The Last of His Mind Read online

  The Last of His Mind

  Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

  www.ohioswallow.com

  © 2009 by John Thorndike

  All rights reserved

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  16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thorndike, John.

  The last of his mind : a year in the shadow of Alzheimer’s / John Thorndike.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-8040-1122-8 (hc : alk. paper)

  1. Thorndike, Joseph Jacobs, 1913– —Mental health. 2. Alzheimer’s disease—Patients—United States—Biography. 3. Editors—United States—Biography. 4. Authors, American—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  RC523.T575 2009

  362.196′8310092—dc22

  [B]

  2009026118

  For the radiant

  Maximo Holst Thorndike

  It was all leaving her in slow, imperceptible movements, like the tide when one’s back is turned: everyone, everything she had known. So all of grief and happiness, far from being buried with one, vanished beforehand except for scattered pieces. She lived among forgotten episodes, unknown faces bereft of names, closed off from the very world she had created; that was how it came to be. But I must show nothing of that, she thought. Her children—she must not reveal it to them.

  —James Salter

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  December

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  Two Years Later

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my readers: Lois Gilbert, Sandy Weymouth, Janir Thorndike, Alan Thorndike, Ellen Thorndike, Bob Ginna, Natalie Goldberg, Eddie Lewis, Henry Shukman, Biddle and Idoline Duke, Paul Kafka-Gibbons, Ted Conover, Kathy Galt and Beth Kaufman.

  Thanks to Harriet Guyon, Jack Lane and Marion Prendergast for the spirited and tender care they gave my father.

  Thanks to the clear-sighted staff at Swallow Press. As a writer, I’ve never been treated better.

  Thanks to the Ohio Arts Council for a 2007 Individual Excellence Award.

  And thanks to three havens where writing came easier: The MacDowell Colony, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Brooks Free Library of Harwich, Mass.

  December

  My father sleeps through the December afternoon. He has always resisted a nap, doesn’t believe in them, yet now lies on top of his bed wearing a winter coat and his red fleece hat, snoring lightly. He’s ninety-one. For an hour he doesn’t move, his head tilted back against the pillow and his hands interlaced on his chest. Another hour and the light begins to fade outside. Finally I walk down the hall and tap on the doorjamb. I stand beside the bed, listening to his shallow breaths and watching his old face: his half-open mouth, the crust in the corners of his eyes, his patchy skin and tumultuous eyebrows.

  “Dad? Do you want to wake up?”

  He opens his good eye but doesn’t say anything, just stares without moving. Outside, the long Vermont dusk is settling. Every Christmas Dad stays in this downstairs bedroom in my brother’s house—but now his eye shifts from chair to window to door and back, making me wonder if he knows where he is. After a couple of minutes he hunches himself up against the headboard. I try not to hurry him, because I’m always groggy myself after a long nap.

  Resting in bed, he wears the old pair of slippers Al has given him, wide and brown and flattened at the heels. His feet are too swollen to fit into his shoes, and there’s no chance this year that he will tramp across the meadow with the rest of us through six inches of new powder, as he did last Christmas.

  When I turn on the table lamp with its cheerful yellow glow, he sits up and lowers his feet to the floor.

  “What time is it?”

  “Four-thirty,” I say, reading off the digital clock on the table beside him.

  “Is it night?”

  “Almost.”

  His face is still lopsided from sleep, but both eyes are open. He takes off his hat and flexes his bony hands on the edge of the bed. I stand beside him until my brother walks in with some papers. Al has drawn up a couple of documents that will allow him to take over more of Dad’s finances. Someone has to do this, because he can no longer keep up with them on his own. He wants to balance his own checkbook, but I’ve watched him try and he can’t do it. He keeps records but they’re scattered, and he’ll sit at his dining room table for thirty or forty minutes trying to figure out what’s wrong. Dates, names, money, math—it’s all slipping away from him.

  Al takes his time. He asks Dad if he’s warm enough, if he’d like a glass of water, and gives him some time to finish waking up. But when he holds out one of the documents and explains how this will make things easier for all of us, Dad balks.

  “I’ve given up too much already. I don’t want to sign anything.”

  “All this one does,” Al says, “is add my name to your bank account so I can make sure the bills get paid. It’s still your money. There won’t be any change for you at all.”

  “There’ll be a big change. I won’t be the one in charge anymore.”

  He doesn’t look at us, but he knows what’s going on. His mouth turns down as if we have already deceived him.

  “Dad,” I tell him, “you’ll always be in charge. All you have to do is talk to Al and he’ll do whatever you like.”

  We’ve never backed our father into a corner like this. We’ve asked him to stop driving and to accept help with his medications, but he’s never had to sign anything. Al stands in front of him with pen and paper, but Dad shakes his head. He stares down at the floor, at the carpet, at his feet in their slippers. “I don’t want to.”

  In the boxy silence that follows his refusal, I become aware of my patience, as if it’s a commodity I’m spending. I don’t know how much I have.

