Still, these were happy times for both of us. Now and then he’d take my arm and would point with his other hand at a wild rose or large sunflower or a graceful bird that floated over us. We’d walk until the reddish glimmer of the setting sun along the surface of the river was extinguished. He didn’t tire easily.
CHAPTER THREE
A Fascination with Predicament
By his second year in the nursing home, my father’s legs had grown much weaker and our walks became much shorter. Within the nursing home itself, he still insisted upon walking on his own, sometimes with attendants to assist him; but the sloping driveway outside of the building and the uneven paving of the hilly road below were difficult for him to walk without the risk of stumbling and injuring himself. Our evening walks along that country road would soon come to an end.
One night in the winter when I came into the living room where my father liked to spend his evenings, he was in a cheerful mood but thought that it was 1912. He spoke of “an enormous man” and then he made a reference to “the Gate of Heaven,” an impressive-looking Roman Catholic church whose priest had been a good friend to his parents when they were, he told me once, almost the only Jewish family in South Boston.
The priest, as he had said, “used to come on Friday nights for dinner with my family. He loved my mother’s cooking! He and Pa would have a glass of schnapps together in the kitchen before Ma put out our dinner on the table….
“One day, he took me with him when there was a big parade coming through South Boston. He put me on his shoulders so I could see above the crowd. There was this enormous man riding in an open car and waving to the people. I wanted to know who it was. The priest said, ‘You are looking at the president of the United States. The man who’s sitting in that car is William Howard Taft.’
“I realize now he must have been in Boston to campaign for reelection. I was six, so it had to be in 1912. That was the year when Theodore Roosevelt split the vote by running as an independent on the Bull Moose ticket. If my memory is right, that’s the reason Woodrow Wilson was elected.
“Naturally, I didn’t know this at the time. All I knew was that the priest had wanted me to share in the excitement. I was very fond of him. Some years ago I tried to look him up, but I was told that he had died….”
Now, in the nursing home, as his recollective powers steadily declined, the detail that astonished him when he was six and its association with the kindly priest who took him on his shoulders were the parts that still remained to him.
On another evening later in the winter, my father didn’t seem to recognize me when I first arrived, but then surprised me when one of the nurses came into the room. “I don’t think I’ve introduced you to my son,” he said. His voice had its old congenial sound, as if the two of us were at the Harvard Club for lunch ten years before and one of his physician friends had stopped by at our table.
Later that night, he talked about a boy named Danny Sullivan who was his playmate when he was in elementary school. At one point he asked, “Have you seen Ma?” He always spoke about my mother by her name or else he’d say “your mother,” but he called his mother “Ma.” I wondered at that moment if he thought I was his brother.
It wasn’t sad to be with him, because he didn’t seem to be unhappy. His confusions obviously troubled him but didn’t seem to frighten him; and now and then there was a moment in which his responsiveness to an occurrence taking place around him in the nursing home—a medical emergency for instance—startled his attendants by its promptness and alacrity. One night, a woman who was visiting a patient suddenly collapsed and seemed to have gone into shock. My father got down on the floor and took her hand and pressed his fingers to her wrist to find her pulse. Appearing to be reassured, he stayed there at her side until one of the nurses had arrived.
Another night, as I was just about to leave, he took my arm and said something in Yiddish, which his mother spoke but which I hadn’t heard him speak in many, many years. I asked him, “Daddy, can you say your name in Yiddish still?” He thought for a moment, then said, “Hershel Leben”—Harry Leo—and then put his arms around me and began to cry.
“It’s been a good trip, hasn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes, Daddy,” I told my father. “It’s been a beautiful trip. You made it good for all of us.”
—
As often as possible, when I visited the nursing home, I’d try to bring my dog with me because her presence made my father utterly serene. She was a sweet dog, named Persnickety, a golden retriever whom my father used to play with when she was a puppy. She loved him dearly and, of course, placed no demands upon his cogency.
“Oh, there she is again,” he’d say and reach his hand to stroke her head.
One night, when I let her off the leash as we were coming in the door, she raced around a group of patients in the hall, ran into the living room to the sofa where he liked to sit, and sat down in front of him.
She lifted her paw.
“Is Jonathan here?”
I was standing at the doorway still….
He’d usually say my name when I arrived. Or else he’d simply press my arm and hold me there in front of him and look hard in my eyes. “So how’s it been?” he’d ask sometimes. If I told him I’d been in New York, he’d say something that was capaciously appropriate about the reason I was there. “Did you get it all done?” he might inquire. Or, on one occasion: “How are they treating you down there?” If I looked a little frazzled, or fatigued, he’d urge me to relax. “Ease it up,” he’d say to me if he could see a worried look within my eyes.
When it was time for me to leave, he’d sometimes jab me gently in the arm. “Don’t be a stranger now,” he’d say, a phrase I’d often heard him use in decades past to say good-bye to someone he was close to—or, indeed, now that I think of it, to almost anyone who had been visiting our home.
