How to Be Alone Read Online Free PDF Page B

like this—

what I saw of my father’s fall looked more like this:
    He held himself together longer, I suspect, than it might have seemed he had the neuronal wherewithal to do. Then he collapsed and fell lower than his pathology may have strictly dictated, and he chose to stay low, ninety-nine percent of the time. What he wanted (in the early years, to stay clear; in the later years, to let go) was integral to what he was . And what I want (stories of my father’s brain that are not about meat) is integral to what I choose to remember and retell.
    One of the stories I’ve come to tell, then, as I try to forgive myself for my long blindness to his condition, is that he was bent on concealing that condition and, for a remarkably long time, retained the strength of character to bring it off. My mother used to swear that this was so. He couldn’t fool the woman he lived with, no matter how he bullied her, but he could pull himself together as long he had sons in town or guests in the house. The true solution of the conundrum of my stay with him during my mother’s operation probably has less to do with my blindness than with the additional will he was exerting.
    After the bad Thanksgiving, when we knew he was never coming home again, I helped my mother sort through his desk. (It’s the kind of liberty you take with the desk of a child or a dead person.) In one of his drawers we found evidence of small, covert endeavors not to forget. There was a sheaf of papers on which he’d written the addresses of his children, one address per slip, the same address on several. On another slip he’d written the birth dates of his older sons—“Bob 1-13-48” and “TOM 10-15-50”—and then, in trying to recall mine (August 17, 1959), he had erased the month and day and made a guess on the basis of my brothers’ dates: “JON 10-13-49.”
    Consider, too, what I believe are the last words he ever spoke to me, three months before he died. For a couple of days, I’d been visiting the nursing home for a dutiful ninety minutes and listening to his mutterings about my mother and to his affable speculations about certain tiny objects that he persisted in seeing on the sleeves of his sweater and the knees of his pants. He was no different when I dropped by on my last morning, no different when I wheeled him back to his room and told him I was heading out of town. But then he raised his face toward mine and—again, out of nowhere, his voice was clear and strong—he said: “Thank you for coming. I appreciate your taking the time to see me.”
    Set phrases of courtesy? A window on his fundamental self? I seem to have little choice about which version to believe.
    IN RELYING ON MY MOTHER’S LETTERS to reconstruct my father’s disintegration, I feel the shadow of the undocumented years after 1992, when she and I talked on the phone at greater length and ceased to write all but the briefest notes. Plato’s description of writing, in the Phaedrus , as a “crutch of memory” seems to me fully accurate: I couldn’t tell a clear story of my father without those letters. But, where Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper. My mother’s letters are truer and more complete than my self-absorbed and biased memories; she’s more alive to me in the written phrase “he needs distractions!” than in hours of videotape or stacks of pictures of her.
    The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies. I wonder if our current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism—our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, and behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution—isn’t intimately related to the postmodern resurgence of the