As You Go Along

All the world is not a stage. Though, from the age of two, I desperately wished it were. Now, after years of character study and delivering stand-up routines across Canada, I understand what a great piece of theatre life really is. I used to dream of acting. Theatre alone brought my high school average out of the basement. I enrolled in chemistry, and physics, and math. “I’m going to become a doctor,” I would say. Though what I really wanted was to play one on TV. It was always acting. The play was the thing. I continued to study performance art throughout college, which led me to stand-up comedy. Anything for the adrenalin rush of immediate feedback and living on wits alone. Little did I know that, at age 46, I would be relying on my wits and my improvisational skills more than I ever had during rehearsals. Now, I am not only a husband and a father. My lifelong role as a son has metamorphosed into that of caregiver to a mother afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. She was diagnosed in April of 2017. Since then, there has been a tumbling of medical dominoes leaving her an altogether different person than the parent I grew up with. “Altogether” is ironic, since she is really now several different pieces of a whole. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (the one law I remember from high school science class). When a relative receives a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, those close to them usually react with panic, and Google searches. That’s what I did. There are three stages to Alzheimer’s: mild, moderate, and severe. Notice that these are not three types of Alzheimer’s. They are stages. They are consecutive and inevitable, like three acts of a play. The difference is, unlike actors with a script, patients and their minds and their bodies are unique, and, thus, unpredictable. I had no lines I could memorize (and no movie I could watch) to prepare me for the plot twists and unpredictability of having a parent with dementia.