The Theft of Memory

by Jonathan Kozol

  An older physician whom I also questioned told me that he thought her speculations were correct, although he urged me not to paint the situation with too broad a brush, because he said that people drawn to geriatrics tended to be motivated by profound compassion. “They tend to be unselfish people. Many come into this field after they’ve been through the same things you’ve been facing, with their parents or grandparents.” Then, too, he made the point that the doctor caring for my father might well have academic or collegial obligations competing for her time and that this might be one reason she was out of town or unavailable so frequently.

  If that was the case, I asked, wouldn’t it have been appropriate for her to have explained this to me from the start and perhaps referred me to another doctor who was less distracted by competing obligations?

  “Ah,” he replied, “but nobody, no physician, wants it to be thought that, amidst their other obligations, they cannot deliver on the needs of their own patients. That would be a terribly embarrassing concession. And I’m speaking now of any area of medicine….”

  Having said this much, he told me that he didn’t see that I had any choice but to be as stubborn and persistent as I had the will to be in pressing for the kind of care I thought my father needed and deserved. For this and other reasons, I do not regret one bit that I pressured and pursued my father’s doctor as I did. If anything, I wish that I had done it more relentlessly.

  —

  There is a final point I ought to make about the sheer intensity and persistence of the bond that held me to my father. Although I know this may seem hard to understand, I think that I felt even closer to him now than I had been before the early indications of his illness. As I have mentioned, there had been extended periods when I had allowed the pressures of my work to distance me from both my parents and when I had seen them only at infrequent intervals. But since my father had grown ill, I had set aside entire weeks, and sometimes months, to be with him as often as I could and had probably spent more hours with him than I’d done at any time since I was a boy. I’d been listening with more attentiveness to almost every word he spoke, noticing his shifting moods and altering expressions, his evanescent bursts of gaiety, his times of relaxation and serenity when we were sitting, for example, on the patio outside of the nursing home and my dog was lying at his feet.

  I have said I felt that I was on a journey with my father. Our guessing games while he was in the nursing home to try to fathom something that he wanted to express but could not lucidly convey, were one part of that journey. So, too, were our shared attempts to extricate a memory or penetrate a bafflement or navigate an interesting maze of interrupted reasoning. In these ways, I felt that we were joined to one another in an exploration not just of his own impeded processes of thought but of the mystery of thinking in itself. In this sense of exploration, I felt a more direct and intimate connection with my father than at almost any time since we went out on those evening walks together more than sixty years before when he was feeling discontent about his work, as my mother had explained, and seemed to get some comfort from my company.

  If I hadn’t spent so many hours with him in the nursing home but had managed to distract myself more thoroughly from his predicament by opportunities afforded by my work and by my friendships and political activities, and had made only limited and periodic visits, it would have been easier to look upon him now with a degree of distance, and through a lens of pathos, as if he were no longer the father I had known, but only a diminished version of that man. But I had made my choice and, as a consequence, I did not see him in that way at all.

  Yes, it is true I’d been deeply shaken as I had observed the progress of an illness that had robbed my father of the gifts of clarity and insight that had made him a remarkable physician. But those gifts, those areas of competence, had never been the whole of who he was. In terms of his inherent charm and sweetness, and his humor, and his outright sense of mischief when he flirted with Lucinda or tried to get his hands on Silvia’s rear end, but, most of all, in his long and brave and dignified resistance to the darkness that progressively encircled him, there was, for me, no diminution—not in the essence of the person he had been, not in the admiration that I felt for him. This is why it was so hard to let him go. The young doctor understood this.

  CHAPTER NINE

  My Father and Mother: Together and Apart

  For the remainder of my parents’ lives, Silvia or Julia was with them almost every day and every night. The exceptions were on weekends or, very rarely, on a weekday when both of them had to be away. At those times, one or another of the extra helpers Silvia had found would come in and take their place.

  One of the best of these extra helpers was the wife of Alejandro, who, like Alejandro, had studied medicine in Cuba. (He had been a cardiologist; she had specialized in family medicine.) Sometimes Alejandro would come with her and stay there for an afternoon, helping when she needed help but mostly simply spending time in Daddy’s company. Lucinda had, by now, become a nurse practitioner and no longer had the time to visit the apartment on a routine basis, so I was grateful for Alejandro’s efforts to look for ways to make connections with my father and stir up his alertness.

  Throughout his first two years at home, my father seemed to recognize me when I came into the room so long as I arrived before he had grown sleepy. When I kissed him, he would kiss me back. If he found it difficult to summon up my name, I would lean forward and whisper in his ear, “Hi, Daddy! It’s me! It’s Jonathan.” He would smile and grasp my hand and look at me with that penetrating gaze that, no matter how impaired his memory might be, always seemed to indicate discernment.

  Although his ability to carry on a conversation of any length at all had pretty much disappeared at least a year before, he surprised me now and then by the bluntness of an answer he would give to something I had asked. Once, after the second time he’d been in the hospital, a medication he’d been given led to a week of miserable diarrhea. When I asked how he was feeling—it was a dumb question—he gave me an awful look and answered, “Ich bin dreck”—meaning, more or less, “I feel like shit.”

