The Last of His Mind Read online

  He gives me a look.

  “Okay, I know Emotional Work isn’t just screaming.”

  EW is an endless topic for Weymouth. It’s his daily practice and hope for the world, and screaming is just one catharsis of many. I could also cry or flail about or contort in silence, all of which would be good for me. Both Sandy and Lois think I should be crying more, raging more, maybe laughing more. They’re probably right, given how much of my father is still in me.

  Back on the Cape I move into one of the upstairs bedrooms. I’ve had some fears about disappearing into the pocket of my father’s life, of being swallowed by his needs and routines, and each night I feel a ripple of alarm when I lie down on my bed’s ancient horsehair mattress. I’ve been here two days, I’ve been here three days, and already it seems like years. This is my bed. This will be my life as long as he lives. Four days, five days—these are drops in an enormous bucket. Looking ahead, there’s nothing but me and my father.

  On a cloudy afternoon I drive Dad over to one of the town beaches. It’s foggy at the shore, and the ocean almost invisible. A seagull flares for a landing, struts up and down on the sand, then lifts its head in a long spasmodic cry. Dad doesn’t want to get out of the car, so I open the window to the salt smell and the small reverberation of waves knocking against the shore. I’ve been trying to get us to the ocean every day or two. Dad never says no when I suggest a trip, and so far he’s never been the one to say it’s time to go home. Today I’m determined to outwait him—but then he trumps me by going to sleep. It’s so easy for him. I look over and he’s gone: head back, eyes barely closed, his gaunt face drawn tighter around his teeth. His hair has turned white in the last couple of months. It was gray for decades, and now it’s almost pure white.

  I sit behind the wheel and wait. An hour-long nap is nothing to him, and I wish I’d brought a book. Finally I get out of the car and close the door, softly. My father sleeps on. I mash across the sand to the edge of the ocean, crouch and lift a handful of cold salty water to my face, then walk down the shore for a hundred feet. In the last five days this is as far from my father as I’ve gone. There he sits in the car, slumped back against his seat, with the keys hanging from the ignition. Someone could steal him, I think, an idea that makes me laugh. I walk even farther down the beach, until his car almost disappears in the fog, until I’m too far away to stop a kidnapper. Of course no one is going to steal this old man. They’re more likely to see him sitting there with his mouth hanging open, think he’s dead, and report him.

  He wakes when I climb back into the car, and I suggest that if he’s ready to go we could pick up some food on the way home.

  “I think we should,” he says.

  I love my father’s language, the New England formality of it.

  The fog has penetrated inland, and with it the gulls. They sweep over the parking lot and perch on the supermarket roof, their plaintive cries filling the air. Here on the outer Cape, the ocean is never far away. I drop Dad at the door with his four-point cane and tell him he can go inside, I’ll catch up with him after I park the car.

  He stands at the curb. “No,” he says, “I’ll wait here.”

  My father is formal, soft-spoken and courteous. Also stubborn. It wouldn’t occur to him to steer anyone else through life, and he doesn’t expect to be steered.

  Just getting to the bakery section and the frozen food aisles takes ten minutes, because Dad must pause and consider everything he sees along the way: the blood pressure machine, the column stand with bananas, the pharmaceutical counter, the chrome dispensers with five kinds of coffee. On my own I’m a speed shopper, striding past the elderly and the harried parents who wheel their kids around in carts that look like little trucks. Alone, I can make it in and out of the store in twenty minutes. But Dad’s gait has become a shuffle, and no one in the supermarket moves slower than he does. He ponders his choices. I’ve forgotten the grocery list, but it doesn’t matter, because these days Dad figures out what he needs by inspecting what’s in front of him. It takes us an hour to get through the store, and by the time we approach the checkout I’m ready to take off running. Let’s go, I want to scream, let’s get out of here. And at that point Dad becomes the shopper I always try to avoid in a line, removing his items from the cart with slow precision, one by one. From behind the cart I lift out the milk and ice cream, trying not to let my impatience show.

