Chapter One

The Reunion

If you’ve had a close relative with Alzheimer’s, you know that it can be a long, arduous journey for all concerned—a journey that at various times can be sad, frightening, frustrating, boring and even funny, sometimes all at once. It can recalibrate family dynamics, induce guilt and change the way you think about your own future.

Back when my mother was diagnosed, in the late 1990s, I didn’t know a single other person who was dealing with Alzheimer’s in the family. I’d heard of it, of course, but, well, surely not my mother, my brilliant, creative, complicated and loving mother. Not my mother, whose life-long neurosis defined not only her but our entire small family.

I began writing journal entries, then personal essays, that traced my mother’s decline. As time went on, inevitably my father too began to decline, not mentally, as my mother did (or not at first anyway), but physically. And relationships shifted among my mother, my father, my sister, and me. By the time Mom died at 92, Dad was permanently bedridden with a broken femur. When he died, 2 ½ years after Mom, at 95, I’d completed 14 essays and wondered for years how to assemble them in a cohesive form.

Like many who’d lived through the Depression, my parents saved everything -- kitchen drawers filled with string and rubber bands, 50 years’ worth of bank statements crammed into file cabinets, even an ancient, stiff diaphragm in a bathroom cabinet. Amidst the junk, I found some of the playful, tightly rhymed poems my mother wrote to Dad every year for his birthday, their anniversary and Valentine’s Day (who’d think to pair “valentine” with “repine”?), typed on her old manual typewriter. She had a predilection for ending lines by contrasting “glamorous” and “amorous,” “neurotic” and “erotic” (and once, even, playfully, “psychotic”). Mom always cheerfully described herself as an ordinary, everyday neurotic. But erotic? Glamorous?

And I found a bundle of my father’s handwritten letters to his new bride when he was in the army during World War II. I opened them slowly, savoring them, not wanting the reading of them to end -- the very last of my father’s voice. There was Dad’s familiar neat script on the crisp beige papers with a grid printed on the back. But are these words really my father’s? Sweetest Sugar Baby, he wrote. It is not the voice of the Dad I knew, the one I remember best from recent years, lying in a living-room hospital bed with a transistor radio at his ear. Not exactly taciturn then, but living entirely in his head, his intellect.

During two months in 1944, my father, 28, wrote at least 41 letters to my mother, sometimes two a day, before he was shipped overseas:

Dearest Honeybunch… Baby… Dearest Sweetest Muriel… My Darling Precious Wife… Sweetness… Honey… Sweetie Pie… Dearest… Darlingest Sugar Baby… Darling Wife… Darlingest Muriel… Dearest Little Wife of Mine… Beloved Darling Sugar Baby… Dearest Sweet Potato…

… and other terms of endearment.

How to connect -- to see -- that young, optimistic, smitten soldier in the shy, socially disconnected old man watching his wife gradually turn into a stranger over the course of 12 long years.

Once, during those Alzheimer’s years, I was an awkward stand-in for Dad’s beloved Sweet Potato at a reunion of the Microwaves Division at Stanford Research Institute, where he had worked before retiring. With Mom sunk deep into Alzheimer’s, I was to be his -- well, his date.

Aside from helping him around the house and taking him on errands, our “date” would be the first time in 40 years that we’d be spending real time together, just the two of us, like when I was a teenager and the weather, the tides and the winds were favorable and Dad and I went sailing.

My mother and sister didn’t want to sail, but I loved the fresh, salty air; the hypnotic rhythm of the waves beneath us; the sight of the tanned, muscular boys who hung out at the harbor; the feeling of distance from shore and from my own life; the aura of adventure; the pride of being physically bolder than Mom and Sis.

Dad taught me how to face a challenge. When I was six or seven he showed me how to ride a two-wheeler. When I was 15 he taught me how to drive. He helped me with my math homework throughout high school. When we sailed, he challenged the sea. At Pete’s Harbor, with its enticing, fishy smell and the clank and clatter of boats bobbing against wooden planks, we walked down the dock to the Water Rat’s berth. We were too busy to talk even if we’d had anything to say to each other, which we never did. We silently scraped and swabbed and bailed. Then we stepped into the boat, which wobbled thrillingly beneath our feet. I leaned over the bow to cast off. Dad settled himself at the stern. My job was to man the jib while Dad handled the tiller and mainsail. We hoisted the sails while gliding out of the harbor into the rough bay. After that there was the tangy spray, the urgent nautical commands from Dad shouted above the roar of the wind: “Ready about! Coming about!” He knew just how to catch the full wind in the sail, when to tighten it, when to let it luff in a gentle breeze. The obedient ship’s mate, I hastily tugged at the line until it tightened on the cleat, ducked beneath the swinging boom to avoid being knocked unconscious, scrambled from port to starboard, starboard to port, leaning almost horizontal over the side to balance her as she rode the turbulent waves. I wore an orange life jacket but was secure knowing that if the boat capsized, Dad would rescue me. We sailed for hours, finally coming about to arrive back at the dock, wet, tired, and sunburned, our matching heads of thick, curly brown hair stiff with salt, my tattered sneakers submerged in an inch of bilge water, snug in rubber foul-weather gear, Dad roaring orders we would drag ourselves home, where Mom had dinner ready and Dad would repeat his same old lines: “Lettuce alone!” he’d joke, predictably, when the salad was served, or “You can’t elope with a cantaloupe” when we had melons for dessert. He’d smile and nod approvingly when I read aloud the stories I’d written, but it was Mom who’d discuss them with me.

