Another time, when I had planned to visit (and Lucinda had, perhaps unwisely, told him to expect me), I was forced to change my plans because I had a cough and chest infection. When Lucinda phoned me the next afternoon to see how I was feeling, my father happened to be sitting in her office. He became concerned about me when he overheard part of her conversation. He wrote a letter which she sent me from her office fax machine as soon as she was done with work.
“Many of us are inquiring about someone who couldn’t come to be with us. Herein: November the sixth. I hope you will feel better in the soon. Fate matters. We will keep in close dispatch.” This time, he signed it, “Your one father, Daddy.”
A slightly longer letter that Lucinda sent me, which wasn’t dated but appears to come from the same period of time, conveyed the same clear recognition of the person he was writing to. It began, “To Jonathan my son,” and then reported on some news that he’d received, or had imagined he’d received.
“No longer than an hour ago I received some information that might help improve my situation. But much has taken place beyond my capability to heal….
“Ma just phoned some moments ago. That did much to raise my spirits. It is too long since I’ve heard from her….
“Please provide whatever information on this matter you may have. Remember age and circumstance.
“I miss you.”
Again, he signed it, “Daddy.”
In spite of his confusion about who it was who phoned him—if he had indeed received a phone call, it was probably from my mother—the letter was one of the most direct and self-aware that he had sent me up to now. There was no pattern or consistency in this. Sometimes it seemed as if the cloudiness that had descended on his understanding of the “here and now” of his existence opened suddenly, as in this letter (“much has taken place beyond my capability to heal”), and the cover-all expressions and discontinuities of meaning that I’d see in other letters disappeared almost entirely.
Six months later, Lucinda sent me yet another message from my father, this one, however, very different from the ones she’d sent before and not actually a letter but more like a memo, or a set of annotations, that a doctor might have made in observation of a patient.
“Repair repetitions,” the memo began.
“Hope: Advise and continue treatment plan.
“Hope: in catastrophe.
“Legs: Recovery.
“Continue recent status of.
“Note: Loss of Certain Figures.
“List: History of HLK poses a number of several histories and multiple fine retardants….”
Even in the loss of continuity displayed in this and other memos he wrote later the same year, my father’s attempt to identify his incapacities (“Repair repetitions,” “Loss of Certain Figures”) struck me as affirmation of the fact that he still was thinking in the terms of a clinician and organizing what he thought in the manner that had been familiar to him in his years as a practitioner.
Another memo that Lucinda showed me reinforced her sense, and mine, that he hadn’t ceased to look at his condition from the vantage point of a physician, even while he also recognized that he was a patient. “In spite of various and said obstructions, I am trying to perform my duties and assist all local persons. There is little I can do except continue observations, viz., survey. How far is that other institution”—I believe that he was thinking of the MGH—“that attends to the same matters? I shall try again to ascertain today.”
This was not the only time in which my father spoke as if he thought the nursing home might be a hospital or sanatorium in which he had some obligations (“duties”) to perform. A few of his notations were, indeed, explicitly directive: “B.P. [blood pressure] straight across the board. Pt. [patient] now sitting very quietly. In no apparent pain. Release: uncertain. Please advise.”
In another of his brief notations, my father made what seemed to be an indirect allusion to the sense of letdown and uneasiness that patients in a nursing home often undergo as the hours of the afternoon go by and daylight starts to fade. “I am under the impression,” Daddy wrote in late December of that year, “that afternoons require of us greater sensitivity than presently provided. Reference made. Respectfully….”
—
My father was ninety-three years old on August 2, 1999. Although my mother had visited him as often as her strength allowed throughout the past three years, she wasn’t feeling well enough to make the drive this time. Lucinda couldn’t be there either, since she had to spend the evening at another nursing home that called her on occasion. So Silvia, who was spending more time with my father now than anyone except Lucinda, made plans with me to celebrate my father’s birthday by ourselves. Naturally, I also brought Persnickety.
Silvia brought a chocolate cake with lemon icing that said “Happy Birthday Harry.” In the garden behind my house the blackberries were ripe, so I picked enough to fill two small straw boxes and I brought them with me for our birthday party.
Persnickety, of course, became excited when the cake was taken from the box, so Silvia put the first slice on a paper plate and set it on the floor. After my father got the second slice, and then another—his appetite was very good, as usual—I showed him the blackberries I’d picked for him and he took one in his fingers, looked at it admiringly, and put it in his mouth.
“I love it,” he said and reached out for another one and then, in all, he ate perhaps about a dozen more.
The blackberries were at that perfect stage, plump and shiny, filled with juice, when they’re most delicious. Persnickety, who loved to eat them from the bushes in our garden, suddenly became alert again. She sat up straight in front of him, gazing at him steadily and making that familiar sound of hers, a gradually increasing grumble, then a mild-sounding “whoof,” which she knew that he would not ignore.