  “How you doing today?” the cashier asks as she scans our first item.

  My father turns to her, interrupting his work, and says, “Very well, thank you. And you?” He’s unfailingly polite to anyone who addresses him, anyone who helps him with a job, anyone he meets. He gives people his unhurried attention, which is probably one reason why everyone likes him. I like this in him myself.

  As my father’s memory grows worse, I wonder about my own. I’ve read books by people who recall complex episodes from when they were three or four, stories filled with dialogue and vivid detail. As for me, I think my earliest years were happy, and I don’t remember much about them. More, though, after I turned seven: a blaze of lights on a Christmas tree in France, with actual candles clipped to the branches, and my brother pooping in a tub that same year when we were sharing a bath, the turds bobbing to the surface and making me jump out onto the cold floor. Was the floor cold? Was it slate the way I remember it? The original story or sensation has surely been reinforced and adjusted over the years, which is why I still have it. The brain has been at work, jostling the neurons and synaptic constellations that comprise a memory and keeping my recall up to date.

  In the years that followed I didn’t pay much attention to my parents’ marriage. I was a kid on a bike, a kid in a rowboat, I was off building forts and shooting marbles at squirrels. Now that I’m older I’m fascinated by their marriage and their emotional lives, but most of it seems out of reach. My mother died years ago, and my father won’t talk. How much, I wonder, did they know about their parents? One generation follows the next, and we learn so little from what could teach us so much, the intimate lives of those who came before us. To learn how families work we turn to novels, to biography and memoir. We explore someone else’s house—while the rooms I want to know about are closed off.

  My father’s duties must seem never-ending to him. He’s supposed to do the exercises shown to him by the physical therapist. He’s supposed to dry between his toes and to drink eight cups of water a day. He’s supposed to take his medications, on time, and to brush his teeth with the new rotary toothbrush, then brush again with a special fluoride toothpaste. He’s supposed to eat healthy foods, and walk around the house more, and not settle into one position for too long. He’s supposed to use his lift chair, the one he calls the Monstrosity, and put his feet up for some hours every day.

  He doesn’t like the chair, he doesn’t like the exercises and he doesn’t like to brush his teeth. He resists drinking water or almost any other liquid and pays no attention to the issue of healthy foods. In the morning I top off his cereal with half and half, and every night after dinner he eats a large bowl of coffee almond fudge ice cream. Who would deny him these treats? He’s a frail old man and his prospects are thin. I make sure he takes his medications, and beyond that I try not to press him too hard.

  In the afternoon we drive over to Brewster on the bay side of the Cape, to a little beach near the mouth of a creek and some marshlands. It’s a bleak winter day with a biting wind, the usual collection of seagulls and some diving ducks. I’m glad that my father is so amenable to these small expeditions, because after a day of looking after him, of sitting around inside, I’m usually desperate to get out of the house. In front of us the waves toss in the wind. It’s hard to believe that last year this massive bay froze all the way from Provincetown to Boston. I remind Dad of this, but he has no comment. I’m living with someone who rarely has anything to say.

  But as we sit in the car with the motor running and the heat on, a woman pulls up in an SUV. She gets out and releases a pa
le Labrador from the back compartment.

  “There’s that woman who comes to the house sometimes,” my father says. He must mean Harriet, because he adds, “She has a dog but she keeps him in her car.”

  Harriet does have a dog, but this woman and Harriet look nothing alike. I can see that my father is drawn to the Lab—and then the woman opens the side door and helps her small son scramble out, bundled in a fat little parka.

  “Oh,” Dad says, “the child.”

  He leans forward in his seat, and his spirits lift. Mine too, just watching him. My father is drawn to both dogs and children, especially small children, the source of youth and enthusiasm. Plenty of life ahead in a young child. Old people Dad ignores.

  He dressed himself this morning, always a slow process, and came out of the bathroom looking jaunty in his blue bathrobe and a red sweater. But he wasn’t wearing his shirt. He’d put his sweater on directly over his bony little chest.

