Dad Dementia Dreams Dolphins

Jeff Ell SmallFor years marine biologist have been trying to figure out why cetaceans beach themselves. Nice people try to save them by coaxing them back into the water, but that rarely works. I’m starting to think that when they know they’re terminal, they come ashore wanting to be buried in the world where they feel like they really belong. The land where they don’t have to hold their breath.

I began thinking about this a few weeks ago when my dad’s dementia took a sharp turn for the worse. After I found him in the garage trying to open his locked car without keys.

He had been fighting memory loss for years. He angrily denied anything was wrong, yet his house was littered with hundreds of empty bottles of herbal supplements, all touting propitiatory blends claiming to increase memory function and mental acuity. Along with the hundreds of empty bottles, was the rest of the detritus his flickering mind washed up on the shores of his home. Mounds of newspapers, unrefrigerated food, and indecipherable piles of bills with notes and dates scrawled on them.

He fought a good fight. He kept himself on a simple routine: to the diner for breakfast, to the post office for his mail, then home again to sort and sift through the ever growing piles. He’s not stupid. He knew the unnamed creature was tugging on his legs, wrapping its tentacles around his mind and pulling him into ever deeper water.

Then the other day, he slipped under and stayed there. That’s when I found him in the garage. A little later, at the emergency room, I listened to him tell the nurse he didn’t know the month or who the president was.

We thought he might have suffered a stroke, and I would often go to the hospital only to find him sleeping. So I’d sit, watch him sleep, and think about his life; who he was, what he did. He was an average man and I’m his average son. I probably over estimated him all my life; love is pretty good at helping us dish out generous ladles of just about everything from the crockpots of our hearts.

While watching him sleep, I would sometimes nod off myself. I would fall into one of those micro naps when nonsensical words jump up and flop about on the dock of consciousness for a few seconds before falling back into the sea of forgetting when my head jerks suddenly to the side.

I kept wishing I could crawl into his brain and make sense of it all. I want to know how he feels, and what he’s experiencing. I’d like to know if he is afraid or sad. I wish I could tape together the shredded fragments and read what’s going on inside that scrambled brain of his.

Then one day, while he slept, is when I thought about dolphins. I could see them sliding in and out of the water with their arched backs and wet skin, as they raced across the sea. For a few seconds, the air breathers jump free from the land of gills and fins and visit the land of lungs and legs.

This image has helped me, a little.

Everyone slides in and out of reality when the alarm rings or our heads suddenly tip to the side. It’s just that now my dad doesn’t get his nose above the surface much anymore.

I think this image has helped me because I know that God can speak to us in our dreams. Jacob laid his head upon a rock and saw the ladder to heaven, and his son Joseph’s dream instructed him about how to save a nation. Jesus’ earthly dad had a dream and moved his family away to safety.

I also know that some amazing scientific and creative breakthroughs have happened in dreams. James Watson dreamed the double helix for DNA, heck even Jack Nicklaus dreamed up his golf grip.

So now when I visit him I try to imagine I’m part of his dream. I want to be his happy faced son in the land of nod where he and his new friends swim around in their diapers. I’m thankful I can still see him beneath the waves and he still knows my name. They tell me that someday even that will disappear into the deep.

But until then we will dream on.

Jeff Ell is pretty good at catching, killing, picking, and growing things to eat. He regularly finds bemusement in the outdoors and enjoys telling his stories to anyone who will listen. Jeff’s the author of Ruth Uncensored, blogs at pastorjeffell.com. and can be contacted via Facebook or smoke signal.

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