Come Home Dad

On February 22nd at roughly 2AM, my father woke up with a start and asked my Mother for help. He was experiencing a traumatic stroke that would change things for all of us.


He wants to go home.

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Officially, there are 5 stages of grief as it relates to a significant loss in your life:

Denial and Isolation
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

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I'm no expert on anything emotional. The running joke around my house is "my husband with the cold dead black heart." So, I'm obviously at a loss to fully explain Dad's feelings or where he's at emotionally. It's clear that Dad is working through his loss at this time.

There is a paper on the wall that talks about patients with aphasia and how to interact with them. I don't remember everything on the list, but it all seemed fairly common sense:

Talk directly to them.
Loss of speech isn't a loss of intelligence.
Loss of speech isn't always an inability to understand.
Ask them questions that can be answered with a "yes" or "no."

I think I've heard the term before, but tonight was the first time I've seen "aphasia" applied to Dad. Next...................