The Gift of Dementia
“Sanctuary” From the Cathedral Grove Forest on Vancouver Island. A place I’ve painted a few times. Because the wilderness is a place to hide and a place to be found.
A good friend told me recently that I need to write my father’s story. His Holocaust story. Yet for so long there would have been nothing to write about. Talk of his experience was completely off limits when I was growing up. Once in a while there’d be whispered conversations between him and Mom and so there was the odd snippet. But it was never intentional. And as kids we understood that it was not something we were to bring up.
The last ten years of Dad’s life were spent dealing with greater and greater levels of dementia. And as it progressed, his lifelong walls began to crumble. After Mom’s death and our move to the west coast, I would take him for lunch and found that things once completely off limits were suddenly open for conversation. I could ask him questions, things about what he remembered, moments, and actual feelings - a place he previously never went.
To say that Dad was a fearful man would be entirely accurate but leaves it in a kinder place as to how that fear manifested in his life and ours. I knew him primarily as a very angry man. His explosive moods frightened us so much and affected so much of our lives thereafter.
As for me, Dad’s way of being certainly affected my trust of people and particularly my view of men, and to say that I am still wary and defensive would be honest, but at least not as bad as it used to be. It took a long time to see that all that mistrust just sent me headlong into all the wrong directions with other angry, passive-aggressive men. But anyway, I digress and that’s another story.
Dad passed away earlier this year, at the end of January. He was 91. His last nine years were not his happiest as Mom had passed in 2013 and he missed her terribly. They were married 57 years, and he had come to depend on her in ways he would never admit.
I remember the night she died, it was also in January and there was a terrible blizzard that night. My brother called me in the evening and said I needed to come to my parent’s house. I asked him what was wrong, he said, “Mom’s dead.” The last day I’d spent with her was just the day before, at the hospital, in emergency, because for one of countless reasons, again she wasn’t well. We sat and talked while we waited for the doctor. When he finally came, he showed up with Mom’s file that was at least an inch thick. No surprise, I’d been back and forth to the emergency room with Mom and Dad too many times to count in the last five years. The doctor said to her that she needed to follow her doctor’s direction for her health and as usual she brushed him off and said she wanted to go home. As she was stable again, he said she could go and that was it. I didn’t see her again until after she had passed away the next day and was lying on the floor of their bedroom at home.
When I got to the house I was greeted at the door by a paramedic. He explained to me that Dad had discovered her in the bedroom, had called 911 and they had tried to revive Mom for about 20 minutes but had “called it.” There was also another paramedic and a police officer there. Apparently when someone dies at home it is required that a policeman also come to the scene.
Mom and Dad’s engagement picture, 1955
I walked into the family room to see my Dad and brother sitting there with the police, and Dad looked up at me in kind of a daze and just kept saying, “What are we going to do without our wife and mother?” I had no idea how to answer him. He had no concept for the fact that us three kids had already been on our own for decades. And I understood that he was really just talking about himself. And I also knew in that moment that everything coming in the next week or two would be on me.
The paramedics had to wait for the Medical Examiner to come and officially declare Mom dead before they could move her and it was a long wait because of the awful weather that evening. While we waited, they allowed us to go and see Mom individually in the bedroom. The police officer was required to watch each of us to ensure we didn’t touch anything or move her in anyway. As I write this, I realize the strangeness of the situation probably for the first time, maybe it’s time and distance that allow another perspective.
Mom’s night dress had been cut open down the front by the paramedics and she lay there arms spread and her upper body exposed, the oxygen tubing still in her mouth. They were not allowed to remove that either until the Medical Examiner had seen her. As I sat with her on the bedroom floor, the police officer in front of me, I pulled a blanket off the bed and covered her up, saying she could at least have some dignity while we waited. The officer said nothing. I stroked her hair and talked to her a bit, she was still warm and that was the first idea I had that she was not long gone. As I spoke to her, I could feel her standing behind me, in one of her old summer frocks and bare feet. I knew then she was okay. Another story to tell….
Dad was a whole other story. In the days following he was heavily sedated and not able or wanting to properly process what had happened or his new situation. He was 82 years old and had been with her since he was 24. I’m not sure he remembered anything else. Until our lunches on the coast….
He was in a seniors’ facility by 2014, having been given an official diagnosis of dementia, and was allowed out only with supervision, so with me or my sister’s family. When I asked him about his Holocaust experience, I asked about World War II, because choice of words was incredibly important, and the “H” word was one we had learned never to use.
He told me one memory in particular that really struck me and it is the one I recall the most. He said when the SS brought them to the Banjica Concentration Camp (outside Belgrade in Yugoslavia) the women and children were separated from the men and he told me how terrified my Oma was. Each night in their barracks, they could hear the machine gun fire of other inmates being executed. He said Oma would just clutch him and his sister and shake uncontrollably. I am still so struck by the memory of a man in his mid-eighties with dementia, being able to recall with such specificity the response of his mother and her emotions. He was just an 11-year-old boy.
Eventually my Oma, Dad and his sister, were released from the camp and sent back to Vienna, Austria where they were born. Somehow a family member had bribed an SS officer (the story from my aunt) to get them out. I never knew who the family member was as my aunt refused to tell me. So much of their story is still shrouded in mystery. And I don’t know how many months they were in that place. My Opa was not allowed to leave and was eventually executed in the same way Dad had heard all those other inmates die.
But I think of Dad’s story of those nights, and Oma’s terror, because it changed so much about what I had always thought of my grandmother. By the time we knew her she was an incredibly bitter, angry woman. Opa’s death left her a widow in her early 40s and she never married again. After the War, she immigrated to Canada with Dad and my aunt, where they lived in Winnipeg. That was also where Dad met Mom, where they married, before they made their way out to Calgary when I was three.
Oma would come visit us in Calgary and stay for at least 6 weeks and we dreaded it every time. She was so sullen always, and difficult to get along with. Even though I recall with joy some of the things she would cook – her apple strudel dough stretched paper thin and hanging over the edges of the kitchen table, and all those handmade noodles in her chicken soup. But the story Dad told me of her terror in the camp helped me understand the person she had become and all those years as a kid being afraid of her wrath melted away into compassion, understanding, and the hope that she knows me now and understands.
And so, it is with Dad’s anger. So much of what happened to him as a child, the murder of his father, the permanent changes in his mother, explained his anger. And it helped me understand all those explosive moments with him as we grew up. His anger was a mask for all the fear he felt from the age of 11 and ever after. Even if he could never admit it, that scared little boy was always there. A boy in a family with three sisters, the treasured boy, now without his own father.
And this is just the beginning of the story. The memories, the scars, the lessons, all those things passed on to us as Second-Generation survivors, as both wounds and gifts. It’s going to take me a while to sort it all out. Be patient with me. Pieces come back to me in the bits that they are, and I am sometimes too afraid to confront them, share them even less. And I hate to cry. Yet it’s the place this inevitably brings me, and I hear Hashem telling me to continue. He has something for me in this, and maybe for my children as well.
Just this weekend He said to me:
“I accounted to your favor
The devotion of your youth…
How you followed me in the wilderness….”
(Jeremiah 2:2)
If there is anything I know from my childhood is that Hashem was always present. In that wilderness of the Shoah and all the pain shared with us, I always knew He was there. Not sure how, as it would have been easy to reject His presence. But He has been with me, picking up the pieces, creating healing from brokenness, and showing me the way forward. He continues to be here, I sense His strong friendship, no matter what. And as He directs me to Kaddish every day for Dad, I sense them both nearby. And they tell me there is more to say….
