So my father calls just before 4 a.m. in distress because when he turns the lights off the room gets dark, and his Meals On Wheels delivery hasn't come, and the digital clock says three-five-six and he doesn't know what that means. It's crazy, he says, and he wants to know if the same thing is happening where I am.
I tell him it's four in the morning.
He asks me what he should do and I say there are many possibilities, but maybe the best thing is to turn off the light in the bedroom and go to sleep for a few hours, and when he gets up the food will have come...
No one is calling this Alzheimer's yet. The reason they're not calling it Alzheimer's is because it doesn't really matter what you call it. His sister died of Alzheimer's, and he's past 84, and when you look at the stats and the behaviors it's hard to imagine what else it could be. But our primary care physician holds the line at calling it an impairment, and adding that it's significant. And that's all that needs to be said. No sense in putting a frightening word into play, because whether it's in play or not, we'll still have to go to the elderlawyers, and get the assessment from the Visiting Nurse Service, and decide what accommodations are best, and take a series of actions...
I mention all this for several reasons -- first, to explain the continued silence on the blog, and second, to anticipate future entries that will reflect a growing degree of radicalization. And third, because I know I'm not remotely alone in all this. So I'll share for whatever it's worth. I know -- because I've been on similar territory before -- that I'm about to start a long series of rounds with well-meaning, underfunded agencies that mostly send you mimeographed lists of resources and leave you on your own with respect to navigating them (Visiting Nurse Service will be an exception in this regard - they're good, and hands-on). It reminds me how thin the safety net is, and the state of denial we're all in. Here we all are in the middle of a big demographic catastrophe, and the fact is we've got hardly any base of support...
Occasionally I stop thinking about that and start thinking instead about the number of friends and colleagues I've got who can't find full-time work because they're over 40 and therefore too expensive and therefore they're making do on the fringes of professional society, more or less. Professional society, please note -- I'm not even starting to talk about actual poverty and even deeper crises in the labor force...
I mention the white-collar angle, along with the aging-parent-entropy angle, because it suggests to me that, although no one's really focused on it, when you take the two together you've got the seeds of a deep and lasting radicalization.
I know I'm not the centrist I used to be. I don't think I'm a doctrinaire leftist, but I'm beginning to think that there are no centrists in foxholes.
I wonder how this will begin to play out on a national political scale.
Which is a useful form of wondering, because it distracts me from what's under my nose.
On both counts -- more to follow. Watch this space.
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