Midnight wanderings

About a week after my parents arrived, I was awakened in the middle of the night by voices. I lay there listening, and I could hear my dad's voice right outside my door. I remembered that Dad gets up multiple times a night to go to the bathroom, and I thought at first that he had simply gotten confused on the way back to bed, and wandered out of his room. That actually happened the first night; he went out and ended up in the guest room, where my visiting sister was sleeping. I went out and found him fully dressed, standing and looking over the banister, which ends right at the master bedroom. Mom was saying, "it's not time to get up yet, it's 2am." So apparently Dad had woken up, and either because of jetlag or because it was just "one of those things," thought it was time to get up. I herded him back into his room, and together Mom and I got him back into his jammies and into bed. After that I showed mom how to lock the door so he couldn't get out. He eventually figured out how to unlock the door, but once got confused, and locked himself in, in the middle of the day.

Until last night, Dad hasn't wandered again. On the occasion he can't be persuaded to go back to bed, he'll consent to watch TV with the volume down low and no other lights turned on. I guess that can backfire, because occasionally he'll insist to Mom that it must be time to get up because, "there's stuff on TV!" Oh for the days of rainbow screen!

This morning around 2am I was half awake when I suddenly heard Mom and Dad's door open. Now that is odd because Mom never comes out in the middle of the night, and even if she did the first thing she'd do would be to knock on our door because she needed something. Instead I heard someone walking around. I got up and went into the hall, where I caught up with Dad peering into the dark empty office. I turned him around, and he said to me,"I wanted to know where the breakfast table is." I said,"It's too early Dad, you need to go back to bed." But he kept saying, "But you know, I wanted to know there the breakfast table is." Mom was asleep when we got back to the room, and I got Dad to get back into bed (although he did it in a very unusually awkward way, sure sign he was disoriented), and as he lay down he said again, "I just wanted to know where the breakfast room is." So finally I said," Dad, it's downstairs," in both English and Taiwanese. He asked me again, "The breakfast room?" "It's downstairs, downstairs." And he said,"Oh, downstairs." At this point, Mom was awakened by our voices, and minutes after I got back into bed, I heard voices as she took him to the bathroom. She told me later that he'd gone to bed at 7, way too early, and woken up at 11ish, insisting on going downstairs to look for, "that thing," which she was pretty sure was his personal spoon. Dad has a personal spoon that he uses for every single meal, and we've lost it a few times because he hides it in his pockets, then loses track of it.

After I got into bed, I was thinking over what happened, and my brain was hit with a thud of despair when I realized that my dad, with whom I used to have deep discussions on politics and theology, was now waking up at night to look for the breakfast room. Or something. I lay awash in these depressing thoughts for a few minutes, then shook myself, and said, "how do you know he didn't just have a really weird dream and wake up totally confused? He might have still been half asleep for all you know."  As it was, I finally fell asleep, and was in the middle of an intense dream when I suddenly heard Dad's voice clear as day saying, "Hello!" to me. I instantly woke up and listened, but there was nothing, it was early morning and everyone was still asleep. Everyone except maybe Dad, who could've gotten up to watch TV for all I know. Mom took him to church solo, and let him sit in the pew while she was in choir. He did great sitting all by himself. Afterwards he said to Mom, "Hey do you know if they have cookies today?" Which of course they did at coffee hour, so they went to coffee hour, and stayed some time, since they didn't get home for quite a while!

And that is how life is now, absolute random craziness, interspersed by good days or good moments.