Sometimes, Do Your Best is all You’ve Got
Navigating Alzheimer’s expected and unexpected moments
Of the many guiding principles that you could choose in life, “do your best,”
is really one of the better ones. Properly adhered to, it will never steer you wrong.
It is also a pretty darn good guiding principle for navigating Alzheimer’s too.
There are many reasons for this, but perhaps chief among them is that there are many, many times when you literally have no idea what to do or how to handle a situation.
And I don’t care how many support groups you join, or how many books you read to prepare you, Alzheimer’s is going to throw things your way that you didn’t expect; and even if you did expect them, it will throw the expected things at you at unexpected times and they’ll hit you it unexpected ways.
Preparing our Kids
Doing our best is pretty much how Kari and I have made it through preparing our kids for Dad’s Alzheimer’s. We have three kids, Ava (11), Ivy (7), and Ean (3). Each of them has a different level of maturity, and each of them has their own unique personality, and it is literally impossible to account for all of the ways that they could react to Dad’s illness. So, we’ve done our best to prepare them as best we know how to as their parents.
To be honest, and we take no credit for this, they have handled it incredibly well. To them, he’s always just Grandpa. It doesn’t matter to them that he says things that sometimes don’t exactly make sense, and it doesn’t matter to them that he can’t ride his bike with them like he used to. They know he’s Grandpa, and they love him, no matter what.
We were very honest with them from the very beginning that Grandpa was going to go through a lot of changes, and that his health was going to get worse, and that we couldn’t predict when any of these changes were going to come, but they were coming.
One such moment occurred about two weeks ago — Dad didn’t recognize his grandchildren.
Do Your Best
Again, we had prepared all of the kids for this moment. We told them quite a while ago that, eventually, Grandpa wouldn’t recognize them, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know them or love them, just that he couldn’t remember. Occasionally, they would ask before they saw him if Grandpa was going to remember them, and we were always honest. We said, “We don’t know. We’ll see.”
I guess that preparation paid off, to some degree, because when they did see Dad a few weeks ago, and he didn’t recognize them, or remember their names (he just called them “the girl,” “the other girl,” and “the boy,” lol), they didn’t really miss a beat.
I mean sure, they realized that Grandpa didn’t recognize them, but that didn’t change anything, he was still their Grandpa, and they tried as best they could to play with him as they always had.
But, of course, each kid reacted in their own unique way, as evidenced by the following video that Kari took…
Notice that Ean just plows ahead with playing, Ava stands aside and helps, and Ivy mouths, “what is with him?” And that pretty much sums up the personalities of our kids in a nutshell.
We Keep Doing Our Best
Now, when the kids see Dad, they don’t expect him to recognize them, and again, it doesn’t really matter to them. To them, he’s their Grandpa, and they love, and he loves them. Because that’s the truth.
He does his best. We do ours. And on we go…