One night he held my dog’s head in his hands and studied her. A nurse who had a special liking for my dog said, “This one is an angel.”
My father said, “Well, I’m not sure I’d go that far.”
The nurse looked at my father with delight to hear him making this connection with her words. “What is she, Doctor, if she’s not an angel?”
“Practicing to be an angel,” said my father.
He continued holding her in front of him….
Only a week after that, he didn’t seem to notice when I came into the room. His eyes were shut. He looked as if he were asleep. But when my dog, who was standing right in front of him, grew impatient with his nonresponsiveness and began to lick one of his hands, he opened his eyes, stroked her head, and lifted up a cookie he’d been holding in his other hand, teasing her until she nearly climbed into his lap, her big front paws planted squarely on his knees, her soft brown eyes and dripping tongue directly in his face. His cheeks reddened, and in a boisterous act of self-defense he threw the cookie out across the carpet, watched her as she chased it underneath a chair, then reached for another cookie from a saucer on the table next to him and kept on playing with her in this way, exhilarated, as it seemed, by her enthusiasm for the game and by the little plaintive sounds she made when he held a cookie for too long.
“How old is she?”
“Almost seven,” I replied.
He threw another cookie past the chair where I was sitting.
“There she goes!”
After he had given her the final cookie on the saucer, she came back from chasing it and settled down in front of him, curling up on the carpet at his feet and licking her paws carefully until she got bored with this and closed her eyes. Soon she was breathing heavily. My father closed his eyes as well. Before long, both of them were sleeping.
On another visit, when we stayed a little later than we usually did, she followed him when he was being taken to his bedroom. Once an attendant helped him to get into bed, Persnickety scrambled up and lay down on the linens next to him.
“Do you want to sleep with me?”
She made a grumbling sound.
“I think she may have been a lion once,” he said to the attendant. “Would she let me comb her hair?”
She sat up suddenly.
“If you were smart,” he told her, “you’d say yes.”
She was looking down at him.
“Am I going to get a kiss?”
She licked him on his face.
“Where do you live?”
She licked him again.
“Being with this animal,” he said to the attendant, “is conducive to religion.”
Suddenly she sneezed.
Daddy said, “Gesundheit!”
—
For a number of years after coming to the nursing home, my father still could read aloud from printed words and, in the first two years at least, it generally seemed as if he understood them. I’d come in and find him sitting at a table turning the pages of the Boston Globe in a rather grand and authoritative way. By the end of the second year it became apparent that he no longer comprehended more than isolated pieces of a story, but the ritual of reading to another person seemed to be enjoyable to him.
He’d usually read stories from the paper or articles from publications like The British Journal of Neurology, which I would collect from his apartment when I visited my mother. He’d grow frustrated with himself if he turned two pages accidentally and would look back at the prior page again in order to assure the continuity. No matter how opaque the meaning might have been, he’d appear determined to complete a piece of writing when the text was there in front of him. Occasionally he’d make a statement of approval or of seemingly discerning disagreement.
One of the companions I had hired to give him more attention than the nursing home provided was a man named Alejandro Gomez, a Cuban doctor who had not yet passed the board exams in the United States and brought his textbooks with him when he spent time with my father. Since he was familiar with the language in the journals that my father read, he would try to offer substantive responses to comments that he made, even though he had to make what was, at best, an educated guess at what my father really meant to say. As imprecise and speculative as this reciprocity between the two of them might be, there was a feeling of engagement.
“I love your father,” Alejandro said. He sometimes brought his daughter with him in the evenings. She was a precocious ten-year-old, an inquisitive and outgoing child, and she liked to listen to my father, and she tried to figure out which way he might be going when he restlessly attempted to convey a clear idea. She was very good at doing this. When she was sitting next to him, he’d often lift his hand to touch her long brown hair.
Children of Alzheimer’s patients frequently speak of the challenges they face in finding and retaining reliable companions who are not merely technically effective but also likable and interesting men and women who have a gift for making an emotional connection with the people whom they care for. I was fortunate in finding several people like that who knew how to stimulate my father’s thinking process and who would respond to bits of memory he summoned up in ways that often stirred him to recapture other details.
Alejandro was perhaps the best at this. But there were others—a graduate student from Nepal who drove all the way from Amherst to be with my father two or three days a week in his first year in the nursing home, an artist from the seacoast town of Gloucester who wore a jaunty blue beret and had a spicy personality my father found enlivening, and a beautiful soul named Silvia Garcia, a fiery and strong-minded woman who became my father’s closest friend and most determined advocate in his final years.
The staff at the nursing home, in contrast, struck me, overall, as rather automatic, by-the-book, and sometimes quite impersonal in dealing with the patients. But there were exceptions. One of them was an extraordinary nurse, whom I will call Lucinda in order to protect her privacy because she told me many things in confidence that the nursing home officials probably would not have wanted relatives of people living there to know.