  “Dad, you forgot your shirt.”

  “Oh,” he said, looking down. “So I did.”

  Eight months ago Dad was still looking after his companion, Jane. Companion is not a word he would use—nor lover, mate, or partner.

  “What do you call Jane?” I asked him years ago. “What word do you use?”

  Looking up from some papers, he said in the mildest way, “I call her my great and good friend.”

  Though never married, they spent twenty-eight years together—longer than his twenty-three years with my mother and his ten with Margery, his second wife. Dad and Jane lived together about half the time, occasionally at his house but more often at hers in Connecticut. They went to Blue Hill, Maine, each July, and spent most of the winter in Jane’s Florida condo.

  Last winter she was too exhausted to make that trip, and gradually retired to her bed. Throughout the winter and spring Dad stayed at her house, cooking, running errands, climbing and descending the stairs to her bedroom. But he was ninety and growing wobbly himself. In April the doctors ran some tests on him and diagnosed atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat associated, among other things, with congenital heart disease, high blood pressure and intense emotional turmoil. Its most dangerous effects are pooling blood and clots that can travel from the heart to the brain. The doctors put him on a blood thinner and a pair of heartbeat regulators, and told him to stay away from abrupt exercise.

  He went on living with Jane until she died of cancer in July. Then he was alone. The day after she died I spoke to him by phone and found him shakier than I’d ever heard him. By the next day he’d recovered a little, and from then on didn’t mention Jane. He would answer a question, but otherwise didn’t talk about her. He’d done the same after my mother died in 1972.

  Every day brings some new confusion. A week ago, after a long shower and shave, Dad walked out of the bathroom with his soggy incontinence underwear of the night before pulled up over his pants. Another morning he put both feet into one leg hole of a pair of Depends and remained in the bathroom for thirty minutes, unable to figure out what was wrong and unwilling to call for help. He can still speak logically in short bursts, but the jig is up when he has to put on his underwear. I’ve heard of such confusion in the elderly, but it’s a shock to see this play out in my proper father.

  After a silent confused day, Dad sits down at the dining room table before dinner and starts talking as coherently as a year ago. “This president,” he tells me, “has no sense of economic reality. We cannot continue with this trade imbalance. No country can keep this up. No country ever has.”

  Yet only ninety minutes later he lies in his room with his sweater off and his shirt unbuttoned. He wants me to do something at the foot of the bed, but can’t remember what it is—or perhaps he can’t put it into words. When I spread his jacket over his chest he jerks his arms and says “No no no.” His eyes are wide open, he’s bewildered and afraid, and doesn’t look like my father at all. It hardly seems possible that only a month ago he was living on his own.

  For twenty hours a blizzard has been howling across the Cape. At the exposed northeast corner of the house the snow is only five inches deep, but on the leeward side it’s up to the bottom of the windows. The power went off before noon, and with the furnace out the temperature inside started dropping and has now fallen into the forties.

  It’s an old and drafty house. There’s some insulation in the attic, but none in the walls. The house was built a hundred years ago for the widow of a surfman, one of six who lost their lives rowing out from the Monomoy station to save the crew of a stranded vessel. It was paid for by the U.S. Lighthouse Department, and is known locally as the Monomoy Disaster House. All in all it’s a solid old place—though when I crawl around in the basement, applying plumbers’ foil tape to the ductwork junctions, the sag of the floor timbers is evident. They are timbers, not milled wood, and in places the spans are sixteen feet. In most of the rooms the windows are original, with aluminum storm and screens added outside, nothing really airtight. It’s a handsome house, painted yellow, but it could use some work. The original structure, with four small bedrooms upstairs, has been extended, in typical New England fashion, with a gabled addition that now holds the laundry and tool room, and a set of tiny stairs leading to a bedroom under the eaves. I’ve closed off those stairs, and the ones going up from the living room, in an attempt to hold onto what heat we still have.

