Chapter Four

Death of Dad

“I should know who you are, but somehow I don’t,” my father said to me one day when he was 95. It was two and a half years since my mother had died, three since Dad had become bedridden after breaking his upper femur and having surgery that never healed. I know I should know who you are, but somehow I don’t. In a way, he was still himself, or at least the self that I knew, not the mysterious, long-ago self that wrote passionate letters to my mother and called her “Darlingest wife of mine” but the man who knew everything, and if he didn’t know something, at least he knew he didn’t know it, and once he’d been informed, all was, at least momentarily, in its proper place.

Dad had always known everything. He’d been the Final (and Very Opinionated) Authority on All Things Large and Small: the best way to reheat a slice of pizza in a toaster oven; why too much salt could kill you; how to drive a stick shift without burning out the clutch. He was the family authority on mathematics, astronomy and mortgages. He knew how cats’ minds worked. All my life up to this point, if I needed a few tips about investing money, or what kind of car uses the least gas, he was my go-to guy. I always believed everything he told me, whether I understood it or not.

Yet now, here was something he didn’t know. He was apologetic. As always, he was lying in a hospital bed in his home, in pajamas. He often dreamed he was walking. He still had an almost-full head of silvery hair, tucked under a wooly cap. His goal was to live until 96, the age at which his older brother, Charlie, died. Apparently sibling rivalry runs cradle to grave.

“I’m Jeanie, your daughter,” I reminded him.

“Jeanie! That’s right,” Dad said. Sometimes I had to tell him his mind was playing tricks on him, and he agreed.

Dad and I first met when I was almost two, upon his return from World War II. In an old photo, he is posed jauntily outdoors, somewhere in the South Pacific, his pith helmet on his head, wearing khakis, bare-chested, skinny, a pipe in his mouth, one finger raised as if in triumph—maybe he knew he was coming home soon. Or perhaps he was giving the photographer an instruction on the use of the camera, which would have been just like him.

I envision him, a skinny kid still in his soldier’s uniform and cap the way he appeared in that photo, with a thin mustache, scooping up his new little daughter, his first child, in her pink corduroy overalls and baby bonnet. Mom said we promptly adored each other.

He was the calmer parent, the opposite of emotionally volatile Mom, the self-described neurotic, the extrovert who charmed everyone with her charismatic personality. Introverted, blunt (honest to a fault, Mom always said affectionately), he’d always lived in a separate world. “He’s working out mathematical equations in his head,” Mom would boast as he sat munching quietly at the dinner table while the rest of us chattered. Now, at the end of his life, when he could do nothing much but lie there, nearly blind, virtually deaf, in some ways he seemed to be in his natural element, perhaps enjoying completely uninterrupted time to think about things that to me were unimaginable. Cosmic things. With the hospital bed tilted slightly up, he gazed serenely into the middle distance. He had no peripheral vision, so he didn’t know I was there until I leaned over the bed to meet that gaze. I’d say, “How are you feeling?” and he’d smile and say, “Pretty good,” sounding slightly surprised.

And as I sat by his bed, he liked more than ever to enlighten me on assorted topics, as though his head were so crammed with information that he had to unload some of it in order to make room for new ideas. He addressed me in a dry lecture format, just as he always had, which automatically made me—never a good student—either sleepy or resistant. “I’ll tell you something about overpopulation,” he’d begin, apropos of nothing, a faraway, dogged look on his face. Or, “You clearly don’t understand how the digestive system works. Let me explain.” He’d clear his throat and begin at some seemingly arbitrary point mid-narrative, immediately leaving me, the self-designated dimwit in a super-smart family, far behind.

The son of immigrants, Dad was the only one in his family to go to college, getting a degree in electronic engineering under the G.I. bill right after World War II, then a Master’s degree from Stanford. He could fix anything that broke as long as duct tape was available and you didn’t mind if it ended up looking like a Rube Goldberg contraption; he knew about black holes and obscure reptiles that dwelt in the tropics. He had a mild-mannered affect but strong opinions about everything. Even now, confined to bed for years, he’d learned a little bit of the Tongan language from his favorite caregiver, got himself up to speed on environmental issues, and, for all I know, solved the mystery of dark matter in the universe. His memory, up until recently, had seemed as sharp as ever: He remembered the way he used to drive slowly along a frontage road because his beloved retriever, Buddy, loved to race the car. He reminisced about Harry, Archie and Sammy, the three buddies of his youth. He muttered darkly about his tyrannical father.

He had short-term memory, too: the population statistics from the latest census, the washing machine that broke down last week. And yet: “I should know who you are, but somehow I don’t.”