When I went away to college, Dad sold the heavy, old-fashioned Water Rat and bought a sleek new fiberglass sailboat, and Mom gritted her teeth and loyally donned the orange life jacket to take my place at the jib. One day Dad and Mom capsized in rough weather on the bay in their sleek new fiberglass boat (maybe the trusty Water Rat would have fared better) and had to be rescued. And thus their sailing days ended, abruptly.

But Mom went every place else with Dad, and pined when he was away on business trips. Dad bicycled to work and came home daily for lunch. In the evening, Mom washed her face and put on fresh makeup for his arrival, rushing to embrace him as he stepped in the door with the afternoon newspaper and a tired smile. Every night they took a bath together, went to bed together, got up together, ate breakfast together.

Mom especially loved the annual company dance with Dad. They were both graceful dancers, often whirling around the kitchen to old Dixieland and big band records in the style of their youth, or tea-dancing at the Hyatt Regency. Mom always dieted for weeks in advance to fit into her black velvet sheath and squeezed her size 5 feet into high heels. She wore a rhinestone necklace and earrings. At 5 feet to Dad’s 5-foot-5, she always seemed to be craning her neck to gaze up at him. “He’s so tall that he played basketball in high school,” she’d boast.

When Dad retired at age 55, they made a point of accompanying each other on every mundane errand. “We don’t know how much longer we’ll have each other, so we want to make use of every second together,” Mom told me once as she grabbed her jacket and purse to tag along with Dad to the hardware store.

When my sister and I left home, they reconfigured themselves as a twosome so smoothly that I wondered if they’d been counting the years until our departure, when they could revert to the natural order of things.

And then the natural order changed.

As Mom began spending her days sitting in her chair, silently scowling at “The Big Book of Jewish Humor,” Dad began talking to me like a wound-up Chatty Cathy. “I knew a fellow in the Army . . .” he’d begin. Or, “My father, that son of a bitch . . .” Or, “I used to have an old 1947 Pontiac, and one time . . .” His stories of the past were detailed, complete with names and dates and emotions and beginnings, middles, and ends, even morals. He also explained to me in mind-numbing detail a system he created for calculating mortgage payments that he thought Charles Schwab might be interested in, and his new method of reheating leftover pizza, which he wrote down in large print, easy-to-follow steps to give to the pizza maker at Round Table, and why he suspected the toilet was leaking and what exactly he intended to do about it.

I had always thought of my father as a quiet man, but it turned out he wasn’t especially quiet after all. Maybe, years ago, he did all his talking to Mom at night in bed, and that was enough.

Dad hadn’t danced with another woman in 60 years. He and Mom continued going to senior center dances well into her Alzheimer’s phase, but when it was clear that those days were numbered, I tried to fill in the gap, taking a turn on the dance floor with Dad. But, being a rock’n’roll-era girl, I was no substitute for Mom. I stumbled, head down, watching my feet, not used to being led by a man. I might have wanted to learn, but Dad had no patience for my clumsiness. I was used to this -- I knew that in Dad’s eyes I was not as graceful, as thin, as smart and as compassionate as my mother.

I knew Dad was excited about the upcoming engineers’ reunion in his own, low-key way, because I received endless and repetitive emails and telephone calls during the preceding weeks: “I’m afraid the parking lot will be full, so many people are invited.” “What do you think the food will be like?” “Will there be enough to eat?” He calculated to the minute what time we should arrive to guarantee a parking space. He labored over a little bio he was preparing in case anyone asked what he’d been doing in the years since he’d retired, and sent it to me for editing. It was funny, upbeat, describing his efforts at gardening; the way he and Mom used to go dancing at the senior center; his daughters all grown up…

On the day of the reunion I arrived to pick Dad up, 45 minutes early as he’d requested. I was wearing a pair of baggy slacks from the section of my closet where I kept my emergency fat wardrobe, and clunky shoes. I seemed to tower over Dad, who was now shrunken and hunched, his once-curly hair falling in smooth, white waves. He was wearing a pair of stiff, brand-new blue jeans with the waistband almost at his chest, cinched with a belt, a white shirt, and a faded, checked, synthetic-fiber jacket. He told me he’d tried on three different jackets and asked Mom’s caregiver which one looked best. He also wore his usual blue baseball cap with “Menlo Park” written across the top to shade his bad eye from the glare, and a pair of shiny black loafers I’d never seen before. He was extravagantly Dressed Up. Back when he bicycled off to work every day, he wore, in the typical engineer’s style of the day, a short-sleeved, nylon, see-through shirt with a slide rule in the pocket. He was still the quintessential geek, just this side of having his eyeglasses held together with masking tape.

