Today I had a meeting in North Sydney. Having spent a lot of time (1/2 decade) working there I knew where to park for free, which is in a residential area outside the cbd. My meeting finished at 4.30pm and I walked back to my car, being there by 4.45. Where I park is next to a set of beautifully cultivated sportsfields. Each tier of field is separated by a beautiful set of trees.
So I’m walking back to my car, and there’s this old guy there, clearly upset and looking for his dog. It hurt my heart to hear him call out, that I started to look with him and got a good description of the dog.
We looked for around an hour and a half, mainly because he kept looking and by that time I couldn’t leave him.
So I said to him something along the lines of, “Why don’t we walk back to your place and tell your wife that you can’t find the dog and maybe you can put a call out for him.”
And he agreed.
So I walked him back to his home which was just around the corner of the park. And his wife was waiting at the gate, in her wheel chair. And I explained what happened, because the man was kind of vagued out.
And she said:
“He has advanced Alzheimer’s, the dog you’re talking about disappeared when he was a boy. he’s been asking after that dog for the last 10 years.”
This man was so articulate and so eloquent, I had no idea.
At least that old man had a caring stranger helping him to look for his beloved dog for a while. Take consolation in that if nothing else. You did good.
Alzheimer’s is a vicious disease. Not so much to the victim – perhaps mercifully, they don’t seem to realize that anything is amiss – but to those close to them that witness it. My maternal grandmother went that way. The last time I saw her, she was in the advanced stages. She sat in her wheelchair absently, a half-eaten cookie forgotten in her lap, and talked about grandfather (passed away in '82) and her yarn store (closed down in the late 70s) and, once in a while, about me – in the third person. When she spoke, she was fairly lucid-seeming, though she slurred her speech a little. Her thoughts kept slipping out of her grasp, though, so the topics were brief and fleeting and interspersed with moments of silent fugue, where she just seemed to slip away to parts unknown. She never looked straight at me when she spoke; she responded without really moving, as though the voice was inside her own head.
It was quite wrenching to see her like that, though I took some comfort in the idea that she was probably happy inside her own mind, believing grandfather was still alive and she still ran her yarn store successfully. I figure, of the myriad ways one could shuffle off this mortal coil, it probably isn’t anywhere near one of the worst. Not, at least, for the victim.
Although I suppose that if your dementia makes you repeatedly relive a bit of a traumatic period of your life, it’s probably not at all very nice, so I can feel for the poor old guy; that pup must have been quite important to him. But it’s a good thing you helped him out or he might have wandered off to Og knows where, so however badly you feel for the guy, take some comfort in the fact that you got him home safe and sound and he wasn’t left to wander the streets in search of a puppy that doesn’t exist.