The Last of His Mind Read online

  I think of Jane’s daughter Catherine, the only one in that family who had the courage to tell her mother she was going to die. The tests had come back, the cancer had spread, it was too late for any more radiation or chemo. But according to Catherine, only she would tell her mother, “You’re dying.”

  Admirable, I thought. At the same time, Catherine had her own agenda. She pushed her mother to face death, and to talk about it. She read her poems by Rumi, she rang singing bowls and read to her from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And Jane responded—or so Catherine claimed. At the funeral service she announced that in the last weeks of her life, “Mother finally became the woman I always wanted her to be.”

  I shrank when I heard that. Yet now, my hopes for my father are not that different. I’d love it if he changed—if I could change him—into a garrulous old man filled with stories about my mother, their marriage and my childhood.

  On the phone with the nurse of my father’s general physician, I mention how Dad came out of the bathroom a couple of weeks ago wearing his underwear over his pants. Dressing apraxia they call this, and apparently it’s a sign, because within a day we have an appointment with a neuropsychologist, Gerry Elovitz, to evaluate Dad’s cognitive functions. Dr. Elovitz is a PhD, heads a memory center on the upper Cape, and makes house calls. This seems a miracle, and even before he arrives I’m inclined to like him. He pulls up in a high-riding four-wheel-drive pickup and steps out onto the snowy drive carrying a fat briefcase. He’s a big outgoing guy with a brushy mustache and a strong handshake. We chat for a couple of minutes about the blizzard, then I escort him into the house.

  “Doctor Elovitz, this is my father, Joe Thorndike.”

  “Call me Gerry, please.” He reaches out and shakes my father’s hand. “How you feeling today, Chief?”

  “Pretty well,” Dad says. “Getting along pretty well.”

  That’s what he always says.

  Gerry warms him up. “I’m here to help figure out how your memory’s doing. I just want to ask you a few questions.”

  He’s a charming guy, respectful and not too intrusive—but I recognize on my father’s face the lowered eyelids of suspicion. I’m sure he can tell, as Gerry hangs his jacket on the back of a chair and opens his briefcase on the table, that there are going to be more than a few questions. Contained in his briefcase are the tools of his evaluation: the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, the Mini-Mental State Examination, the Geriatric Depression Scale, the Beck Anxiety Inventory, the Life Satisfaction Scale and the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale.

  “Shall we get started?” Gerry asks.

  “We might as well,” my father says, trapped but game. Almost from the start he runs into trouble.

  “Can you tell me what year this is, Mr. Thorndike?”

  “It’s two thousand and five.”

  “Can you tell me what day of the week it is?”

  My father hesitates. His mouth pulls down and his face tightens. “Give me a minute,” he says.

  The psychologist waits for twenty seconds. Then, in a level voice, he asks the next question. “Can you tell me what season this is, Mr. Thorndike?”

  “It’s January.”

  “What do you call this? Is it winter, or spring, or summer,

  or fall?”

  Through the windows we can all see the deep snow from last weekend’s blizzard. But my father, under pressure and forced with a choice, gambles on “Summer.” His answer is tallied, and the questions continue.

  “Can you tell me, Mr. Thorndike, what floor of the house we’re on?”

  “We’re on the first floor.”

  “I’m going to give you three words that I’d like you to remember later. Here they are: ball, flag, tree.”

  My father stares straight ahead as the test continues. It is a test, and he knows it. He fails to count backward from a hundred by sevens, and when Gerry asks him to spell world backward, he’s slow to start.

  “Backward?”

  “Yes.”

  D . . . w . . . o. . . .

  Gerry gives him plenty of time, but he can’t do it.

  “Can you tell me those three words that I asked you to remember?”

  He can’t.

  “Take this paper in your right hand,” Gerry says, “fold it, and put it on the floor.” Dad focuses and does this correctly, though I can see his hesitation.

  Then, “Read this and do what it says.” Gerry hands him a paper that says Close your eyes, and my father, instead, opens them wider.

  From a set of simple drawings Dad correctly identifies a tree, a flower, a bed, a house, a toothbrush and a volcano. Instead of mask, he says masquerade. When shown a picture of a watch he identifies it correctly—but when asked to draw a clock and put the hands at eleven, he can’t do it. This doesn’t surprise me, because for weeks he’s been asking me what time it is, even when a clock is readily visible.

  “Can you name for me, Mr. Thorndike, the last four presidents of the United States?”

  My father is a student of history and politics, and for years was a daily reader of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But the only president he can come up with now is the current Bush. From the couch where I sit, I can see the turmoil growing on his face, the grimaces and gathered eyebrows. Here, publicly, everything he has feared about his mind and memory is being exposed.