  Al tries to explain. If checks bounce, he tells Dad, or if bills don’t get paid, it’s a problem for everyone. “I noticed this fall that some of your bills were overdue. It would really make things easier for us if you’d let me pay them.”

  Dad looks away. For a long time he doesn’t say anything, and when he finally glances at us I think he’s going to give in. Instead he says, “I want to go home.”

  He stares again at his feet. The windows are now black with night.

  “I want to go home and take care of my own money and be in my own house.”

  “We’ll be going back,” I assure him. “I’m going to drive you back after Christmas.”

  “I want to go now.”

  How desolate this sounds. I am tied to him. I have brought him here and must take him back, and now have a bleak vision of the two of us sitting in his house on Christmas Eve on snowless Cape Cod, far from my brother and the rest of the family. We would eat some small dinner, sit in his living room and exchange a present. We would read. It makes me lonely just to think about it. Dad’s two favorite times of year are the family reunion in August and Christmas at Al’s in Vermont—yet now he wants to go home.

  “I want to keep my house,” he says.

  “Your house is
yours, Dad. We’re not taking that away.”

  But he will not sign anything, not tonight. Al puts the papers back in a folder, and we reassure Dad that both house and money are his, and he can make all decisions about them. Slowly, by talking about our holiday plans, we bring him around. Al’s two boys, Porter and Ted, will be here, some friends and neighbors will stop by, and we’ll telephone our other brother, Joe Jr., and my son, Janir, who’s spending Christmas with his wife’s family. Dad stops talking about going home, but it’s another hour before the stark look leaves his face, of someone hunted and trapped.

  Over dinner he’s still not his old self. He sits warily at the table with his hair uncombed and his eyes restless, looking at his food, then around the room. He turns to my sister-in-law and asks, “But where are the children?”

  Al and I look at each other. We were the children, long ago. By now even our own children are adults.

  “Tomorrow,” Ellen assures Dad. “Some children will be coming over tomorrow.”

  This is true, but I’m sure my father is thinking about children young enough to be swept up in the mystery of Christmas. Back on Cape Cod, before we left his house, he showed me a pair of Christmas cards he’d bought, “one for my great-granddaughter and the other for my great-great-granddaughter.” He has, in fact, only a granddaughter, my brother Joe’s two-year-old Eliza. She’s miracle enough, the first female born to our line since Aunt Annie, Dad’s father’s sister, in 1867.

  My father is not the kind to take over a conversation, to assert himself or steer the talk his way. He has things to say about history and politics and economics, and he’ll tell an occasional story, but he has to be drawn into it. During the meal the conversation swirls over his head, until I coax out of him a little vignette he once told me about Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  “Well,” Dad says, leaning forward, “I believe he was eighty-six.” As he speaks he rests his palms on the white tablecloth. “He was out for a walk with an old friend in Washington when a woman passed them on the sidewalk. She was young and attractive and beautifully dressed, and she gave the two old gentlemen a smile as she passed by. ‘Ah,’ sighed Holmes to his friend, ‘to be seventy again.’”

  Dad’s memory is irregular, and sometimes his language breaks down, but a little story like this flows out intact. It makes me smile, in its defiance of old age. This is the self-reliant father I’ve always known, with his dry humor and bank of anecdotes—not an old man who wakes confused and says he wants to abandon Christmas.

  Usually after dinner he sits in the living room, perhaps with the rest of his wine, and at least listens in on the talk. But tonight, as soon as the plates are cleared, he thanks Ellen for the meal, says good night to the rest of us, and shuffles along the downstairs hallway, leaning on his cane. It pierces me, how old he looks, how even now he’s passing out of our lives. His bedroom is carpeted and cheerful, but also the coldest in the house, and he keeps the door open in hopes of warmth. I watch him go into his room. I can see his bed through the open door and keep expecting him to climb into it, but for ten minutes he doesn’t appear. He must be changing into his pajamas, I think, and I don’t want to barge in on him. Twenty minutes and still no sign of him, so I walk down the hall and knock on the jamb.

  He’s sitting on the edge of a chair with his long underwear bunched around his ankles and his bare legs shaking. He’s managed to get his pants off but not his socks, and these have stopped him from peeling off his long johns. He looks up at me, then down at his knees.

  “I’m having a little trouble here.”

  His legs are pale and thin and nearly hairless. I kneel in front of him, feeling awkward, and pull off his socks, then his long underwear. I’ve never dressed or undressed him before.

  We get his shirt off and his pajamas on, then a sweater, and he climbs into bed with his legs still shaking. I pull the blanket and quilt up to his chin, and when he’s completely settled he says, “Thank you.”

  For the past few days he’s been thanking me constantly. When I serve him a meal, when I bring him his coat, when I open a door for him, he thanks me. The formality of it has started to get on my nerves. He never says Thanks or Great or Okay, it’s always a precise Thank you. It makes me feel like an attendant.

  I’d like to sit down on the bed beside him, but I’ve never done anything like that, not since I was a child. I twitch his quilt around and ask, “Dad, how long do you think you’d have sat on that chair before giving me a call?”

