SINS OF THE FATHER
When Hector Elizando's dad didn't take care of his own needs while caring for his wife who had Alzheimer's, he fell into the ultimate caregiver hell.
BY:MARC LICHTER
Photograph by Frank Veronsky
"It was the dark ages," explains acclaimed actor Hector Elizondo, referring to the period in the mid-1960s and early 1970s when his mother, Carmen, suffered from Alzheimer's disease. "They didn't call it Alzheimer's. It was ‘pre-senile dementia,'" he adds with a tone of disgust in his voice.
The alternative name didn't stop her from displaying all the signs we now attribute to those with Alzheimer's. "The first signs were the usual—typical forgetfulness, fatigue. Middle-stage Alzheimer's symptoms were more acute," he continues. "Forgetting where they lived, forgetting how to get out of the room, what the doorknob was. Laughing at herself when she saw her image in the mirror. It happens one time, you think, ‘Oh, well.' But when it happens a significant amount of times, that's a pretty good sign.
"[She'd get] up and have to leave the premises, take a walk, and would let no one touch her. That's a bad sign.
"[She'd take] a bus ride outside the neighborhood and we'd get a call from the police station, ‘We have your mom here. She seems to be confused. Fortunately, the information in her wallet helped.' [We'd] get down there and she'd be having a very nice day, having coffee, talking with all the policemen."
It wasn't, however, this actor who was cast in the main role of caregiver. Rather, it was his father, Martin, who starred in this segment of the family tragedy.
"He was a good, working-class man from a working-class, Puerto Rican background. Fortunately, he was bilingual and a very educated man," Hector explains lovingly. "But he carried with him a deep sense of guilt that [my mother's illness] must have been his fault. This couldn't have happened on its own, he thought. But it was genetic; it had nothing to do with anything."
Martin Elizondo cooked and cleaned, and he bathed and dressed his wife. He had no one to leave her with at home, so he took her to work.
"I would be around, but I was working," says Hector. "My sister and I would take turns helping out. But it got to the point where it was untenable; I couldn't take that much time. Weekends, we would be there. During the week," Hector says, incredulous after all these years, "my father was there, but he had to go to work. She would sit next to him while he worked. He was an accountant, he had a storefront [on Manhattan's Upper West Side]. He kept trying to work through all this.
"[My mother would] just sit there and stare and have snippets of conversation and trail off into cyberspace," the 71-year-old thespian remembers. "And eventually she would speak less and less, and then get these fits of anxiety and she'd have to walk. And he'd have to close everything up and stop everything and just follow her. And part of the cause of that anxiety we now understand, but they didn't."
And all of this took its toll—on both Martin and Hector. "The real casualty was my father," Hector notes. "There was no agency, no support system that would arrange for someone to come over and help with her care."
Martin would be frustrated from repeating himself, exhausted from the care he provided and depressed by the ongoing and worsening situation. He always maintained a glimmer of hope based on moments of coherence on Carmen's part. Even so, it was ill-placed, and this working caregiver would let his formerly immaculate appearance deteriorate, evidenced, for instance, by an ink stain from a leaking pen in the pocket of a shirt that should have been washed but wasn't. "The isolation was terrible. He started to slip," the son says of his father. "Eventually, I made him go to the doctor."
Hector Elizondo, who currently stars as a psychiatrist on Monk, has learned much about Alzheimer's and the effects it can have not only on the person who's ill but on the caregiver. He's seen his parents devastated by it, and also has survived four aunts and a cousin, who all had the disease. He's since spent years as a supporter of and spokesperson for the Alzheimer's Association. At the time Martin Elizondo cared for Hector's mother, though, he struggled as he witnessed his father's bout with depression that was caused by caregiver burnout.
The doctor ordered Martin be institutionalized for six weeks. Hector was so repulsed by the care the state facility provided that he soon took his father out. Martin later sought respite with friends in rural Connecticut, while Carmen was institutionalized in a different facility, having reached a point that was beyond the family's ability to care for her. "He disappeared for a while," states Hector, "and sought peace and quiet and started to heal."
When Martin returned, he visited his wife religiously. Hector would often join him, but it was difficult while performing eight shows a week on Broadway. He was in Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue, and felt like one.
It was at that point the toll was being taken on the thirtysomething actor, who turned to alcohol to get through the day. "I started to slip. It lasted a couple of months," he admits, explaining that it was his leading lady's having to point out that he was missing cues and slurring lines that made him realize it was time to stop.
Drinking wasn't a problem for his father. Rather, it was Martin's dedication to his wife that wore him out. Upon returning from respite he told Hector, "I know my job: to take care of your mother. I have to see her every day."
So, Hector relates, "every day he would schlep out to see her. I would go with him, my sister would or another friend. He was convinced that she would be coming out soon, but she just kept deteriorating.
"Finally, it got to the point where I had to have a very painful exchange with him, and told him I can't go anymore. I said, ‘She's gone, she's not there, I can't visit a husk, I can't visit an image. As far as I'm concerned, Pop, she's in prison in her body and should be let go and set free.' But he was going through the charade of expectation and clung to hope."
Hector sent his father on vacation to Puerto Rico to give Martin a break. But Martin returned from the trip early. He couldn't finish out the week, feeling guilty and that his presence would make Carmen better.
"The irony," bemoans Hector, "is he finally crashed, his immune system went south because of the years of depression and stress. He wound up in the hospital. My father passed first, which was a shock and a surprise." His mother died about a month later—on Martin's birthday.
Hector's wish: "That my father had freed himself, somehow, from some of these constraints, from the burdens of his culture and religion, including guilt. That would have helped him a lot."