He chose one of the largest berries and he held it out for her. She made short work of it and looked at him for more. He teased her then, holding up another berry just above her nose, then lifting it a trifle more as her tongue got near, so that she had to climb on him before he would relent and pop the berry in her mouth.
As almost always was the case when Silvia or Alejandro was in charge of things, my father had been neatly shaved and dressed. Silvia usually dressed him in his chino slacks or corduroys and one of his nice jackets—beautiful but slightly worn tweed jackets, some of them with leather elbow pads, during the colder seasons, and a light blue seersucker jacket often on these summer days—and one of his deep blue shirts and handsome ties.
The juice from the berries had trickled on my father’s lips. Silvia quickly found a napkin and wiped away the juice before it could run down across his chin and stain his shirt. Then he sat back in the sofa while Persnickety curled up on the carpet at his feet. The evening was warm. There were cricket sounds outside the window. My father looked about him with what seemed to be complete contentment.
Not every evening, naturally, was equally serene. There were times when undercurrents of concern—puzzling worries about my mother, for example—would intrude upon his sense of equanimity. Once, in the early autumn of that year, he suddenly looked up and asked me, “Is it true your mother’s sleeping in a sewer?”
“No,” I said. “She’s sleeping in her bed.”
“Where’s she living?” he inquired.
“In the same old place—in the apartment,” I replied.
“She’s doing well?”
“She’s doing fine.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said my father.
A few nights later, he struggled for a long time to repeat a word I’d spoken, but could only summon up a word that sounded similar.
I asked him, “Does it madden you when you can’t find the word you want?”
“That’s it,” he said.
“Something is playing tricks on you?”
“Exactly!” he replied.
He used one hand to draw a semicircle in the air. “It’s like s
omething…,” then he broke off, but finally tried to finish the idea by saying “something in a circle?” I knew he hadn’t made the point that he was after.
“Is that the word?”
“Not quite….”
“A globe? A sphere?”
He raised his hand, one finger pointed, as if I were almost there.
“A hemisphere?”
“That’s it,” he said. But then that moment of assertiveness was gone and whether I had really fixed on the right word at last—he’d often used that word, or “lobe,” in speaking about functions of the brain—I wasn’t sure at all.
Occasionally, from that time on, I noticed that my father found it difficult to speak about himself in the first-person pronoun. He knew the word he ought to use was singular. He knew it wasn’t “you.” He’d reach instead for “he.”
“He’s missed you,” he might say to me when I arrived there after having been away too long.
Once, in answer to a question I had asked, he said, “He can’t seem to recall….”
“ ‘He’ is ‘I’?” I finally asked.
He looked as if he was delighted that I’d tried to stick a pin into the ambiguity of things.
“There’s a connection…somewhere,” he replied. Then, as if he’d had enough for now of the effort we were making to find sense in all of this, he made a joke out of his own bewilderment—“if somebody could only figure out what the hell it is!”
There was no apparent anguish in this flare-up of impatience. He simply shook his head a couple times, as people do to indicate that somebody they know who does peculiar things is “up to his old tricks.” That clear blue gaze of unabated curiosity about his own condition still was there. Perplexity, the fascination with predicament itself, still drew him on—and drew me on as well. And once again, as when I was a boy of only nine or ten and he used to take me with him on those long walks in the autumn evenings, I felt that I was with my father on his journey still.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Can You Take Me Home with You?”
By April of 2000, my father had been living in the nursing home for three years and ten months. Even though he now could walk only for short distances without someone supporting him, Silvia and Alejandro and the others who took care of him knew it wasn’t good for him to be sedentary for too long, which was unhappily the case with many of the patients who did not have private aides. He was sleeping longer hours now than he had done before and would often spend the morning in his bedroom but would spend his afternoons and evenings either in the living room or, in nice weather, outside on a patio.
There was a waist-high wooden fence surrounding the chairs and tables on the patio, which overlooked a sloping lawn where small brown rabbits hopped about and nibbled at the grass. The fence allowed me to unleash Persnickety so that she could wander freely from one group of people on the patio—visitors, staff members, or their patients—to another. But the rabbits proved to be a great temptation for her, and now and then, when someone didn’t latch the gate that led into the patio, she would push it open with her nose and dash across the lawn in her big gallumping way in pursuit, always unsuccessful, of her small tormentors.
I didn’t worry when she did this, because there was little traffic on the road below and she would quickly grow discouraged when she saw how easily the rabbits could outpace her. But my father grew uneasy if he noticed she had slipped away from us and if he then looked around and saw her running through the grass or sniffing at the flowers at the bottom of the hill.
Once, when we were sitting on the patio and she abruptly left his side and ran to the fence and used her paws to lift herself up high enough so that her nose was just above the upper rail, and looked down at a rabbit and made a plaintive sound, my father became agitated until I had gotten up and brought her back.
