Mind Boggling

I published this story on July 24, and then, the next day I realized that there were a couple of typos.  Augh!! I quickly pulled it back to fix them.  And in the cruel way cyberspace sometimes acts, it erased the whole first paragraph and refused to give it back.  It took me almost two weeks to come back and fix it.  But it's important to have this little snapshot of my sweet boy at this time in his life.

At 14 years and 5 months Lukas is sliding quickly away from us.  Most of the time, he walks slowly and stiffly, hips and knees not cooperating.   He sleeps a great deal and most of the time, he prefers a small bed near the table where both Carolyn and I sit to work on our computers.  He can be pretty crabby, especially in the morning, which is absolutely the opposite of who he is.  He has always been the sweetest dog, an incredible drama queen, definitely a lover, not a fighter unless it was to defend his sister from all perceived dangers.  But now his mind is....boggled.  He is off in some other land and seems lost

Most heartbreakingly, it appears that he sometimes doesn't know his beloved sister.  She has been his protector, his safe place, his happiest moments all of his life.  Every day when Zuza and I would return from work, he would come alive, greeting her hysterically, wanting to play, dashing around in absolute glee.  (She, of course, would look at him with a certain alpha dog disdain.  "Yeah, whatever.") But she then would spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning his ears, washing his face, being the Mom, all the while cuddling with him.  Now he growls and lunges at her, often enough that we seldom leave them together unsupervised.  It is most heartbreaking that it really scares her.  She's completely blind now, so she can't tell if he is growling at her or at the cats and it is much harder to protect herself, so she tries to hide.  The most unnerving thing that he does, however, is that he hallucinates.  He snarls and growls at invisible things.  Sometimes he lunges. It honestly shakes me to the core.  

Then he gets his medication, which is mostly for pain, arthritis and otherwise, and an appetite stimulant.  Then he's back!!  Our old Lukey!  He wants to play with his favorite toy, Foxy; he's hungry, he's hopping up and down!!  He's funny and happy and wants to be with me every second.

And now he wanders.  If he was a human, we would be locking the doors and making all of the cabinets impossible to open.  He has forgotten how to back up, so if he runs into an obstacle he gets stuck there.  Yesterday, in the house, he walked into teeny little places from which there was no return, squeezed between a piece of furniture and the wall.  One time, I was just outside disinfecting the mail--yes, I still do that--and he was in the living room between a box of record albums and a wooden dog crate, and he just started screaming at the top of his lungs.  I'm outside yelling--because he's really deaf now, "I'm coming Lukey!  It's okay!  You're all right!" as I dash back in.   The next time, I was in the kitchen and heard very loud rustling and crunching noises.  He was in a space that was perhaps an inch and a half wide, behind a wooden chest where an egg carton, (waiting to be filled by our chickens), had slipped.  Once again, there was no reason for him to be there.  And once again he was completely foiled by the obstacle.  I spent the rest of the day with him in a pouch, strapped to me.  The new normal.  And how long will this normal last?  I don't know.

Living with loved ones who are slowly sliding down the path of dementia is an excruciating business.  We learned this lesson thanks to our friend, Susan.  In the end, she made her own decisions about how and when she wanted to die.  With Lukas, this decision, like most of the others in his life, lies with us and the forces of the universe.  I hope that I can be strong enough to bear the weight of the life of this waif, my boy, my little man

Fireworks 2019

Last night I saw the best fireworks show ever. Our neighbors do this every year, but we usually have to go home before it starts because it has always made Lukas insane. He could still hear it at home, but it would be quieter and, of course, his barking and shrieking would only bother us, not the entire neighborhood. Zuza would just take it in stride, the way she always has.

This year was different, because they are both different.  Lukas has lost a lot of his hearing. It's harder because he can't hear the quiet praise and soothing sounds we make when he's upset. On the other hand, noise is much less of a problem. Innocent hikers walking by the house are finally safe from maniacal barking, and some trucks pass unnoticed. Woo hoo! Zuza's changes are harder to bear. She had to have an eye removed in January because of an abscess. The cataract in her remaining eye has destroyed her vision. This journey I'll detail in another post, but for the purpose of fireworks, her condition has made loud noise really scary.  She flinches every time there is an unexpected, sharp noise--hammering on the house, a dropped pan, a door slam.  The funny thing is that TV noises don't bother her. All kinds of mayhem can go on and she sleeps right through it. So, we left them home with a TV western blaring on the TV, and they were happy to sleep under a blanket in their best bed. And yes, they have a "best" bed.

So all that to say, amazing fireworks, right around the corner from our house, blossoming right over us.  Incredible colors. Incredible noise, including that sharp whistling that is usually followed by a soldier shouting, "Incoming!"

And suddenly I was a little girl, nestled up against my Dad, on the shore of Lake Winnebago at Lakeside Park in Fond du Lac.  We were talking about which of the fireworks we liked and which ones we didn't. Neither of us liked the "duds", ones that shot up and then, no colors, just an earth rocking BANG!

And who protected who in those moments?  My Dad came home from WWII shell-shocked--that term that became PTSD--and didn't go to the fireworks in my earliest years. I only learned the reasons after his death, in a random conversation with my Mom.  When he came home, she learned not to serve him coffee in a cup and saucer because his hands shook too much. At night he would cry out, and jump, and thrash. She said that she knew it would embarrass him, so she never mentioned it.

All those years, all those memories buried deep inside him.  No one ever let him talk out any of that fear, any of the revulsion he had felt at the destruction he saw.  He never told war stories. To my knowledge, he never wrote to the men with whom he served.  He said that he never wanted to return to the cities he had seen intact...and then torn up.  He never returned to London where he had grow up; he never saw Italy or France again.  And, I believe, he never appreciated the fireworks that I thought were so magical, if a bit unnecessarily loud.

This year, he would have been happier holding my nearly deaf dog on his lap in the quiet of my house, watching a western on TV.  I can't even begin to tell you how much I would love to have that be true.  The little girl I was still misses cuddling up to her Dad, listening to him explain magic.