The Story of My Father Read Online Free PDF Page B

die of. It affects five million Americans and is the fourth leading cause of death among us. This is what was wrong with Dad, the answer I hadn’t known to the questions the people who cared about him kept asking me.
    It was called
probable
Alzheimer’s disease in his case because at that time the only sure diagnosis was by autopsy, after death. Now we know of several genes that predispose to it, some with near certainty, so DNA testing would be a possible diagnostic tool.
Would be,
but isn’t often—first because it’s expensive; and second, because there’s a sense in which for the patient, already afflicted, it’s useless. Even now, fifteen years after Dad was diagnosed, there’s nothing to offer someone with this disease except a few palliatives.
    When I heard what was wrong with Dad, I experienced a strange rush of relief, a feeling that I think was related to the sense I’d had, for some years, of being responsible for him. I’d been single when my mother died, of all four siblings I lived nearest, and he and I had wound up spending a lot of time together over the six years between her death and his diagnosis. In the summers, I had gone up to see him in New Hampshire nearly every weekend, usually stretching my visits out to three or four days. I tried to have at least one extended summer stay of several weeks or even a month with him also. He came to our house in Cambridge for at least half his holidays, and I frequently drove to New Jersey just to visit. We spoke often on the phone and wrote more often—I still have many of his letters to me. I had noticed his failing early on, but no one else in the family shared my perception. “He’s fine with
me,
” my brother would say, and I would feel accused of imagining things or of responding to Dad in a way that was somehow
responsible
for making him seem vague.
    Actually, what was unique in our relationship, Dad’s and mine, was that when we were together we were usually
alone
together. Unlike my siblings, who all had spouses and multiple younger children, I had only one child, and at that stage Ben spent some of his free time with his own father and most of his summers at camp. When Dad and I saw each other, we were able to talk intimately, leisurely—about our lives, our family’s story, our work. In the years after he retired, we labored together side by side for weeks and months, each summer and fall, redoing the ruin of a house he’d bought in New Hampshire. I honestly think I saw the workings of his mind more clearly than my siblings did at that stage. Certainly I saw his oddness, when he was odd, more sharply. But even I didn’t really
want
to confront it. It came and went anyway, and so again and again I was able to argue myself out of acknowledging it.
    But there came a point when I knew I had to try to do something about what I felt. I’d seen it once too often, too clearly. His friends, his last living sister, had begun to ask their questions. I felt the burden—as the one who thought something was wrong myself; as the one who seemed to be held responsible by others; and, after all, as the oldest daughter in the family, the one who saw him most—to do something.
    I moved in slow motion, it must be said, given who Dad was and, probably no less, who I was.
    First I tried to talk to him about it—about depression, for instance, which seemed a possible explanation. About medication. He was characteristically vague in response (he could be more effectively nonresponsive than anyone I’ve ever known), and I felt he might be telling me, in essence, that it was none of my damned business.
    Maybe that was true, I don’t know. Certainly I was always able to shift quickly to thinking so, to feeling as guilty for trying to do something as for doing nothing—because while I didn’t want to be irresponsible, I didn’t want to be intrusive either. I remember writing once to his sister, my aunt Grace, that it seemed wrong to insist to Dad that he