  “Mr. Thorndike, would you name all the animals you can think of.”

  “Dog. Cat.” He’s shutting down now. “Mouse. Rat.” And that’s the end of them.

  “Can you name some fruits?”

  None. He’s breathing harder now, as if under stress. Finally he says, “Pear. Apple.”

  “How about vegetables?”

  A long silence. “I’m confused here.”

  He’s exhausted, and it doesn’t help that the evaluation is being done in the late afternoon, the worst time of day for my father, as it is for many old people. He’d do better in the morning, I want to say. I want to defend him but sit quietly on the couch, as I’ve been asked not to interrupt.

  Later Dad will refer to Dr. Elovitz as “the guy who shows how stupid I am.”

  When the questions are over, Dad hobbles into his bedroom and lies down. He’s flattened, and immediately goes to sleep.

  Gerry and I stand in the kitchen talking. He takes his time and doesn’t rush off, as late as it is. He’ll return in ten days for a second, shorter interview, but he can give me a tentative diagnosis now: my father has advanced second-stage dementia, most likely caused by Alzheimer’s. He’s also depressed. For the depression Gerry will recommend to Dad’s physician that he prescribe Prozac or something similar, and for the dementia, Aricept, a drug that can help slow further memory loss. Nothing can reverse it.

  “It’s hard to set a time line,” Gerry says, “and he’ll have good days and bad. But in the end, if he lives long enough, he’ll forget everything.”

  Later, I sit alone in the darkened house, slumped in Dad’s chair. What a misery, this disease.

  Most mornings my father still shaves, though he hasn’t had a haircut in months. His eyebrows, certainly never trimmed in his life, look like miniature squirrels that have jumped onto his face, and his bad eye sometimes droops to a close. When I find him naked in the bathroom, standing in front of the mirror to shave, I see how bony he is, his arms like sticks and his legs withered. He’s much shorter than he used to be. We were once exactly the same height, five nine and a half, but I’ve probably lost half an inch myself by now, and Dad must be under five six. His skin is droopy, especially behind, where his butt has almost completely disappeared. Just a few loose flaps of skin back there—though I haven’t looked too closely.

  They say the sexual organs are the last to lose their youthful form. This seems to be the case with my father as well, for the only part of his body that hasn’t shriveled is his penis. There’s a jolt: his penis. By writing about it I’m gearing up to the scary day when I’ll be cleaning it. That and his wither
ed butt, after he loses control of his bowels.

  Returning from some cross-country skiing on the bike path, I find Dad in the kitchen staring at a large round unsliced loaf of bread I bought at the supermarket. I don’t know how long he’s been standing there, but it might have been quite a while: he can pause in front of the shelves in the bathroom and examine the deodorants and razors and aspirin for twenty minutes. Now he’s staring at this lovely, unusual peasant loaf, which he has removed from its wrapping and set on the counter that extends into the middle of the room.

  I take off my hat and gloves, and hang my coat in the closet. When I come back to the kitchen my father is still standing on the other side of the counter, in front of the bread. There’s no knife in sight, or cutting board. Dad looks up at me, then down at the bread, then up again. He lifts his hands from his sides and rests them on the vinyl countertop, on either side of the loaf. I start to ask him if he needs some help, but don’t. I ask him that too much. Instead I wait.

  Finally he says, “Just what do I do with this?”

  Evenings in my house when I was growing up. Both my parents came home late, after six, sometimes after seven, my father on the train from Grand Central, my mother driving back from school or some hospital. She had gone back to college, graduated from Barnard, spent four years in med school at NYU, then completed a demanding internship and residency in anesthesiology. Day to day I didn’t feel her absence, because I had Nana. Nana was Imogene Graves, who worked for us for more than twenty years. Neither nanny nor housekeeper is a big enough word for her. She lived with us, went to France with us for six months, became a second mother to both Alan and me. She was a Negro, as we said then, and married to George Graves, a barber and manager of Sugar Ray Robinson’s barbershop in Harlem. On weekends she either went into the city, or Graves came to stay with us.

