some vivid dreams lately. I was trying to teach a kid to ride a horse (as if I would know), but for whatever reason I had to sit backwards facing the kid. As we galloped along, I was trying to get him to slow the horse down, but to no avail, as is often the case with these types of dreams. We sped recklessly across the plain, out of control. I woke as the horse was about to go over a cliff.
I don’t know how much meaning to attribute to dreams, but it seems like our subconscious trying to express itself. I don’t know much about riding a horse and I don’t know much about how best to help with D’s Alzheimer’s. Even if I can’t see where we are going, I’ll try not to take us over the cliff.
Earlier this week, I was having a pleasant dream about driving 2 hours to deliver an unsolicited Christmas gift. Somehow, this connected to my father who was in a medical facility, strapped to a board on a 45-degree angle, frozen. He woke up, still quite sick, but able to say a few words (what were they)? Either way, they felt peaceful. He needed help getting cleaned up because he had some old friends coming to visit.
In my real life, my father had died 28 years earlier, in a hospital, from cancer. A nurse friend and I had bathed him a few days before he died. That has always felt like an incredible act of compassion — my friend helping me comfort my dying father. Is this what we’ll do for D someday?
This morning, I woke up after dreaming about being with a group of good people who had come in possession of some valuable gifts. They were being robbed by some evil people who took everything and were going to kill us. I was able to rewind the dream to the point where I had a rifle. I knocked off half of them, grabbed the pistol from another and turned to shoot the leader, but I was out of bullets. He shot me smack in the middle of my torso. I laid down on my back and asked someone to stop the bleeding. I must have thought that would be a good time to wake up.
I could spin an interpretation here about the evil Alzheimer’s robbing us as I try desperately to fight back, only to succumb in the end.
Week 30: I have a long history of planning and hosting large parties in my various backyards, over the past 40 years. Bringing together and reuniting with groups of friends and family. I invited about 50 people for a late summer gathering that I’m calling our Tomato Festival. Sharing fruits of our garden as an excuse to have fun cooking, eating, drinking, singing, and dancing with people who care about each other (on many different levels) feels like a good idea at this point.
Naturally, I just had one of those anxiety dreams — food is not ready, I forgot to set up the music, no one is being helpful, and my father was trying to start the fire with little bits of wood and broken glass while someone was trying to toss in plastic. I wondered if some of my anxiety was also stemming from our anniversary bar episode — that scene when she got so angry, the first time she ever hit me. The thought of something like that happening in front of all our friends and relatives would be devastating.
Week 32: The Tomato Festival was a huge success. There was a 0% chance of rain, yet we had 3 hours of drizzle. We were not deterred; I’m getting better at adapting to the unexpected without getting stressed. We had old friends and new friends from down the road to bordering states, and lots of family.
I put Ds sister in charge of coordinating a core group of her best friends to make sure someone was with her, helping to keep her engaged in the festivities (I’m getting better at asking for help and delegating). This strategy worked amazingly well. D held court, the center of just the right amount of attention. She took great pleasure in showing off her photo album that I recently had made for her — happy times with captions.
Our house specialties included tortellini with homemade pesto, the flagship tomato salad, homemade salsa, smokey grilled chicken legs, carne asada, with dozens of ears of corn grilled on the firepit with cilantro lime butter. Dessert was a bowl of grilled peaches with a gallon of vanilla Haagen Das dumped on it — yes, it was that good.
The highlight was sitting around the firepit after dark with 15 of our inner circle, surrounding us with all the love in the world while we drank and laughed and sang some of our old favorites and told those stories we’ve all heard before.
All those memories, there somewhere, like everything.
