Eight Years ago in Williamsburg on Dec. 21, my 89 year old father died due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease; the memory of our father-daughter struggle is sealed upon my soul. My hope is always that his Detroit pals will remember him with dignity. For me the memory is clouded with scenes of a nursing home resident, bonded to a wheelchair, arms frozen to chest, head bent, expressionless, folded into himself, a brain stalled. I am continuously grateful that he didn’t know that he didn’t know.
There were no seasons in his year, no days in his week, no hours on his clock, no voice, no hope, no joy. “Mr. Brown is in a chronic state, prolonged lingering.” I didn’t choose this role and neither did he.
“If he can’t give words to thought, is it thinking?” I asked Dr. Harding. On the examining table, he drew a map of the brain and talked of cell death, ailing neurons with disconnecting schema. “Prognosis is poor with fleeting moments of lucidity.” He ordered another brain scan; the nurse asked, “For who?” Father Brown corrected, “For Whom?” As a professional, educator daughter, I swell with pride and treasure a fleeting moment of lucidity.
I am a teacher; I work in terms of “fix-it” strategies. Where is his zone? What keeps him here? I am a spouter of information and he is a vacant listener, never a responder. Every day for him was a workshop as he dealt with disconnecting retention, fractured recall, unraveled reasoning, stranded schema.
On the morning of Sept. 11, I was taking my father for a haircut. “Why not get them all cut?” his routine quip. I gazed at the large Woodhaven parlor TV in stunned silence as the first plane hit the tower; my father wandered in as the second plane hit. There was no plausible explanation for the few residents who were starring. When life knocks you to your knees, that’s the best position in which to pray. Staff and residents, seven of us, formed a prayer circle and through tears mumbled, “Our Father who art in Heaven….”
“Dad, do you have your rosary?”
“In my pocket, in my pocket.”
The reality of this event was never stored in his memory. Words don’t count when words don’t matter.
As the disease progressed, we lived in peaks and slumps; the slumps were frequent and lengthy. His life became a hopeless confinement within a mind in the process of decay. There is safety in silence with deep sadness beneath unspoken words. I don’t ask questions he can’t answer. The present disappears in the present.
My epiphany comes in writing about him; it isn’t biographical, it’s about me. I can’t make him whole again. Dementia is that place between fall and winter, difficult to define; a place of constant conflict between expectation and reality. I remember him best when I mourn him the least. His rosary: in my pocket, in my pocket.
Knowles is a James City County resident
