i’m literally sitting on the floor of my bathroom right now with the door locked because my dad just spent forty minutes trying to convince me that the mailman is actually his long-lost brother and i honestly don’t even know why i’m typing this it’s so stupid and minor compared to what i deal with at the clinic but i feel like my brain is actually melting... i’m 31 and i have a masters degree and i spend forty hours a week telling families how to manage age-related cognitive decline but here i am hiding behind a towel rack because i can't stop crying over a sponge. he tried to eat a sponge today—he thought it was a lemon bar—and i had to pry it out of his mouth like he was a golden retriever and he just looked at me with this total lack of recognition... absolute anosognosia... and asked when his daughter was coming home to pick him up it’s funny in a way like i actually did a little bark-laugh when it happened because the irony is just too much... i’m currently studying for my clinical license exam and i’m reading all these chapters on geriatric psych and neurodegenerative disorders and i know every single stage of this... i could draw a map of his brain and color code the plaques and tangles but none of that matters when your dad thinks the sink is a toilet... i keep thinking about ten years ago when my mom died and we were sitting on that hideous plaid couch she loved and i promised him—I PROMISED—that i would never ever put him in a home... i said we’d stay together and i’d take care of him until the end... i was 21 and full of this idiotic noble confidence that only kids who haven't seen a real crisis have now i’m looking at these memory care brochures i swiped from work and i feel like such a massive fraud... i’m the one who sits across from crying daughters and tells them that placement isn’t a failure it’s a medical necessity and i give them all these pamphlets on level of care and palliative support but the second i look at the brochure for the place on maple street i feel like i’m signing a death warrant... his executive dysfunction is so bad now he can't even figure out how to put on a shirt if it’s inside out... he just stands there in the hallway with his head stuck in the armhole and looks at me like he’s waiting for me to fix the whole world i had to call my supervisor today and ask for an extension on my project because i spent the whole night cleaning up what happens when someone forgets how to use the bathroom... the smell of that disinfectant—that weird artificial lemon smell—is just permanently stuck in my nose now... i can taste it in my coffee... i feel like i’m failing every single metric of my life right now...