  By now I’ve dressed Dad in long underwear, pants, insulated ski pants, a shirt, a heavy sweater and a parka, plus hat and mittens. As skinny as he is, he often feels cold when the temperature inside drops to seventy-five. Now he’s in bed, peering out gamely from under a quilt and a sleeping bag. Not a word of complaint from him, of course, but it could get a lot colder in here with the wind tearing the heat out of the house. I’ve been taping off the windows, we have candles and flashlights and plenty of food, and my goal is to keep my father at home. I’m worried about him, but like the feeling of adventure. Already it would take a town snowplow and a fire truck to get him out of here—and then they’d take him to the vocational school, where in a power outage last year the elderly slept on blankets on the concrete floor.

  Besides, he’s interested in this storm. “How cold is it now?” he asks me.

  I check the outdoor thermometer. “Fifteen degrees.”

  “Lots of wind,” he says.

  He has always loved severe weather. When I was ten he took my brother and me to see the path of a tornado that had passed through Holyoke, Mass. Whenever a hurricane struck the Connecticut coast he wanted to stick it out in our house, and once, in the quiet eye of a storm, paddled me down the street in our canoe. He used to claim that when humans finally learned to control the weather, political factions would evolve into parties based on climate: sunshine parties, rain and high humidity parties, and so on. He, however, would be a voting member of a tiny minority, the Natural Disasters Party.

  Me too.

  Twenty-nine hours of relentless wind, three feet of snow, the worst winter storm on Cape Cod in a hundred years. But after our primitive dinner last night, the electric came back on and the laboring furnace gained ground against the cold.

  I worry less these days about whether I can stick it out with my dad. I’m having a pretty good time. I’ve been here three weeks, I’ve been here four weeks.

  Last summer when we moved Dad down to the TV room, I went through his upstairs medicine cabinet and dresser drawers, gathering up his old medications. I threw most of them out, but this afternoon, on the shelf in his downstairs closet, I found an old cloth bag with a surprise inside: a dozen yellow pharmacy bottles, all holding capsules of the sedative Nembutal. Three different doctors had prescribed the medication, and many bottles were labeled “30 capsules” and contained all thirty.

  Marilyn Monroe took Nembutal on the day she died. As few as two grams can kill you, and alcohol adds to the efficiency. Dad’s capsules are labeled 100 mg, so ten caps would be a gram. Thirty or forty caps would do in anyone, and he has more than three
hundred.

  More than once Dad has voiced an aversion to the travails of old age, and at one point was a member of the Hemlock Society. The pills date from 1997 to 2001, when he was entirely lucid, and he must have brought them down to his current bedroom sometime after we moved him: before that he wouldn’t have kept them in the TV room, where his grandkids often lay around on the couch. The cloth bag has been in plain view at least since Christmas, and his hand passes within a foot of it every time he reaches in for a shirt or sweater. But I think he’s forgotten whatever plans he had for the drug. Suicide is a project for someone younger—or someone with a better memory. I take the bag full of pills upstairs. I feel the same as my father about debilitating old age, and I’ll be holding on to the Nembutals.

  Later, with the pills tucked in my dresser drawer, I have to ask myself why I didn’t leave them where they were. I can’t be sure he doesn’t remember them, and I don’t want to ask him about them, because that would remind him that they exist. In principle, I don’t believe in stopping him from taking his own life, but in practice that belief has fallen before a more primitive desire: I don’t want him to die.

  I still avoid the truth when my father asks when I’m going home. “Not in this weather,” I tell him, or “Dad, I’m happy right here for now.” These are evasions, they’re lies, and I wonder if I’m being cowardly not to tell him I’ve come to stay. I wouldn’t have to add, “until you die,” though it would seem implied. By now it might relax him to know I’m going to stay and take care of him indefinitely, because day by day he’s more dependent on me, and that must worry him. If only we could address the whole process of dying and how he feels about it. But this is my father, I might as well wish for a different parent. Or be a different son—one who’d talk about those Nembutals and about my plans to stay.