Joy

On Wednesdays, the Memory Care unit helps patients Facetime their families. They haven’t allowed visitors since March, and my father-in-law probably doesn’t fully grasp that fact. We haven’t made one of our monthly weekend trips to Florida to see him since February. Even to me, February seems a million years ago now.

When your brain no longer makes new memories, the old ones are precious. The people caring for my father-in-law know that, so a few weeks into the lockdown, they tasked a staff person to carry around an ipad a couple days a week helping residents connect virtually with their families. They cannot give us an exact time to expect a call. Caregiver work is unpredictable. Having been in schools all my life, I get that. People are neither a routine process nor a typical product. So much of getting it right means responding to what presents in the moment, deviating from the plan.

So most Wednesdays, at some point in the day, I’ll see a Facetime call coming in, and we drop everything to answer. I say the same words every time as soon as I see his face appear and the caregiver’s hand pulling back from the screen. “HELLO! It’s JENNY!” I prop the iPad in the exact same place at the kitchen table and pull up two chairs. I call the dog. She knows just what to do now and jumps up to gaze at him. As soon as he sees the blue kitchen walls and the dog, he exclaims, “Jenny! And your white dog!” I signal to my husband who is working at his desk downstairs that his dad is on the phone, and he joins me at the table…always sitting to my right, the dog between us. And once my father-in-law sees his son’s face, he beams. The joy is so real you can feel it through the screen.

We don’t talk long. And we have learned it doesn’t matter what we say so much as how we say it. No polite chit chat. No questions like “how are you?” No rapidfire tumble of words about our own lives. We say the same simple things each time. We cue the same old stories…sometimes several times within a ten-minute conversation. We have learned the way to start them: not “do you remember?” but “I was just thinking about…”.

Sometimes the story that worked last week evokes no reaction, so we cycle through the tried and true “I was just thinking…” starters until his eyes light on whichever one gets through today. We retell and help him relive the time he and Tom spilled the big can of white paint on new carpet, the time he bought the Triumph Spitfire without telling Tom’s mom, the golden retriever three dogs ago who liked to pick up all the neighbors’ Sunday newspapers and bring them to the doorstep…the big youth hockey rivalry against a better-equipped, wealthier team…IU football and their chances this year. It doesn’t matter that these are the same stories. What matters is bringing the light to his eyes.

Joy is a powerful tool. It can cut like a knife through loss and sadness. Watching my father-in-law laugh till he nearly cries as we reconstruct the scene of the white paint spilling back in the summer of 1985 makes me glad in a way I can barely explain. Seeing his face light up when his eyes land on my husband never fails to remind me of the powerful reservoir love builds in us.

It is sometimes hard to accept that the days of him taking a deep interest in our lives are past. He cannot process the present, and the future does not concern him now; he is leaving it to us. I realize that, like most parents, he spent decades listening to us, making our stories the focus, rarely offering his own. I don’t think we often paused from our recitation of all the exciting things happening in our lives and updates on our kids, our work, our adventures to ask our parents, “How are you really? Tell me about your life story.” Our role was to tell; theirs was to feed the tale with interested questions and marvel at our responses.

Now it is our turn. We choose the stories he loves to bring what memories we can to the surface from the murky depths. And in the midst of his terrifying journey, we try to bring some light. We evoke laughter. And when we get it right, we unlock joy.

There is so little he needs right now and so much we cannot do. We cannot reverse time nor the ravages of neurons. But joy…that we can help with.