We said goodbye to Mom. She looked up from “The Big Book of Jewish Humor,” which she’d been gazing at with a furrowed brow, and stared at us blankly. “Where are you going?”

“To a lunch, Mom.”

My mother, the original party-girl, raised her eyebrows skeptically. They were still slightly pink because she’d put lipstick on them that morning and the caregiver had to scrub it off.

“Well, have a nice time,” she said, returning to her joke book with a look of grim determination.

We set off, Dad with his plastic bottle of water with his name in large letters, “Bernie,” taped to the side, and a manila envelope with his carefully edited bio and a sheaf of printouts of the mathematical designs he’d created on his computer -- the hobby of his old age -- and that he was always showing to anybody who would look, which these days was just the caregiver and me.

Like a mother, I opened the car door, made sure he fastened his seat belt, drove him the few blocks to the restaurant, reassuring him again that parking was not an issue, that there would be more food than he could eat and that we could leave whenever he wanted.

Faced with this big social event -- and with quiet me instead of chatty Mom as his date -- Dad was cautious and a little confused. Slightly bent over, head held low to avoid the glare of overhead lights, hesitant, he entered the restaurant.

It wasn’t just I who loomed over Dad. As guests arrived, and the banquet room filled up, everyone seemed gigantic. Dad shuffled slowly through the crowd, squinting at people’s name tags, clutching his manila envelope. Other old white men with silver hair and hearing aids greeted him with enthusiasm, and I stood at the ready to identify them -- “It’s Dick Harvey, Dad! He remembers you!” -- and shouted their comments into Dad’s good right ear: “He says he’s the one who hired you! He wonders if you still go sailing!”

I saw some quizzical glances. One man asked Dad, to my chagrin, if I was his second wife. People always said I look exactly like my mother, and it turned out that many people here remembered her, asked after her. “She was a live wire!” said one. But it was me here instead, first mate by default.

I stood back and let Dad take center stage. I was comfortable with that role. Mom wouldn’t have been. She’d have been seeking people out, introducing herself, boasting of Dad’s minor accomplishments: “He gets up on a ladder to prune the orange tree!” “I can’t tear him away from the computer!” “He still has all his own teeth!” Her piping voice with its Brooklyn accent would ring out in the din, louder than all the others.

Dad took his mathematical computer designs out of the envelope and, head lowered, doggedly made his way through the crowd with the intention of showing them to one particular former engineer. I helped clear a path for him and attract the attention of the colleague. Dad eagerly fanned out his designs like playing cards. The colleague glanced at them politely but was distracted by the crowd. Even if his eyesight had been better, Dad was so involved with explaining the designs that he wouldn’t have noticed the colleague’s wandering attention. I drew Dad aside and told him that although I was sure the man was interested, there were too many distractions here for him to concentrate. Dad nodded.

Sitting at a table in the Chinese restaurant pouring tea for Dad into a tiny cup, scooping rice onto his plate, I wondered what he’d be saying to Mom if she were here, and in her right mind.

After the meal, everyone took a turn to stand up and tell briefly about his life. “My son died,” said one quietly. “I’ll never forget the wonderful days at S.R.I!” exclaimed another. “I’ve opened a winery,” said a third, distributing bottles of merlot.

Despite a microphone, Dad couldn’t hear a thing and every once in a while turned to me and said in a perfectly audible tone something like, “Where’s my water glass?” Mom used to say that Dad’s mother would turn down the volume on her hearing aid whenever she didn’t want to engage with the world. By refusing to get a hearing aid, Dad didn’t have to bother turning a knob.

When it was Dad’s turn to speak, I expected him to read his carefully edited bio, but he just mumbled “I’ll pass” when I handed him the mic. I was astonished and whispered encouragement. If I’d been Mom, I’d have stood up, mic in hand, and talked for him, laughing and joking and charming everyone, including Dad. Reluctantly, still seated, his head tilted down and face hidden beneath the cap, Dad mumbled into the mic so quietly that he was almost inaudible. “Hi . . . retired in 1970 . . . spend lots of time battling the weeds. The weeds are winning . . . That’s all.”

Dad wanted to leave soon after that, and we slipped quietly out of the room in the midst of other people’s speeches. Dad said, “That was nice, but I wouldn’t want to do it again.” I took him home to his computer and his wife. Later he emailed me a photo; an organizer of the reunion had come to their house to snap a picture of him and Mom for the post-reunion newsletter. In it, Mom is sitting in his lap in a very short, polka-dot dress, her bare legs splayed apart, her arms spread out, her head tilted slightly back, her eyes closed. She looks like a huge, lifeless doll. He is peering around her head, grinning.