  When he was alone with Julia and Silvia, the words he spoke were often in reaction to an act of kindness on their part or, in the case of Silvia, to something she had done that had aroused his anger. Once, when she was bathing him, she said that his resistance to her washing of his “private parts” (that, or “privates,” was the term that she and Julia always used), with which she was familiar now, impelled him suddenly to challenge her with heated indignation.

  “You’re not going to get it!” he announced to her.

  “I said to him, ‘I don’t want it, Dr. Kozol! I don’t need it! I have a husband of my own.”

  I asked her if this made him laugh.

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t laugh. He looked as if I’d startled him. I think he was a little shocked that I would say something like that.”

  My father’s sense of sexual self-consciousness continued to be obvious to Silvia and Julia for a long time after he came home. When a visiting nurse arrived once every month to put in a new catheter—he had become incontinent by now—he would try to block her hands. “He’d cross his hands over his lap,” Julia said, “as soon as she approached him and removed his covers. His arms were strong. He’d lock his hands together.”

  Then, once Julia had persuaded him to let the woman do her job, “he’d turn his head away from her and look at me with terrible embarrassment, as if he was thinking, ‘Here’s this woman who’s a stranger to me and she’s holding my privates in her hand.’ It was like, ‘What’s this woman trying to do to me?’ He was relieved the moment she was gone.”

  My father was sleeping longer now, falling asleep about an hour earlier than when he first came home, but Julia and Silvia made it a point to keep him up most of the day. They would lift him from his wheelchair and would lead him back and forth in the apartment or outside in the hallway, as they still did with my mothe
r, to make him exercise his legs and keep his circulation strong.

  When he was sitting at his desk, said Julia, he continued “to try to write things to himself”—letters and numbers, fragments of words, sometimes an entire word, with arrows often pointing from one word or letter to another. “It was like doodling,” she said, but the letters and numbers, as before, were recognizable. At times, she noticed, there would be an element of urgency or even mild franticness in the way he did this, putting aside one piece of paper, then reaching for another.

  In the evenings I would see those papers scattered on his desk. The arrows and lines connecting words or numbers, frequently darting up and down a page between two separate items, gave the impression of that sense of hecticness and urgency that Julia had described. It was as if he were racing the clock, getting down these messages, or meanings, or reminders to himself while he still had the chance. Julia said that he looked “very busy” while he did these writings.

  —

  Late at night, once my mother was asleep, I would sometimes sit there at my father’s desk and take out some envelopes and folders from one of the drawers, as I’d done when he was in the nursing home. A number of folders, buried beneath other items—long-outdated legal documents, insurance applications, greeting cards, drafts of letters he may or may not have mailed—opened up entire chapters in his life that I hadn’t thought about for years. As with the items on O’Neill, I brought these folders to my house and stayed up for several nights recapturing some of the most intriguing moments of transition in his medical career.

  One of these moments took place rather late in his career, when he was in his fifties. At that time, even while he kept on with his practice in neurology and his more active interest in psychiatry, he had found himself attracted to the interaction between processes of law and what he termed “patterns of pathology that can pose a threat to other human beings.” He had been asked by the Commissioner of Mental Health in Massachusetts to assist him in deciding how to ascertain the danger—and, more specifically, longevity of danger—represented by a person with a record of repeated physical assaults, typically on women, who had been arrested but whose legal disposition had yet to be resolved because there were questions about his psychiatric state.

  Ethical, medical, and public safety factors frequently conflicted in these cases. Judges often found themselves bewildered in attempting to determine whether dangerous but psychiatrically disordered individuals ought to be considered knowledgeable actors in the crimes they had committed or whether, on the other hand, they should be perceived as mentally ill people who could not be held accountable for their behavior. In the latter situation, judges might assign them to a psychiatric institution, a secure facility operated by the state, with a sentence that was indeterminate in length.

  The heart of the issue was the all-important question of a person’s understanding of the “wrongness” of the crime he was committing, as well as the question as to whether the offender acted voluntarily or was under the compulsion of a force that he could not control. In order to evaluate the person’s state of mind, the commissioner asked my father to become the director of a diagnostic center where evaluations could be carried out while psychiatric care could be provided in cases where my father felt that it was called for.

  In a pattern of extensive preparation that had come to be familiar at other times in his career, my father began by looking at the research that existed on the questions he would now be facing. “The paucity of knowledge here in the United States,” he wrote, led him “to begin by making a survey of the ways that other nations and societies had addressed the same dilemmas. I visited a variety of prisons and related institutions in the United Kingdom, Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark,” and “conducted colloquies with Swedish and Norwegian specialists.” While he was in England, he said he’d made a point of “visiting the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge” and “spent some time at Broadmoor, the first of Britain’s ‘special institutions’ for the criminally insane,” from which he said he took away “both valuable and cautionary lessons.”