I told my father, “You had a worried look just now.”
“Well,” he said, reaching for her head, “he doesn’t want any harm to come to her….”
His fondness for Persnickety posed a question for me later in the year when she developed a slight swelling on the upper surface of her nose. The swelling at first awakened no alarm—her veterinarian thought it was an inflammation, caused perhaps by allergens, and that it would subside. When it did not subside, but gradually hardened and increased in size, I brought her back to the veterinarian. The diagnosis this time was cancer in her nasal cavity.
By now, the swelling was so obvious that people working at the nursing home who had grown attached to her, and would often scrunch down on the floor (a few of the patients did this too) in order to pet and play with her, began to ask me what was wrong. And once Persnickety had undergone exploratory surgery, which required the shaving of a small patch of her fur and left an area of reddened skin exposed, as well as a line of stitches that extended almost to one of her eyes, it struck me as improbable that my father did not recognize these differences in her appearance when, as he always did, he held her head within his hands and studied her so closely.
The cancer was inoperable because of its location. A period of chemotherapy began in order to slow down the tumor’s growth before it pressed against her optic nerve and started breaking down the architecture of the bone that protected her brain cavity. The doctor said that she was not in pain. But when the surface of her nose became inflamed, she would rub it with her paws and would sometimes cause the wounded area to bleed. Her doctor said she might have eight months, maybe twelve, possibly a little more, before she lost the satisfaction that she took in life.
One day, when the inflammation had returned and she lifted a paw to scratch the reddened area, my father quickly took the paw and held it in his hand so she couldn’t raise it high enough to do her skin more harm. He didn’t ask me what was wrong, but he looked at me, and then at her, with obvious concern.
I decided it was time to tell him what was wrong. I was confident he was going to outlive her, and I didn’t want him to be disappointed suddenly when a friend who brought him so much happiness, and whom he almost always seemed to recognize the moment that she bounded in and took her place there at his feet, was all at once subtracted from his life.
But there was another reason why I told this to him now. I wanted him to keep on knowing me as long and as thoroughly as possible, and I knew this would not be the case if I presented to him only the most superficial aspects of my own existence (“happy talk”) but steered away from everything that held importance for me. I wasn’t married. I lived alone. Persnickety was my only real companion. I wanted my father to have the opportunity to understand, no matter how obscure and inchoate that understanding might turn out to be, why he’d now and then detect a look of sadness in my eyes that I didn’t think I would be able to conceal.
Whatever he comprehended when I told him of the tumor, I had the feeling—and Lucinda said she was convinced of this as well—that there was something different in his manner now when he gently touched that area and traced the wound left by the line of stitches. If it was not comprehension of the danger she was facing, it was certainly solemnity. I think he knew that Persnickety, of whom he’d said so pleasantly two years before that she was “practicing to be an angel,” was living with a shadow just above her forehead now. I know that line of stitches worried him.
—
One night toward the end of winter, as I was about to leave, my father asked me something he had never asked before.
“Can you take me with you?”
His capability to speak about himself in the first-person pronoun would resurface like that off and on, with no predictability. I avoided giving a real answer to the question. I think I came up with a vague equivocation. “It’s a long drive, Daddy, at this hour….” Something of that nature. It bothered me that I couldn’t find a way to answer him more honestly.
Before long, this developed into a familiar theme whenever he could see that I was getting up and putting on my coat to leave, even though I knew he had no recollection of the pla
ce I lived and I doubted whether he had any memory of his own apartment.
“Is it time for us to leave?” he’d ask. At other times: “Are we going home now?” When I’d say that I was going home but tried to find the gentlest way to tell him that I could not bring him with me, his eyes would sometimes cloud a bit or he’d simply look at me with wilted resignation. He’d follow me with his eyes when I went outside and passed the window near which he was sitting.
There was a television set on a maple table halfway across the living room. Once, when a patient turned it on, my father watched intently as a camera panned across the unmistakable façade of the MGH, the hospital in which he’d done his internship and, when he was older, had taken younger doctors with him on his rounds. He suddenly began to cry.
“Fight the fight!” he said to me.
I told him, “Daddy, you give me a lot of strength to keep on with my work.”
“As long as I live!” he said and, reaching out one of his hands, he held me tightly by the arm.
Later that evening, when it seemed that he was growing sleepy, I took out my pocket watch to see what time it was. My father, apparently less sleepy than I thought, noticed the watch and took it from my hand and looked at it with what appeared to be consuming interest. His father had given him a beautiful gold pocket watch, which he in turn had given to me when I went to college. I kept that gold watch safely in my bureau drawer.
This one was an inexpensive and gold-plated version. He opened the cover and followed the second hand as it made its circle on the dial.
“Where are you living now?” he asked.
“Still in the same place,” I replied, “right there up near Newburyport.”
“Can you take me with you?”
“Not right now,” I said.
The Theft of Memory Page 4