Living in the present

My father is 90 years old and has been living in a nursing home for a year.  He has a number of the issues that the elderly have, brittle bones, hesitant mobility and especially increasingly bad short-term memory.  He can tell you about toboganning on the farm when he was a kid, or what it was like to work in Vanuatu just after retirement, but he may need to ask me the same question three or four times during our visits.  It's also difficult for him to process information which is either complex or spoken quickly.

As you'd expect, this can make finding topics for my regular visits difficult.  I know he'd be interested in my kids' activities, for instance, but telling the story requires an attentiveness and complexity he can't muster any more.  Our conversations are summaries, delivered in easily digested sentences.  For a while I was finding it a real labour.

Until I hit on the magic trick for communicating with someone with memory problems:  stay in the actual present moment.  I can't regale him with tales of our recent weekend, but we can talk about the cloud formations in the sky; he can tell me about the numbers of planes that are visible from his large window and he loves to speculate how far up they might be (he was in the air force in World War Two.)  We walk in the garden when it's nice and look at the progress of growth of the many different plants; I can ask him some of their names and many times he can tell me:  gardening was one of his passions when he was more able.  Thus it is that our conversations, far from being a laborious task, have become a sort of mini-holiday for me.  I am preoccupied with nothing other than the details of the present moment, and communicating with my beloved dad.  I am so happy to have made this discovery.  Our times together now -- especially when it's nice out! -- remind me of some of the close conversations of our past.

If only I could be there to look at the stars with him like I did when I was a little girl.