to the airport and sent him off to Denver, a small, thin, oddly dressed elderly man, still wearing his beloved horrible hat.
I flew to Newark airport, got a bus from there to Princeton, and then a cab from what is euphemistically called “downtown” to Dad’s house in the woods. I spent some hours there, bagging trash and odd possessions, packing up the last few things, vacuuming, cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms. It was awful to me, pathetic, to see the way he’d been living—no furniture, a mattress on the floor to sleep on, dog hairs everywhere.
By midafternoon I’d done what I could. I got in Dad’s car and fetched his dog, Naomi, from the kennel. I drove to Connecticut and left the dog at Dad’s sister’s house there; she had offered to take her. I got home long after dark and parked the car in a willing neighbor’s driveway until my sister and Dad could pick it up.
I spent much of the next day on the telephone. The van had turned up—at last!—and been towed to a nearby garage in western Massachusetts. I talked to the people in the rental office in New Jersey about their perhaps going up to get it for a surcharge. No deal. Finally I arranged to have it driven back down by a guy at the garage. He understood exactly how much at his mercy I was. He charged me a blackmail rate and kept me on the phone a long time. He said he loved my voice, he’d love to meet me, what did I look like, what was I wearing? I was very, very polite to him because I felt I had to be, but it seemed the final, almost laughably irrelevant unpleasantness to get through.
On schedule, though, we left for our stay in France; Dad came back east a few weeks later with my sister and had his summer in New Hampshire.
That fall I had a fellowship in writing at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. We didn’t have phones in our studios there, so I was sitting in the public phone closet under its single bright light, the voices and laughter of the other fellows in the main room only slightly muffled by its closed door, when I learned from my sister what I already knew in my heart— that Dad had been diagnosed with what is called “probable Alzheimer’s disease.”
Chapter Three
IN 1907, a German doctor in Frankfurt named Alois Alzheimer wrote an article on a mental patient of his, a woman who had died at fifty-six after a strange five-year illness.
Her first symptom had been paranoia, a suspiciousness of her own husband. Then, rapidly, that became entwined with profound memory impairment:
She could no longer orient herself in her own dwelling, dragged objects here and there and hid them, and at times, believing that people were out to murder her, started to scream loudly.
She was institutionalized. It was difficult, Alzheimer said, to examine her, she was so confused, so frightened: “She bursts into loud screams each time she is approached.” For a while she was still able to speak—at least to name objects, albeit with difficulty. Gradually, though, she declined: “General imbecility keeps progressing.” By the time of her death, he described her as “totally dulled, lying in bed with legs drawn up, incontinent.”
He performed an autopsy at the request of the director of the asylum, in part because no one could understand what had happened, what had gone wrong with this patient. What he discovered only increased the mystery. Her brain was riddled with neurofibrils, thickened and changed in a way that made them chemically unrecognizable. In places they were clustered together in what he called
thick bundles.
In addition, scattered over the entire cortex was a “peculiar substance” that he was, again, unable to recognize chemically. He felt he was looking at a new disease, a mental illness with no name.
Now we call it by
his
name, Alzheimer’s disease, and it is the dread disease of our time, particularly for those of us who are turning fifty, or sixty-five, or seventy and have escaped the
other
diseases one used to
I flew to Newark airport, got a bus from there to Princeton, and then a cab from what is euphemistically called “downtown” to Dad’s house in the woods. I spent some hours there, bagging trash and odd possessions, packing up the last few things, vacuuming, cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms. It was awful to me, pathetic, to see the way he’d been living—no furniture, a mattress on the floor to sleep on, dog hairs everywhere.
By midafternoon I’d done what I could. I got in Dad’s car and fetched his dog, Naomi, from the kennel. I drove to Connecticut and left the dog at Dad’s sister’s house there; she had offered to take her. I got home long after dark and parked the car in a willing neighbor’s driveway until my sister and Dad could pick it up.
I spent much of the next day on the telephone. The van had turned up—at last!—and been towed to a nearby garage in western Massachusetts. I talked to the people in the rental office in New Jersey about their perhaps going up to get it for a surcharge. No deal. Finally I arranged to have it driven back down by a guy at the garage. He understood exactly how much at his mercy I was. He charged me a blackmail rate and kept me on the phone a long time. He said he loved my voice, he’d love to meet me, what did I look like, what was I wearing? I was very, very polite to him because I felt I had to be, but it seemed the final, almost laughably irrelevant unpleasantness to get through.
On schedule, though, we left for our stay in France; Dad came back east a few weeks later with my sister and had his summer in New Hampshire.
That fall I had a fellowship in writing at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. We didn’t have phones in our studios there, so I was sitting in the public phone closet under its single bright light, the voices and laughter of the other fellows in the main room only slightly muffled by its closed door, when I learned from my sister what I already knew in my heart— that Dad had been diagnosed with what is called “probable Alzheimer’s disease.”
Chapter Three
IN 1907, a German doctor in Frankfurt named Alois Alzheimer wrote an article on a mental patient of his, a woman who had died at fifty-six after a strange five-year illness.
Her first symptom had been paranoia, a suspiciousness of her own husband. Then, rapidly, that became entwined with profound memory impairment:
She could no longer orient herself in her own dwelling, dragged objects here and there and hid them, and at times, believing that people were out to murder her, started to scream loudly.
She was institutionalized. It was difficult, Alzheimer said, to examine her, she was so confused, so frightened: “She bursts into loud screams each time she is approached.” For a while she was still able to speak—at least to name objects, albeit with difficulty. Gradually, though, she declined: “General imbecility keeps progressing.” By the time of her death, he described her as “totally dulled, lying in bed with legs drawn up, incontinent.”
He performed an autopsy at the request of the director of the asylum, in part because no one could understand what had happened, what had gone wrong with this patient. What he discovered only increased the mystery. Her brain was riddled with neurofibrils, thickened and changed in a way that made them chemically unrecognizable. In places they were clustered together in what he called
thick bundles.
In addition, scattered over the entire cortex was a “peculiar substance” that he was, again, unable to recognize chemically. He felt he was looking at a new disease, a mental illness with no name.
Now we call it by
his
name, Alzheimer’s disease, and it is the dread disease of our time, particularly for those of us who are turning fifty, or sixty-five, or seventy and have escaped the
other
diseases one used to
Similar Books
The Last King of Lydia
Tim Leach
Sharpshooter
Chris Lynch
House Arrest
K.A. Holt
Memoirs of Lady Montrose
Virginnia DeParte
Clockwork Prince
Cassandra Clare
The Wandering Island Factory
TR Nowry
Dance For The Devil
S. Kodejs
Young Lions
Andrew Mackay
In Your Corner
Sarah Castille