When Mom’s mental condition approached its later phases but Dad was still physically and mentally healthy, it was Dad I wanted to talk to on my visits, only Dad; it was too painful to try to converse with my once-so-verbal-and-witty mother--the one I could talk to about books and relationships--now so blank. With Dad, I could do as I’d always done, ask him questions that had concrete answers. “When did you first know about Mom’s condition?” I asked him. And, “Why did you hide it from me for so long?” He responded, as I knew he would, with dates and neurological reports and explanations. We finally had something in common that we were both unequipped to handle; we had actual discussions about how to deal with Mom, during which he’d listen to—and, of course, argue energetically about--my opinions. We’d go for slow walks, arm in arm, around the leafy suburban neighborhood, as the caregivers watched over Mom. He’d stop along the way to point out details of the flowers and plants in the front yards we passed. I’d murmur agreeably, inhaling the summery fragrance of honeysuckle and listening to a distant hoot-owl as he stood wondering aloud about the Latin name of a particular shrub; he liked to try and identify every tree, beetle and bird on our path.

It was then that I might have ventured into new territory. Away from the house and Mom, both of us relaxed, I might have asked him the more personal questions, some of which I’d wondered about even before Mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, before their life together took that tragic turn, other questions that now crept into my mind: Why did you marry such a neurotic woman? If you had known that your life would end like this, would you have done anything differently? Do you regret anything?

Yet the walks were peaceful and soothing to us both. We hadn’t done anything this father-and-daughterly since I went sailing with him on his boat at the local harbor when I was a sullen teenager with a bad haircut, strapped into a bulbous, bright orange lifejacket. Here I was, walking around the neighborhood with my elderly Dad, the good daughter for all his neighbors to see. Eventually he became shaky and walked with a cane. We went out for pizza, grocery shopped, took Mom to the doctor. He didn’t ask me any questions, personal or otherwise; his curiosity was almost exclusively reserved for the world around him, not for the people in it. He was a collector, a hoarder of hard facts. I realized that it had always been my mother who kept him apprised of my life, dragging him to plays I was in, giving him my stories and magazine articles to read. Now, lacking prompting from her, he was in his comfort zone.

And I reverted easily enough to my own comfort zone, too, half-listening to his lectures on topics I’d avoided learning in college, half-thinking my own thoughts just the way, I suppose, he was so often thinking his. The discrete roles of each member of our family had been established long ago. Now, with the dominant member, my mother, out of commission, I did not want, during those sunny strolls, for anything else in our family to be different. If my mother was destined to forget how to walk and talk and ultimately how to swallow, at least my father would always be himself.

There were moments that did take me by surprise, though. Once, out of a clear blue sky, he said, pensively, cryptically, “You know, your mother isn’t the woman I married.” “I know,” I said gently. She wasn’t the woman who raised me, either—she was some trickster god’s idea of a reasonable facsimile. Another time, he said, “If Mommy dies before me, I think I’d like to go to New York and visit my brother Charlie.” They hadn’t seen each other for decades. “Go now, Dad,” I urged him. “Don’t wait. The caregivers and I will take good care of Mom.”

Sometimes Charlie called. They were both stone deaf by now and shouted at each other over the phone—I could hear Charlie’s voice from across the room--neither one hearing a single thing the other said. “How are you?” they’d yell at each other, and hang up after 30 seconds, Dad looking pleased. “Charlie sounds good,” he’d remark.

And later, Mom gone, us alone together, me in a chair, him lying quietly in bed, more questions drifted through my mind: Are you afraid to die? Do you feel that you were a good husband, a good father? Was I a good daughter?

But it wasn’t just that I had questions for my father. There was this fear: If I ventured into such an existential abyss, might I be called upon to provide some kind of deep emotional or spiritual support to a man who seemed to function only on the plane of the rational? Or worse still: Was I prepared to ask myself some of those very same questions? Instead, I’d ask him idly, “What brand of dog food did you used to feed Buddy?” “Was your father a religious man?” “What about global warming?” During those last few bed-bound years, his responses began to get vaguer. He’d say, “Well…” in a tone that implied deep thought and equivocation, and gaze off, and I’d wait patiently, and sometimes he would not answer at all, or he’d suddenly say, “The best coffee I ever tasted was in the army!” or “Are the oranges on the tree ripe yet?” I was never sure whether he’d forgotten my question or hadn’t heard it in the first place or taken so much time to think about it that he’d lost track of what it was.

In those last months with Dad, I sat almost silently at his bedside glancing at my watch. A kind of torpor overtook me. Dad was talking less than ever now, occasionally asking for coffee or a Tylenol, or wondering if I’d gotten anybody in to fix the heater. But I could tell he was still thinking about the world, because occasionally, out of the silence, he’d ask me to look up a word in the dog-eared dictionary that he always kept nearby. I was thinking, too, but not about big things—just about practical things: which meds needed to be picked up at the pharmacy when, is the Depends supply running low, what’s that funny smell. By now, after 14 years of watching my parents’ decline, my emotions felt stunted, limited to annoyance and frustration. Mom’s Alzheimer’s, Dad’s broken bones, the end approaching…

When he died, Dad was not quite as old his brother Charlie had been at the end. He never did see Charlie again, but I think he’d forgotten all about that race to the finish. He slipped quietly into a coma in his own home with me by his side, his face white and smooth and serene. It was only a few days after he’d wondered, just briefly, just that one time, who I was.