Still, shaky though Shenk’s arguments for the brighter side of Alzheimer’s may be, his core contention is harder to dismiss: senility is not merely an erasure of meaning but a source of meaning. For my mother, the losses of Alzheimer’s both amplified and reversed long-standing patterns in her marriage. My father had always refused to open himself to her, and now, increasingly, he couldn’t open himself. To my mother, he remained the same Earl Franzen napping in the den and failing to hear. She, paradoxically, was the one who slowly and surely lost her self, living with a man who mistook her for her mother, forgot every fact he’d ever known about her, and finally ceased to speak her name. He, who had always insisted on being the boss in the marriage, the maker of decisions, the adult protector of the childlike wife, now couldn’t help behaving like the child. Now the unseemly outbursts were his, not my mother’s. Now she ferried him around town the way she’d once ferried me and my brothers. Task by task, she took charge of their life. And so, although my father’s “long illness” was a crushing strain and disappointment to her, it was also an opportunity to grow slowly into an autonomy she’d never been allowed: to settle some very old scores.
As for me, once I accepted the scope of the disaster, the sheer duration of Alzheimer’s forced me into unexpectedly welcome closer contact with my mother. I learned, as I might not have otherwise, that I could seriously rely on my brothers and that they could rely on me. And, strangely, although I’d always prized my intelligence and sanity and self-consciousness, I found that watching my father lose all three made me less afraid of losing them myself. I became a little less afraid in general. A bad door opened, and I found I was able to walk through it.
THE DOOR in question was on the fourth floor of Barnes Hospital, in St. Louis. About six weeks after my wife and I had put my mother in touch with the social worker and gone back east, my oldest brother and my father’s doctors persuaded him to enter the hospital for testing. The idea was to get all the medications out of his bloodstream and see what we were dealing with underneath. My mother helped him check in and spent the afternoon settling him into his room. He was still his usual, semipresent self when she left for dinner, but that evening, at home, she began to get calls from the hospital, first from my father, who demanded that she come and remove him from “this hotel,” and then from nurses who reported that he’d become belligerent. When she returned to the hospital in the morning, she found him altogether gone—raving mad, profoundly disoriented.
I flew back to St. Louis a week later. My mother took me straight from the airport to the hospital. While she spoke to the nurses, I went to my father’s room and found him in bed, wide awake. I said hello. He made frantic shushing gestures and beckoned me to his pillow. I leaned over him and he asked me, in a husky whisper, to keep my voice down because “they” were “listening.” I asked him who “they” were. He couldn’t tell me, but his eyes rolled fearfully to scan the room, as if he’d lately seen “them” everywhere and were puzzled by “their” disappearance. When my mother appeared in the doorway, he confided to me, in an even lower whisper, “I think they’ve gotten to your mother.”
My memories of the week that followed are mainly a blur, punctuated by a couple of life-changing scenes. I went to the hospital every day and sat with my father for as many hours as I could stand. At no point did he string together two coherent sentences. The memory that appears to me most significant in hindsight is a very peculiar one. It’s lit by a dreamlike indoor twilight, it’s set in a hospital room whose orientation and cramped layout are unfamiliar from any of my other memories, and it returns to me now without any of the chronological markers that usually characterize my memories. I’m not sure it even dates from that first week I saw my father in the hospital. And yet I’m sure that I’m not remembering a dream. All memories, the neuroscientists say, are actually memories of memory, but usually they don’t feel that way. Here’s one that does. I remember remembering: my father in bed, my mother sitting beside it, me standing near the door. We’ve been having an anguished family conversation, possibly about where to move my father after his discharge from the hospital. It’s a conversation that my father, to the slight extent that he can follow it, is hating. Finally he cries out with passionate emphasis, as if he’s had enough of all the nonsense, “I have always loved your mother. Always.” And my mother buries her face in her hands and sobs.
This was the only time I ever heard my father say he loved her. I’m certain the memory is legitimate because the scene seemed to me immensely significant even at the time, and I then described it to my wife and brothers and incorporated it into the story I was telling myself about my parents. In later years, when my mother insisted that my father had never said he loved her, not even once, I asked if she remembered that time in the hospital. I repeated what he’d said, and she shook her head uncertainly. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe he did. I don’t remember that.”
My brothers and I took turns going to St. Louis every few months. My father never failed to recognize me as someone he was happy to see. His life in a nursing home appeared to be an endless troubled dream populated by figments from his past and by his deformed and brain-damaged fellow inmates; his nurses were less like actors in the dream than like unwelcome intruders on it. Unlike many of the female inmates, who at one moment were wailing like babies and at the next moment glowing with pleasure while someone fed them ice cream, I never saw my father cry, and the pleasure he took in ice cream never ceased to look like an adult’s. He gave me significant nods and wistful smiles as he confided to me fragments of nonsense to which I nodded as if I understood. His most consistently near-coherent theme was his wish to be removed from “this hotel” and his inability to understand why he couldn’t live in a little apartment and let my mother take care of him.
For Thanksgiving that year, my mother and my wife and I checked him out of the nursing home and brought him home with a wheelchair in my Volvo station wagon. He hadn’t been in the house since he’d last been living there, ten months earlier. If my mother had been hoping for a gratifying show of pleasure from him, she was disappointed; by then, a change of venue no more impressed my father than it does a one-year-old. We sat by the fireplace and, out of unthinking, wretched habit, took pictures of a man who, if he knew nothing else, seemed full of unhappy knowledge of how dismal a subject for photographs he was. The images are awful to me now: my father listing in his wheelchair like an unstrung marionette, eyes mad and staring, mouth sagging, glasses smeared with strobe light and nearly falling off his nose; my mother’s face a mask of reasonably well-contained despair; and my wife and I flashing grotesquely strained smiles as we reach to touch my father. At the dinner table my mother spread a bath towel over my father and cut his turkey into little bites. She kept asking him if he was happy to be having Thanksgiving dinner at home. He responded with silence, shifting eyes, sometimes a faint shrug. My brothers called to wish him a happy holiday; and here, out of the blue, he mustered a smile and a hearty voice, he was able to answer simple questions, he thanked them both for calling.
This much of the evening was typically Alzheimer’s. Because children learn social skills very early, a capacity for gestures of courtesy and phrases of vague graciousness survives in many Alzheimer’s patients long after their memories are shot. It wasn’t so remarkable that my father was able to handle (sort of) my brothers’ holiday calls. But consider what happened next, after dinner, outside the nursing home. While my wife ran inside for a geri chair, my father sat beside me and studied the institutional portal that he was about to reenter. “Better not to leave,” he told me in a clear, strong voice, “than to have to come back.” This was not a vague phrase; it pertained directly to the situation at hand, and it strongly suggested an awareness of his larger plight and his connection to the past and