When I arrived at Sunrise today, I could see that I was going to have trouble parking. And that was good. A lot of people had showed up for the Christmas party.
There were lights on the garage pillars and garlands on the banister beside the stairs leading up to the main floor. The lobby and dinning room were crowded with family members, the staff, and residents -- all of whom appeared to be wearing Christmas hats. From down the hall you could hear the "ho, ho, ho" of a Santa Claus.
Childlren were there and a couple of babies, belonging to a couple of caregivers. I'd seen the babies before. Just as cats and a dog are part of the Sunrise scene, so are babies.
I went upstairs to get my mother and bring her down, but I found her lying on her back in bed -- sound asleep. I whispered hello and got no response. So in a normal tone of voice I asked whether she would like to attend a Christmas party. "Indeed I would," she said. But in a moment she was back in a deep sleep. I could not see dragging her into her wheelchair, and taking her downstairs, half awake.
So I went to the party without her. But I felt at loose ends. It was odd being there without Mom. There was an excellent buffet, however, and so I nibbled and chatted with some of my staff friends. Gail Zink, the director, agreed to let me photograph her with Santa. "Ho, ho, ho," he said, agreeing to the picture.
Then I had a good conversation with Tracy, who will soon be in charge of planning programs in the dementia unit upstairs with Mom. She told me how hard it is for resident families to relate to loved ones with dementia.
I mentioned that I like to use videos as a vehicle for spending time with Mom -- she and I can be entertained by them together even though we can't carry on a conversation.
Tracy also talked about the challenge of getting through to someone lost deep in dementia. She mentioned one woman who had been completely passive for a long time. Tracy showed me how she finally held the woman's face as one would a baby and said, "I know you're in there somewhere, aren't you." The woman gave her a big smile.
After a while I went outside and walked down the hill to my car. It was raining. I turned the key in the ignition, and nothing happened. I had left my lights on, and now the battery was dead. I was mortified. Since I had done the same thing at Sunrise only a few days before, I couldn't bear to ask again for help from the staff.
It was rainy and cold, and I thought of calling a cab, but I decided to walk home instead -- partly for the exercise and partly because I was mad at myself for forgetting the lights. That had been stupid, and walking home in the rain was stupid; so it would balance out.
I had reached the center of Mercer Island, about a half mile from Sunrise, and as I was passing near the Walgreen Drug Store, I suddenly heard heart-wrenching cries of pain from the other side of the street. I saw that a pickup truck had stopped, and I expected to see a badly injured dog. Then I did see a big puppy -- possibly a golden lab -- come running in front if the truck. But he wasn't injured.
Then I looked beyond the truck, and saw that a frightened child was making the noise, crying out for his dog, who was frolicking in the road. He was saying something like, "Oh, God, no." "Please come back, Mocha." "Please don't hurt him."
The truck pulled away and the dog was still prancing around in the street. So I went after him, signaling a car to stop, and at the same time the child came out and stopped another car. I shouted to him that I would help capture the dog, and then I realized that he was not a child, but a dwarf, perhaps fourteen years old.
"Oh, thank you," he said, "thank you so much."
We got the dog back to the sidewalk, and the boy caught hold of him, but he got away. For a moment, it looked like the dog called "Mocha" would run out into the street again.
The boy was still terrified. But we managed to corner Mocha in the parking lot by the drugstore, a few feet off the road.. The boy caught him again, but could hardly hold him -- the dog was about the same size as he was. It was like trying to hold on to a rambunctuous pony. I managed to grab Mocha, allowing the boy time to take a collar and put it around the dog's neck.
All this while, he was continually saying to me, "Oh, thank you. Thank you so much."
I have never been thanked so often in so little time in my life for one action. I wanted to help him feel OK about what had happened, and so I told him I had had puppies and I knew how scarey they were with cars.
The collar was now on the dog, and the boy was in control. He continued to thank me, and as I left, I thought of saying, "Merry Christmas." That seemed corny, so I didn't, but the feeling of Christmas was very strong at that moment.
As I walked away, a couple of boys with another dog came up to the boy and Mocha. They looked about his age, but twice as tall. I could hear him explaining what had happened. As I turned and looked back at them, I thought the boy might wave, but he didn't. With the crisis passed, he may have been embarrassed at hving revealed so publicly his feelings -- his terrible fear of loss and profound sense of relief.
I found that I was tremendously moved by what had happened. Tears streamed down my face, and I was glad no one was walking toward me on the sidewalk to see my own public display of emotion.
After about a half hour I was walking across the East Channel Bridge of Interstate 90 on my way into Bellevue and home. It was still raining. Cars were whizing by on one side, and on the other Lake Washington stretched to the north. Seeing the lake, and the shoreline, and the grey sky, I thought for a moment of the way this land would have looked only a few decades back when most of it was wilderness.
A little later on I neared the end of what turned out to be an hour and a half walk home, and I reflected that it had been a long time since I had walked from Mom's home to mine. "When had it last been, " I wondered. When I was a kid in Indiana, or a graduate student in California? No, because in Indiana, I had lived at home, and in California, I had lived 70 miles from where Mom and Dad lived. Then I realized that in fifty-five years of living, I had never until this moment actually walked from Mom's home to my own.
But mainly I thought of my mother and her caregivers, and "Mocha" and his master. I reflected that the boy had probably not even been able to see above the hoods of those vehicles bearing down on his dog.
He may have been embarrassed by his reaction, but I admired him for the purity of his expression. There was something at once immediate and universal in that moment -- his anguished cries of despair in the face of loss and his profound expression of graditude at a tragedy avoided.
I have been trying explain to myself why I was so moved by this encounter. I think the episode resonated with my feelings about Mom. She too has been at risk, and she too has been helped -- her life now is a continual process of need and assistance. But unlike Mocha, she can never be brought back whole. I suspect that my tears revealed a deep frustration in my feelings about Mom -- on the surface I am very matter-of-fact about her condition. But deep down inside I wish I could "fix" things for her.
So there was a catharsis in helping the boy and his dog -- this time I had REALLY done something useful. But at the same time that success underscored my failure to do the impossible for Mom, to cure her.
This thought carried me to Sunrise and Mom and her caregivers. There is a woman on Mom's floor who says "help" hundreds of times every day. I think that if I were ever adrift in dementia "help" would be my one word of words.
Who are the helpers at a place like Sunrise -- the ones who help save Mocha, so to speak, every day? I help, certainly, but very little in the grand sceme of things -- one person for a couple of hours a week. The rest of the time, the helpers are persons who earn their living feeding and bathing and toileting and entertaining those who can no longer do those things for themselves. That they do this with such grace and enthusiasm and kindness is a constant source of wonder to me.
The process of salvation at Sunrise is not always as swift and dramatic as young Mocha's delivery was today. But in a fashion vulnerability and deliverance are woven into the care-giving life every hour of every day.
Later that evening my wife, Linda, and a friend Julie, and I went to the film, "The English Patient." On our way home, we drove up to Sunrise to retrieve my car. The building was aglow with hundreds of tiny white Christmas lights and looked like a fairy castle.
Before hooking up the cables to jump-start my car, I looked up and noticed that a light was on in the room where Mom lives. I wondered why she would be sleeping with the light on -- she can't turn it on or off by herself. Then I recalled that the aids check on her every two hours.
It was about midnight, and someone up there was looking after her.