  “I daresay quite a while.”

  I laugh, but he doesn’t. He has never liked to be helped, and only puts up with it when truly stumped.

  In the muffled early light I come downstairs thinking of the Christmases of my childhood, when Al and I woke our parents with a string of Christmas bells sewn to a band of cloth. A wave of nostalgia runs through me. Where have those bells gone to? I’m sure Dad would remember them if I appeared at his door with them: their pure high tinkling sound. I look down the hall and see his empty bed.

  I find him in his bathroom, where he has tried to get warm by taking a bath. The water now dribbling out of the faucet is barely tepid, and he’s stuck in the smooth tub, unable to stand up in spite of the grab bars Al has installed. Once again he’s shaking from the cold. I don’t know how long he’s been here, and when I ask he doesn’t tell me.

  “It’s slippery,” he explains, and waves me off when I reach out to help. “No. I can do it myself.”

  “Okay,” I tell him coolly. “See if you can.”

  As soon as I say this I’m ashamed—but if he notices my tone he doesn’t show it. He’s already struggling to rise to his feet, but again can’t manage it. After he settles back down, and without asking, I place one foot on the far side of the tub, slip my hands under his arms and lift him to his feet. How skinny he is. Deep pockets have formed below his collarbones, and the skin of his thighs is pleated like the gills of a mushroom. For the first time in decades he’s completely naked in front of me, though he doesn’t seem embarrassed about it or even conscious of the fact. He takes hold of a bar and makes the tricky step out of the tub, explaining what went wrong. “I got in too early,” he says. “Something happened to the water.”

  As I help rub some heat into him with a towel I feel his new weakness, his vulnerability. He must know he’s approaching the end of his life, but I want to protect him from this terrible fact. And I want to look after him. At least I do right now. I might not feel the same if I had to clean up his diapers—and that’s where we’re headed, I can see. At some point he’ll be as helpless as a baby. But so far it’s been no different from raising my son: the more I take care of him, the more I love him.

  A few days later we drive back to Cape Cod with Christmas behind us and a long winter ahead. This past year was a difficult one for my father, for in the spring he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, and in July his longtime companion, Jane, died of cancer. Since her death he has lived alone in his house, determined to bring order to his books, notebooks, photos and file cabinets. I’m glad he still has the will for this, but he fights a losing battle. The real question is how long he can continue to live on his own. After Jane died his three sons—Joe Jr., Al, and I—all invited him to come and live with us, but he declined each offer. He doesn’t want to live in Virginia or Vermont or Ohio. He wants to live at home, in the state he grew up in, near the ocean, in his own house. After all my recent visits I’ve left believing he could still manage on his own, but now I’m not so sure.

  As we drive he turns oddly loquacious, and I draw him into a talk about his wartime travels as a correspondent for Life. I know he filed stories from Italy and North Africa, but I’m surprised when he mentions Australia.

  “You never went to Australia, did you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “During the war?”

  “And later. Your mother and I once drove there. We started out at the Bering Sea.”

  My hands are on the wheel. We’re passing stands of pi
ne and fir, whole forests of them, the nearby fields blanketed with snow, the road almost empty. It’s coming, I think, with a small burst of panic. I glance at my father, but he looks completely compos mentis, staring tranquilly at the road ahead.

  “You drove there,” I say.

  “It was a much longer trip in those days. We had to go down the coast, you see, and stay close to the water. But we ran into trouble around all the redwoods, and the road was washed out and we had to go inland to some little towns. I think it was near the Hearst Mansion. It was quite a long drive.”

  “What year was that, Dad?”

  “Oh, that was in . . . That must have been . . .”

  I have asked too specific a question. I’m sorry to have stumped him, because while the delusion about Australia is troubling, I love the rare mention of my mother, and how freely he’s talking. Once interrupted he can’t find his way back to the topic, nor can I lead him. I want to ask how it was possible to drive a car across the Pacific Ocean, but don’t want to sound like I’m correcting him.

  Though he’s twisted the details, I think I know the germ of his story. In the late spring of 1942, when my mother was pregnant with me, and my father an associate editor at Life, my parents drove a great circle around the country, setting out from New York across the Midwest and the High Plains, over the mountains to Washington and down into California. Dad was looking for stories in those early months of the war. I’m not sure how the Bering Sea gets into it, unless it was the Japanese takeover of two islands in the Aleutians in June of that year—something my father, always the historian, might well remember. What strands are unraveling in my father’s mind? Most of what he says sounds both calm and reasonable. I know he loved the California redwoods, and he has talked before about his visit to the Hearst Mansion, which he describes at length in his book The Magnificent Builders.

  My father has written several books and edited many more, and writing is one of the interests we share. As young men we both loved to read, both went to Harvard, both had literary ambitions. But my father is an intellectual with a wide-ranging knowledge of history, art, archeology and architecture, and while I’ve written three books myself—a pair of novels and a memoir—I’ve spent as much time farming and building houses as I have writing.