Unsettling Coherency

My grandfather is now in a nursing home.

It was a matter of time, really. He has been in steady decline for the past year and a half and the dementia dominates his reason and ability.

Visiting him on Saturday was wrenching. It was our first visit to him in the facility and we had to come to terms with the fact that Grandpa is never coming home again. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen my grandfather outside of Aquebogue, and now this is going to be the new normal until he eventually passes. Grandpa's frailty was expected, but it was jarring to see him in this situation.

Most of what he said was incoherent, but whether that incoherency was due to the dementia or his hoarseness was hard to determine. There were only two moments in which he spoke loudly and clearly. One of his clearer and relevant sentences was about the way the roof in the facility covered the air conditioning unit. The other topic that he spoke clearly about was more unsettling.

"Did you hear?"
"Hear what, Grandpa?"
"Death."
"What? What death?"
"No one died?"
"No. Why do you say that?"
"Oh, I thought that you had heard that someone died."
"No, I haven't heard that. I've heard a lot of happy things lately: news of people getting pregnant, giving birth, weddings, and engagements."
"Oh, ok."

That last part, my attempt to lighten up the conversation, was true. And I actually did have a wedding to go to immediately after visiting him. It was a fun wedding with good booze and spectacularly free dancing. We had a great time, and I had a little too good of a time, because I was rewarded with a moderate hangover the next morning.

In the name of recovery, we canceled our plans to attend a young cousin's birthday party and instead lounged about at my dad's house while we were getting our laundry done. When he found out that we were visiting, he took a break from work to stop in and chat for a bit.

It was our usual catching up. As is his custom, he asked what we had been up to and let us talk about the wedding and grandpa visit for a while before talking about himself. He said that it had been a sad night at the track. When I asked why, he began telling me things I already knew about one of the drivers that had just left the team. After a while, I asked again, why was it a sad night? And he begins talking about another driver who drove before that, and then more about the driver before that. This third person that he spoke about was a good friend of his that had wanted to stay driving on the team, but the team didn't have enough money to maintain a car that was worthy of his talent. Still, they remained friends and the man kept flying over from Connecticut to be a fill-in driver for other cars on the track. He was supposed to be at the track this past weekend, but he missed the first drivers' meeting. As consequence, they arranged for his car to start the race in last place. Hours later, he still hadn't shown up. When the news that a small plane had crashed in Connecticut and taken the lives of its two passengers, people began to realize why he wasn't at the track.

I don't think my dad has ever lost a good friend in his age group to a tragic accident before. He was shaken, and, as expected, not dealing with it well. At several points in his meandering debriefing, I was concerned that his mind was deteriorating like his father's. Of course, after the truth came out, it was crystal-clear that his mind wasn't going, it was just that he didn't want to admit the truth because he was still having a hard time believing it.

I didn't have the same difficulty processing the news. Not only because I barely knew this man, but also because my grandfather had warned me the day before.

"Oh. I thought that you had heard that someone had died."

Grandpa said that at one in the afternoon -- right at the time the news reports say that Teddy's plane went down.