“Normal” is a relative thing. When Nana went down into a mass of struggling breath, wild eyes, and confusion in the bathroom doorway in December 2018, we thought it was just a brief interlude in “normal.”

“Things will get back to normal,” we all said. “She’ll spend some time in the hospital; we’ll work out a plan; things will get back to normal.”

She came back home largely bedbound but still able to get up and move about. “You’ll be out of this bed in no time,” we said. Physical therapists came daily, and she was standing and walking — until she wasn’t.

“We’re taking Nana back to the ER,” K texted. “She fell during her therapy.”

This was when the mini-stroke happened. She sat in the ER bed, mumbling incoherently, unable to name the year or the president. She said things like, “We have to get home soon because Mama will get mad.”

That stay was longer. More stressful.

But we still thought things will get back to normal.

Then came the shingles and the pain associated with them. In rehab she was unable and/or unwilling to do anything other than lie in the darkened room, the shingles hurt her so much.

By then, we were beginning to realizing that “normal” had shifted. That what we hoped would be our everyday reality was not what it had been in early December before everything started. “Normal” kept changing. And it kept changing until “normal” no longer included a living, breathing, laughing, fussing, loving Nana.

We knew the same process would happen with Papa. The only question was when.

Well, “when” seems to be now. This week, he’s taken such a turn that it’s difficult to imagine how he’ll ever get back to where he was.

The changes are staggering:

• He can’t walk even with his walker more than a few feet — literally.
• When he’s trying to walk with his walker, he reaches a point when he just freezes. He stops walking; he stops responding; he becomes a statue.
• We’ve resorted to using a wheelchair Foy lent us to move him anywhere.
• He doesn’t even go to the bathroom by himself: we have to wheel him in there.
• We have to get him ready for bed: wheel him into the bathroom; help him with his hygene; wheel him over to the toilet; help him change clothes for bed.
• He forgets things almost instantly.
• There’s so much weakness in his body and motions that it’s difficult for me to believe that just a week ago he was able to do all these things by himself.

We keep saying that once Dr. McFarland figures out what’s causing all this, we’ll get the situation stabilized and things will go “back to ‘normal.'” But tonight, watching him feebly try to brush his teeth, I thought, “No, this is the new ‘normal.'”