  All of this, the research he had carried out as well as the experience he subsequently gained in taking on the obligations he had been assigned by the commissioner, represent the background for a highly controversial case in which my father found himself recruited as an expert witness, not by the State of Massachusetts in this instance, but by the federal government. The case was that of Patricia Hearst, the daughter of the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who participated in an armed bank robbery after being kidnapped by a group of individuals who called themselves a “liberation army” and who justified their actions on the basis of a barely comprehensible political agenda.

  Patricia was caught by a surveillance camera holding a weapon in her hands during the bank robbery, which took place in San Francisco in mid-April 1974. A month later, she was seen spraying bullets from a semiautomatic to give cover to escaping members of the “liberation army” after they had carried out a second act of robbery, this time in Los Angeles.

  Following the deaths of six members of the group in a shoot-out with police, Patricia had gone underground with two other members and managed to elude police for sixteen months, until she was arrested in September 1975. A “self-employed urban guerilla” was the way that she identified herself when she was brought to jail.

  In the trial that followed, Patricia’s father retained a well-known lawyer by the name of F. Lee Bailey, who assembled a defense team that included a psychiatrist who had studied thought control and methods of brainwashing. The U.S. attorney who led the prosecution brought in two experts of his own. One of them—I remember that I had reacted to this with decidedly mixed feelings—was my father.

  The reason this unsettled me, which I told him at the time, was that federal law officials and specifically the FBI had been engaged for several years in illegal and covert activities intended to subvert the social protest movements that had swept across the nation since the 1960s. The FBI had tapped the telephone of Dr. Martin Luther King and made recordings of his private conversations in an effort to discredit him, and it had harassed and attempted to incriminate others who were active in the civil rights and anti-war campaigns. (I myself had a lengthy dossier, which my lawyer obtained for me from the FBI and which reported on my civil rights activities and even on the lessons I was teaching in the 1960s in my fourth-grade class in Roxbury.) None of this, I realize, had any relevance at all to the very special case of Patricia Hearst and to the question of her guilt or innocence. My uneasiness with my father’s role was a visceral reaction and was certainly not fair to him.

  My father, in any event, agreed to be a witness in the case, although he made it clear that whatever testimony he would ultimately give was going to depend on his interpretation of the interviews he would need to have with the defendant and that he could not predict where those interviews would lead. Once he was assured that the prosecution understood the terms of his participation, he set aside his work in Boston for two months and flew to San Francisco to immerse himself in preparation for the trial.

  Not in my father’s desk, but in the metal filing case nearby, I had come upon the written records he had kept of his conversations with Patricia. I also found a transcript of his testimony and the cross-examination that he underwent at the hands of Mr. Bailey, who comes across as having been a rather less sophisticated litigator than his reputation would have led me to expect.

  My father, after having spent sixteen hours with Patricia in five separate interviews, had come to the conclusion that she’d acted voluntarily, not under coercion, psychological or otherwise, in commission of the crimes of which she was accused. And while he commiserated with her for the situation in which she had found herself, his role was to assess the question of responsibility.

  In his testimony to the court, he stated his opinion, based upon Patricia’s answers to his questions and other interviews that were part of the court record, tha
t she had grown up with an image of herself as, “in a sense, an abandoned child”–abandoned to the care of “a very harsh [and] arbitrary governess” at whose hands she reported that she had been beaten and otherwise mistreated. (My father emphasized that he was not stating these events as points of fact, because he had no firsthand knowledge of those years, but that these were the beliefs Patricia held or the impressions she conveyed.) She also spoke to him of fights between her parents and, while she indicated that these were purely verbal altercations, she said their quarrels had upset her so much that she wanted to leave home and asked to be sent away to a boarding school she had attended earlier. “She said,” he testified, that “the only reason” she had done this was “to get out of that house.”

  While recognizing that many homes have problems of this nature, and being very careful not to demonize her parents, he nonetheless believed, not only for these reasons but also on the basis of emotional distress she’d undergone more recently—furious anger at a man with whom she had been living and had planned to marry but whose arrogant and chauvinistic manner and self-centered social values had upset her greatly—that she had, step by step, emerged into a state of mind, strong-willed and rebellious and hostile to authority, that rendered her receptive to the values of the people who had captured her.

  An “embittered” person at the time when she was kidnapped, “angry…, unhappy…, ready to lash out,” as he testified before the court, she was “a rebel in search of a cause.” And “the cause,” he argued, “found her.”

  In one of the most interesting portions of his testimony, my father described a classic exercise he’d carried out, in which he’d asked Patricia to draw a picture, essentially a “floor-plan,” of the apartment in which her captors held her. Mr. Bailey, in his presentation, had spoken of “a closet” in which she’d been kept after being captured and the sense of terror this had caused, which, he argued, had reduced her to passivity. In the drawing, however, which indicated windows, a kitchen, a bathroom, and the like, Patricia had neglected to include the closet, which Mr. Bailey had described as one of the most traumatic focal points of her experience throughout this time and the fulcrum of the argument that she’d been tormented by her captors into a state of acquiescent desperation, which led her, once she had been freed from her captivity, to collaborate in violent behavior.