The Bathroom
I locked myself in the bathroom. Even though I made myself untouchable, unreachable, all I wanted was to be saved. As I laid down on the tiles, facing up towards the dangling florescent light, I craved death. I don’t mean absence of living—quite the opposite actually. What I really wanted was death to what was inside of me, to the illness that spread from my brain into my entire body, the illness at the core of all the pain and torture I put upon myself. I craved death because I wanted a life, a different life.
When I finally opened the door, which only happened after threats to 1. break the door down and 2. call the police, I sank back onto the floor in a pool of my own sweat and tears. My dad stood over me for a few moments, only to crouch down next to me and say, “Do you want some ice cream?”
Throughout the most unspeakable moments of my illness, the moments where I was lost in a parade of self-destructive behaviors and obsessive thoughts, it was my dad who always reached me. This isn’t to say that my dad is solely responsible for saving my life; I don’t credit one thing or one person with that, and I truly believe that all individuals are ultimately responsible for saving their own lives. However, my dad was responsible for saving me from moments of myself, moments where I could have dug myself deeper into depression, some moments that could have ended my life.
My dad was no psychological mastermind, despite getting his degree in psychology, his real talents lay, superficially, in architecture and mathematics. What I mean to say is, it’s not like he used some Freudian theory or some cognitive treatment as the basis for dealing with me; my dad was just someone who knew people, and most of all, he knew his daughter. Above all else, his talents lay in his title of Dad; he was meant to be a father.
It wasn’t my dad’s job to be my therapist, which is why offering me ice cream in my fits was the most Dad thing he could do, and it worked. He’d drive me across town for a cup of my favorite ice cream, and sit with me in silence until it was gone. That would be enough to get me home and into bed for the night, enough for me to wake up the next morning.
My dad always had an answer. If it wasn’t ice cream, it was watching some mindless HGTV show. If it wasn’t that, it was listening to Green Day, laughing through our attempts to sing along with Billie Joe Armstrong. And if it wasn’t that, it was driving me around south-eastern Massachusetts for hours, salt spilling out of my eyes, until I finally fell asleep.
I suffered from extreme anxiety that kept me from sanely engaging in everyday tasks. I saw a therapist who specialized in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, whose purpose was to help me ‘untwist’ my thinking and acknowledge reality vs. fear. One of my biggest fears actually had nothing to do with myself, but was centered around my dad. The fear was that he would die. How his death would take place depended upon the situation at hand. Every morning when he would drive to work, I feared he’d die in a car crash. Every day at work, I feared he would be killed by a school shooter (he was a sixth grade math teacher). Every time he ran an errand, I feared he would die in a robbery attempt. When nothing was happening, I feared he had cancer, and we just didn’t know it.
Much of the therapy I’ve undergone in the past fifteen years (and still today) has to do with acknowledging and accepting the things I cannot change. God, I fucking hated that. I hated that there was so much I had no control over. But it wasn’t just about acceptance. It was about recognizing that many of these things were very unlikely to happen. This was my actual saving grace at the time, the fact that I could deny these things would happen. Acceptance was too mature of an idea for someone whose livelihood depended on whether or not these things would occur. I chose to deny rather than to accept.
Dad’s life was one of genuine contentment, except for the occasional sprinkle of health crisis. A heart surgery. A stroke. A subdural hematoma. As his daughter, I dealt with them all by deeply denying that the worst-case scenario was a possibility. He wouldn’t die. He couldn’t die. And he didn’t. He survived, he healed, and I could always reestablish a sense of sanity so long as I knew he was going to be okay.
But in the summer of 2020, dad was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. With no cure and so little known about the future of his decline, he was given five to fifteen years to live. He died in three.
It was the bathroom again: the bathroom told me that something was wrong. Well, actually, it was a different bathroom, not the exact one I had locked myself in ten years before. It was a different house, a different time, and a different story. But the beginning of The Doomed Everything started in a bathroom.
Six months before my dad’s diagnosis: I remember watching TV in my apartment, two floors above the apartment that my parents lived in. My dog was barking, but that wasn’t anything special as an anxiety-prone small dog relatively new to living in a big city. But this wasn’t “bark, bark!” then stop. It was consistent barking over a matter of minutes. As I walked towards my bedroom which sat near the entrance to my apartment, I heard something more; something faint that I couldn’t quite make out. I took one step, two steps, three steps down to see if I could make out what the sound was, and as I stood there for a few moments I realized what it was: my dad shouting. I ran down the rest of the stairs only to hear the shouting become more complete: he was screaming my name. I barged into my parents’ apartment, ran past my screeching dog, and came face to face with the bathroom.