Lucinda was the first person with whom I spoke at any length on the day my father moved there. After a short period of time in which she observed my father’s restlessness and his longing for companionship, she helped me to identify an agency that recruited healthcare personnel and was able to provide the kind of people she believed we needed to spend days and evenings with my father up until the hour, generally nine or ten o’clock, when he would go to bed. This was how we had found Silvia and Alejandro and the others I have mentioned. The agency, of course, added on a hefty fee for locating these individuals, so the cost of this turned out to be far more than I’d expected. Still, it proved to be a blessing for my father. With Lucinda there most evenings too, I knew he was surrounded by good people who were truly fond of him.
Right from the start, Lucinda went a great deal further than the call of her professional position. She quickly decided, for example, to go into Boston to get to know my mother, so that she would understand as much as she could about my father’s life at home in the preceding years. She took an instant liking to my mother and she soon began going into town to spend an evening with her when she had no obligations at the nursing home. Sometimes she brought a chicken dinner she had cooked, so the two of them could have a meal together.
In the months in which my mother felt the most bereft at my father’s absence, Lucinda helped to ease her sense of loss by sharing with her bits of news, and interesting things my father still remembered, which she thought my mother would appreciate. In this way, she came to be a source of strength to both of them.
The medical attention she lavished on my father was meticulous but always nicely humanized by the warmth of the relationship between them. One night, when my father’s eyes had a little ooze in them and were slightly pinkish in the corners, Lucinda told me that he had conjunctivitis—very mild. She was applying small amounts of erythromycin ointment. While she was trying to do this, he pulled back his head and told her, “When I was a boy, sixteen, I called a taxi….”
“Where did it take you, Harry?” asked Lucinda.
“I’d like to ask you the same question!” said my father.
“But I’m not the one who called the taxi,” she replied.
I liked the way she jumped right in and came back at Daddy with a good and lively answer of her own.
“I’d like…,” he said to her, or perhaps to both of us, one evening when we were alone with him, then seemed to lose the direction of his thought and moved his lips but couldn’t finish his idea.
“What would you like?” she asked him.
“I’d like to live for seven weeks,” he said.
“Oh, Harry! That’s not nearly long enough!” she said, looking directly at him with her glittery black eyes. “What would I do if I were here without you?”
On another evening, when Lucinda came into the living room after having been downstairs at a meeting with staff workers, my father looked right up at her and asked her if she had five dollars. Since she didn’t have her purse with her, I took out a five-dollar bill and gave it to my father. Holding it in his hands and studying the wrinkled picture of the president in the center of the bill, he finally said, “This is what I paid to come here.”
“Harry,” she said, “I promise you five dollars wouldn’t buy you more than a cup of coffee and a package of stale crackers in this expensive place!”
He tilted his head and gave her an appreciative look. A “twinkling smile” is the way I would describe that look of sudden gaiety.
My father’s fondness for Lucinda was apparent in a letter that he gave her after he’d observed her at the far end of a corridor in a lengthy conversation with a youthful-looking man, who was probably a relative of one of the other patients there. “Dear Lucinda,” he began. “It has taken me more time to write this than one might suppose. Advise: I hope your friend will profit from the opportunities we have all enjoyed. Please report to me on other gentlemen with whom you spend your time.”
Lucinda to
ok this in good nature and managed to pretend it was an indication of paternal thoughtfulness….
When I couldn’t visit for a time because I was traveling or cooped up in my house working on a deadline for my publisher, Lucinda often phoned me or would dash off little notes to give me updates on my father’s state of mind.
“Your dad went to sleep early tonight,” she wrote to me one evening after she’d come home from work. “I’m told you brought Persnickety to visit him last week the night that I was off. Those visits mean so much to him! He’ll talk about Persnickety for days after she’s been here.”
Now and again, Lucinda would surprise me by sending me a letter that my father wrote to me at her encouragement and, as I’m fairly sure, with some assistance from her, but in his own handwriting.
“Dear Jonathan,” he began, in one of the first few letters that she sent me. “How have you been since our last visit, since our very last? Since I enjoyed it and I did, and do, the same. And I hope I will surely see you since our most recent. And I will gain some more impressions and good help and hope in these impressions and enjoy all your opportunities. Good for you and your parents and your friends and nearby visitors!”
In this letter, his handwriting had not changed very much from the time when he still lived at home. Although there were those obvious discontinuities, the meanings of his words were clear and each of the sentences was, in itself, coherent. Only in the final line did he seem to go off-track and forget the person he was writing to. Instead of signing “Love from Daddy,” as he’d always ended letters to me in the past, he had signed the letter in the manner that he would have used in writing to a colleague: “Sincere Regards, Harry.”
In another letter, written three months later, he began, “Dear Jonathan, please tell your mother she’s too fine a woman to throw away her time on men she doesn’t know.” After asking me if I’d convey this message promptly, he continued, “I hope I shall see you soon, and both of us accordingly,” but then concluded in the manner of a business letter as if, once again, he had forgotten, in the course of a few sentences, that he was writing to his son. “Your assistance in this matter would be much appreciated….”
The Theft of Memory Page 3