It started with his complaining that he was forgetting names.
I pooh-poohed it, pointing out that I was 30 years younger and I never remembered people’s names.
In retrospect I shouldn’t have used myself as a yardstick. My dad had spent his life working with large groups of people whose names he’d always learned quickly and remembered.
He fought dementia as hard as he could, including signing up for an expensive Spanish-language retreat in Mexico. Learning new things was supposed to help, but he had to admit defeat after mere days and return home.
He couldn’t do it.
Laboriously he practiced his piano lessons daily. He couldn’t improve.
He picked me up at the airport when I flew in for a visit. We chattered happily during the two-hour drive to his home, then stopped for groceries first. I suggested we save time (because I really needed to get to his bathroom pronto) by splitting up very briefly so we could each grab things from different parts of the supermarket. Mere minutes later, I returned to him, turning a tub of margarine over in my hand.
“They were out of the brand you wanted, but I think this will do.”
“Excuse me?”
I looked up at my father. “Dad? The brand you wanted… They didn’t have it, but I read the ingredients for this one and…”
“Young lady…”
Was he kidding around with me? I looked up with a smile that evaporated when I saw the cold look on his face. “…are you in the habit of walking up to complete strangers in a supermarket and starting up conversations?”
Hours together and I’d only been gone for minutes. Mere, only momentary glitch, I assumed, but it took forever in that supermarket to shake him lose from his absolute conviction that he’d never set eyes on me before…long enough that I honestly feared I wouldn’t be able to do it.
And so it went. Years of in and out…an odd/surreal way for me to lose a loved one that was enough to make me doubt my own senses…till finally it seemed he was irrevocably and forever…out.
I made the mistake of responding to the gibberish he spoke by giving him what I would have wanted: a gentle but firm guide to reality:
“Dearest wife, I’m so, so, so sorry I forgot your birthday!”
“Dearest Dad, please don’t fret. Number 1: I’m not your wife.” I did at least have enough sense not to mention that Mom had been dead for many years. “And number 2: It’s nowhere near either of our birthdays. So all’s well, and you haven’t forgotten anything or slighted anyone!”
I was astounded and confounded when, instead of being comforted, he lashed out at me for trying to tell him things that so very clearly were not true…far more upset than he’d been when we started…and threw the phone down. One of the nursing staff in the home he was in picked up the phone and read me the riot act for trying to tell him the truth.
When I visited in person, I would look deep into his eyes, yearning for the father I’d lost despite his sitting in front of me in a perfectly viable body. But the eyes… 90% of the time they were milky glass, reminding me of the one time I’d looked into the eyes of someone who really was dead. Then, when I least expected it, a little fish-like flicker of life would seem to dart up to the surface before an instant return to the milky depths.
And so it was.
But very early one morning I got a call I slept through. (It was around 1 a.m.) The resulting voicemail was from a harried night nurse saying Dad insisted she try and reach me. Soon as I could, given time-zone differences and being at work, I walked out on the street so I could talk privately and called back. For the first time in awhile I actually got Dad.
My heart sang, but I braced myself for the inevitable my siblings and I knew all too well: Hope gradually fought back into a corner and viciously slaughtered as I was forced yet again to realize his words were only reflexive speeches, uttered without a brain cell of comprehension behind them. That what I was speaking with wasn’t anything that could reasonably be referred to as my father but had much more in common with a recorded announcement.
“Where are you,” was how he greeted me. His words reverberated with the stern consternation of a parent confronting a wayward teenager. At first I told him work then, remembering his condition, Brooklyn…adding New York. “Oh,” he said, somewhere between deflated and relieved.
I apologized for not answering the phone when he called; he…ever gracious, even in his dementia…told me in his low, conspiratorial voice that I shouldn’t feel like I’d missed out: he’d been calling about a concert in Kansas City he’d wanted to gather the family for, but it had been cancelled.
I pointed out that he hadn’t been in Kansas City for quite some time and there probably had never been a concert to begin with.
Then something strange began: Instead of getting upset, I could hear his casual shrug as he said, “Oh well, in that case you really didn’t miss anything,” and we enjoyed a long and leisurely laugh together.
The closest haven from the noise of the street was a Duane Reade. So there I was, strolling amidst the Toilet Paper, the Fantastik Multi-Purpose Cleaner With Oxy Power and Choices Of Mouthwash That Were Legion, blinking back tears as it sunk in slowly that, despite his confusion, we were in the midst of an ongoing miracle: We were enjoying a long and leisurely conversation together, actually talking back and forth…a thing I had given up on with him, a thing I thought I would never experience again. It was as sweetly unexpected as being able to speak with the dead. I can’t define just how I knew: something about the force of his personality, and intent to do things Dad did in conversations, like say supportive things and express warmth. And the irrefutable fact that all his responses were true responses, relating perfectly to what I’d just said. So what if I had to correct him about our relationship (“No, you’re my sister.” “No, Irene and Faith were your sisters.” “Oh…that’s right.”). He was there.
We spoke of many things, of old memories, of sealing wax and kings. When we finished talking I spoke to the day nurse who, when I expressed joy at unexpectedly being able to really speak with my father again, claimed it was just confused gibberish, pointing out that he had, at one point while we were talking, thought we were in St. Louis. I disagree with her. Perhaps, understandably, she didn’t know him well enough to know when the person he was was, in fact, with us again.
I so wish he’d been back to stay. Unfortunately, although his physical body lived for many long years afterwards, that was the last, brief-but-shining moment I had with my father.