“I’m here dad, what’s wrong?!”
“I’m stuck, the door handle fell off again.”
This was a common occurrence in the very old house we lived in, not just with the bathroom but with all the doors.
“Oh! Okay hold on.”
I slid the base of the door handle back into the empty space on the door, twisted and opened it. We both started laughing. The doorknob, again! Silly doorknob!
The doorknob falling off wasn’t my dad’s fault, and this could have happened to anyone of us living in that house, in fact it did happen to all of us at one time or another. So, to say this was a ‘sign’ of my dad’s future diagnosis would be a lie. It was, however, the first time I openly heard my dad suffer. Looking back on this moment, a moment that will remain in my vision whenever I close my eyes, I realize that him being trapped in the bathroom was the story of his future.
I saw a younger version of myself in every gut-destroying, heart-splintering moment of my dad’s pain. And I, in turn, felt the agony of being a loving parent watching a helpless child scream for mercy. Every time I held my dad as he cried on the kitchen floor. Every time I sat next to him in bed as he fell asleep through a manic anxiety attack. Every time I talked him through a screaming fit and comforted him with the promise of the most decadent ice cream sundae I could buy.
Everyone view’s death differently. I have always believed that it is better to die than to live in constant suffering (hence, my willingness to take my own life as a teenager). But never before had I heard of, witnessed, or experienced the suffering like that of Alzheimer’s. This disease, from what I saw, was a prison. It was a bathroom. A bathroom locked from the outside that was only getting smaller, darker, hotter. A bathroom that nobody would ever choose to put themselves in.
Care-giving for someone with a terminal illness was a sort of prison as well. Like a mirror in the bathroom, forced to look upon the horrors that occur inside that bathroom, with no way of providing any real solace for the person locked inside. I felt powerless. I was powerless.
In my second year of my master’s program, I remember speaking with my professor, who I had known since undergrad. She knew all about my dad: how special our relationship always was, and how his disease had progressed. She asked me how my dad was doing, and after giving her the ‘same old same old’ answer, she said something to me that has stuck with me ever since, and that I will hold onto forever:
“How amazing is it, that one day, whenever that is, when your father is no longer here, nothing will be left unsaid.”
I remember being taken aback by her words: no one had ever said that to me, and I had never thought about it. I was brought back to one of the first classes I had taken with this professor. In standard human service-focused personalized thinking prompts, she asked all her students name an aspect of their lives in which they are privileged, and an aspect in which they feel powerless. I remember both of my answers clearly: immense privilege in the fact that I was sitting in her class, receiving higher education, and absolute powerlessness in that I cannot save my dad. Her words "‘nothing will be left unsaid’ brought me back to that class, and to this idea of privilege.
I thought about what a privilege it was to have the dad I have, and to have had these years together. And what a privilege it is to never in my life have to question whether or not my dad loved me or my family, or if he knew that we loved him. What a privilege it has been, and it will always be, to be his daughter.
As a teenager, I made a promise to myself that I would not outlive my dad. How could I? This was a sentiment I held onto for longer than I’d like to admit. But care-giving for my dad, reflecting on how lucky I have been to have him in my life, caused a shift in my perspective of the bathroom. More specifically, it forced me to acknowledge the initial choice, so many years ago, that I made to put myself in there. And in recognizing that choice, I was forced to acknowledge that other choices existed.
I know what my dad would choose for me, and that is now what I choose for me. Not only because of him, but because I realize that not everyone gets to make that choice. I’m going to make this choice for as long as I can.
-Jessie Piltch-Loeb
Jessie Piltch-Loeb is a writer and artist based in the greater Boston area. She graduated from Lesley University with an MA in Expressive Arts Therapy, and is currently working towards her LMHC and REAT. She spent her graduate years exploring the role of literature in healing, and aims now to foster understanding and validation through her work, particularly for children. Along with her two siblings, she is the cofounder of CuraSupport, which provides supports and resources to families facing the mental or physical decline of a loved one. Inspired by her own experiences as a caretaker, she wrote "What’s Going on with Papa Bear?" as a way of supporting children facing cognitive decline in their loved ones.