The show is in its final season now. The three Pierson babies are now 40. Dad died when they were 17. Mom is remarried. She’s still the focal point of their lives–with a lot of codependent behavior going on–but most moving is that she now has dementia. Earlier episodes began to disclose the onset of the disease and her determination to rise above its symptoms, taking charge of decisions for her life while she is able. Very subtly I’ve watched each week, picking up on how Rebecca is slowly going deeper into her world that is leaving her without the ability to remember small details of her past….looks of anguish as she searches the air for a word she cannot find….the latter, how in a particular plot line she could not remember the word “caboose”. It was part of a storybook she had read many times to her children. Try as she may, her struggle to pull the word from the air could not and did not come. She was reduced to describing “caboose” as “you know, the car that comes at the end of the train…” She knew “where” it belonged, but was unable to call it by name.

I share this with you because watching this beautiful fictional woman poetry the throes of dementia have hit very close to home. In 2009 we moved our dad from his home to assisted living. His own dementia had begun slowly and we kids needed to intervene and place him in a living arrangement that offered him protection, care, and socialization. He died in 2012, unable to converse for a good amount of time prior to his death. While that was hard, in between times of watching him lose vocabulary, the ability to communicate was likened to death. Every time he took one step further into the world of dementia, my heart sank. 

I remember when dad had a similar experience to Rebecca’s, trying to pull a word out of the air. He had put on his shoes and was attempting to tie them. After fumbling a bit, he looked up at me and asked “will you help me tie my….um….my…..these ‘connectors’”. Ah, the word shoelaces was gone but the concept of their purpose remained in a diminished cognitive moment.

When dad first moved into a higher level of memory care, one of the administrators casually asked me what dad had done for a career. “Why, he retired as the chief building inspector for the City of Saginaw”. She giggled. That explains it, she said! “Your dad walks around the building looking at the handrails, door frames, etc.” In a few days she had given him a clipboard and pencil so he could “make notes” of his findings. She entered “his world” and offered dignity and purpose to a man who no longer understood purpose, but somehow it bubbled to the surface with actions that came from deep embedded memories that were trapped in the remote memory known only to dad and God at this point. 

My fictional friend Rebecca is slipping away, right before the eyes of her loving family and all of us Pierson family fans. Admittedly it’s hard to watch. With each fail, each struggle, every empty look I am stung by my own REAL life episodes of my dad’s disease. I continuously remind myself that dad’s three years of living with dementia does not define who he was as a man, a husband, a dad, grandfather, brother. He had 80+ years of a very vibrant life! Over the course of those 80 years he had coined a phrase “family is everything”. It was his simple way of letting us know that material possessions didn’t compare to what family offers. This little phrase was one that stuck with him even when other words, deep conversation were gone. 

On the day of his move into his last home–Meadowview–myself, my brothers, their wives, and a few of the grandchildren worked together getting his bed set up, clothes put away, pictures hung. It was dark, time for us to return to our homes, and allow dad to adjust to her new surroundings. My niece Ashley and I had followed dad into the darkness of his bedroom. He had moved a small footstool to the side of his bed and asked us to kneel. Dad knelt in front of the stool and through a moment of great clarity “Thanked the Lord for this day, for this family…”A little footstool had become an altar, a place of prayer, that created a memory that I will cherish forever. 

“Family is everything”…in life and even in the wonderful dramas portrayed on television. I think we can learn a lot from both worlds. Afterall, those are real people telling a story written from stuff that  happens in many families. I know how my dad’s own “story” ended. In the remaining episodes of my beloved TV series, Rebecca’s story will be told in its finality and I’ll be front and center to see how it all ends….

In this moment, dad was struggling to tell me what he was thinking.  By the grasping of our hands, the deep look into each other’s eyes he was attempting to communicate that “Family is Everything”.