Dementia from a Distance
From Bangkok, a son says goodbye to a father who is 10,000 miles away and fading fast.
(A shorter version of this article appeared in the April / May 2017 issue of Wanderlust Magazine.)
BANGKOK, Thailand
It was January 2014. My father, beset with Alzheimer’s Disease for four years, was entering the final 18-month slide to his death. I found myself with an opportunity to live and work in Bangkok, the city where he had taken his young wife, their two little girls and his newly widowed mother in the summer of 1955.
When he left five years later, able to rattle off Thai and converse easily with native speakers, Thailand had changed his life — all of their lives, in fact. I wanted to follow in his footsteps, to bring my wife and young boys to the same place, to expose our children to the world, to turn them into the kind of global citizens that growing up in my family had made me.
I went immediately to my 91-year-old father — a giant to me, a pioneering linguist who taught teachers at what is now Srinakharinwirot University and co-authored the first professional English-language textbook for teaching Thai, the man who taught me how to think. I went to this man, now a phantom of what he was, and I asked him how he’d feel if I moved to Bangkok.
“Bangkok,” he repeated, his eyes cloudier than usual. He was having a bad Alzheimer’s day. “I’ve been to Bangkok, haven’t I?”
My stomach fell. How on Earth could I move away? How could I and my family go from living 10 minutes away from my parents to living 10,000 miles away? How could I help him manage his final days if I wasn’t there?
Five minutes later, I asked him again. It is the strange quality of Alzheimer’s that it fades in and out, stealing a person from loved ones for a time and then abruptly returning him to the front doorstep as if he’d never left.
“Bangkok!” he exclaimed, his eyes clearer than usual. I saw that he was smiling. “We lived in Bangkok, and now you will, too. This is what we raised you to do.”
You may know the challenge and pain of long-distance relationships, particularly if you are an expatriate. But the pain and challenge of trying to care for a dementia-riddled parent from afar is a unique experience that changed my own life. It is something that, oddly, I both would never wish on anyone and am deeply grateful that I have lived through.
- It is the experience of maintaining an American mobile phone — always on, always with you — and thinking that every 3 a.m. phone call from the States is that phone call. (Most often it was the assisted-living facility, not realizing I was 12 hours away, calling to cheerfully ask if I’d be attending, say, the residents’ St. Patrick’s Day party.)
- It is the experience of coming home to a man who once crossed the Khyber Pass in a rickety bus and took an equally rickety train all the way down the Irrawaddy River in Burma — and finding that the first thing I had to do upon arrival was to help change his diaper.
- It is the excruciating disappointment of finally getting someone to answer a FaceTime call on an iPad at my parents’ end of the world, then seeing my father’s face crumple in confusion as he struggles to understand that somehow, impossibly, it’s not a movie of me on that screen in front of him but it’s really me, live, talking to him and asking how he is.
- It is the frantic attempts to call the hospital in Pittsburgh where my father has been taken again because he forgot he used a walker and hit his head in the night — and trying, a world away, to locate the duty nurse who has his chart and can tell me whether he’s alive or dead.
Until July 2015, the answer was that he was always alive, albeit more frail and less cognitively aware each time. My wife and I alternated visits roughly every nine weeks — and maintain that today for my mother, who is also beginning to slip into dementia.
Somehow, by someone’s grace, my entire immediate family was there on the summer day that he died. The prior afternoon, we had said goodbye because we were planning to leave town and head back to Bangkok. He smiled at us, his memories almost entirely gone. Improbably, he still recognized my boys, “You’re a good grandson,” he said to the older one, Mason. “I love you, grandson,” he said to the younger one, Wyatt. Eighteen hours later, he was gone.
And so we returned to Bangkok, bereft and feeling fresh guilt because my mother, now, would be totally alone.
Today, 18 months later, when I think about my father and our decision to come to Thailand, I picture one scene.
It is December 2014, eight months before his death. I stop home for three days en route from London to Bangkok — the long way — and bring him a recent copy of a Thai newspaper. When I was little, whenever he’d travel, which was often, he’d bring me copies of newspapers in the languages of the places he visited.
He looks over the newspaper as I chat to my mother. After a few minutes, I notice that he is speaking in a low voice. It sounds not quite right. I try to figure out what he is saying; he is grinning and seems excited about something, and I think that he is simply babbling.
But eventually I come to realize: This is not babble at all. It is language.
At this moment, my father cannot remember anything of his childhood. He cannot remember, really, ever being a professor. He cannot remember anyone but his immediate family, for all practical purposes.
But my father, the man who carted his children all around the world and showed them all that there was to see — my father the linguist, his mind almost gone, is sitting on a couch in suburban Pittsburgh and reading the news of the day … in Thai. It all comes full circle, doesn’t it.
Read the author’s eulogy to his father here:
Read his obituary here:
Ted Anthony, a Pittsburgher living in Thailand, is a Baby Boomer by generation and a Gen-Xer by age. He has been dissecting and musing about American culture since Guns N’ Roses was on the charts and “Rain Man” was in the theaters. He is the author of Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song. He tweets here, Instagrams here and collects various fragmentary images and thoughts on Tumblr here.
©2017 | Ted Anthony
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