  Alan and John with Imogene Graves aboard the HMS Caronia, 1949

  On most nights Nana served Alan and me dinner in front of an early black-and-white television set in the dining room. We ate there happily, watching Flash Gordon and feeding pieces of dinner we didn’t like to our dog, Bourbon. When Dad got home Alan and I would run up to him, eager to see what he’d brought us: a comic book or a Matchbox truck, perhaps an Eek-A-Freak squeeze toy. My mother would rise to his kiss on her cheek, and that was the affection between them. They ate together later at a small table in the living room, with candles and some wine. I never thought of it as strange that I didn’t eat with my parents. I never thought anything about our life was strange, including the fact that my parents didn’t hold hands, or sit arm in arm, or kiss at some random moment, or sleep in the same bed. Of course, I didn’t see any of that happening with any other parents, so it all looked normal to me. That’s probably what it was in suburban Connecticut: the norm. It’s true that not every set of parents had twin beds—but on television they did.

  I know my father responded to how attractive my mother was. I can tell from the photos he took of her, photos I grew up with and now find in his files. In them she stretches out in bed with her hair spilled over a pillow, or leans back against the Roman Coliseum with her eyes closed in the sunlight, or lies on a wooden deck in a two-piece, flare-skirted bathing suit, her thighs lifted by the black tire tube beneath her. She often looks sultry—yet what I saw when I was a boy, the essential message of my parents’ bodies, was that one did not touch the other.

  Why should I care about any of this? It’s history. It’s not how I’ve lived my life.

  Though in fact, I lived that way for years. I had a strict schooling in decorum, in prudery, in a public life with no touch. I remember that wretched question we asked each other in high school, even college: Do you believe in public display of affection? I grew up in the Dark Ages! And what was truly off kilter at home wasn’t the lack of PDA, it was that my mother, against her nature, had trained herself to live without it. She managed that for years, before everything went to flinders.

  Patti came this afternoon, the “physical terrorist,” as Dad calls her. His ideal day is one in which no one comes to the house, but he doesn’t resist when Patti shows up to run him through his exercises. Today, I think, he’s even a little enthusiastic, as she leads him to the sink and has him stand on his toes, then lift his feet to the side and back. He doesn’t do as well when she asks him to sit down on a chair and stand up again, three times. He quickly grows short of breath, and after two rounds she stops him. He gives her a hangdog look, as if he’s failed a test. His skin looks slack and mottled. His bad hand, the one with the bent little finger, flutters on and off his lap. Yet what I notice is how he lets this cheerful and energetic young woman put her hands on him. In their sessions she guides him, she slides her arm behind his back as she leads him to the sink and shows him how to stand. He may call her the physical terrorist, but I think he actually likes the attention. Perhaps it’s easier for him because Patti is a woman, and also official. She’s a therapist. This is something he must do for his health—she isn’t just someone who wants to give him a hug.

  These days when I meet or part from my father I embrace him, just as I hug my brothers and their wives. But this is an innovation that came in with the seventies. I think Dad still sees it as a kind of craziness that has swept the nation, and that he’d be happier with the old way, just shaking hands with everyone, his sons included. But by now the two of us have been catapulted into physical intimacy. Every day after his shower I dry his feet and toes. I get him into his underwear, then lift his pants up over his pale and hairless legs. I tuck in his shirt, zip up his fly and cinch his belt. During the day, or when we’re saying good night, I sometimes take his arm, or rest my hand on his shoulder.

  He, however, does not touch me. It’s not that he shrinks away, but he never reaches out. If he’s looking for support, his quivering fingers will always seek a grab bar or his walker or a shelf, rather than take hold of my arm. He seems to do this from purest instinct.

  I imagine he learned this from his parents, who were born and grew up in the Victorian age. My grandfather, a Boston stockbroker, was industrious and formal. Every day of his adult life, as far as I can tell, he wore a three-piece suit, only slipping off the jacket on the warmest summer afternoons. He was a small man, shorter than his wife and perfectly gentle—though when I was a child his somber look sometimes spooked me. My grandmother was a schoolteacher, an actress in local plays and something of a journalist: her articles for the Peabody Women’s Club fill a small album. The two of them were in their forties when my father was born, a late and only child, and their devotion to him is clear. The thousands of boring letters they sent him over the space of forty years are written on folded blue or ivory stationery, two or three pages of news from his mother, a page or two from his father. He called them that always, Mother and Father.

  They called him Jay. He had a dog when he was young, Mickey, and for a while a flock of chickens. Never enough playmates up on Hog Hill, where they lived in a house with a wraparound porch and a view of the farmlands below. In the photos of my grandparents, on the porch or the lawn in front of it, they always stand apart, sometimes ten feet apart. They never touch, and they never show up in a photo with my father, who worked the camera. My grandparents liked some space between them, and my dad must have taken that in through his pores. Indeed, it must all have seemed unremarkable to him, as it did to me as a child. There wasn’t much affection in his family, but plenty of devotion—and that was pretty much what I got from my own parents. The difference is that Dad seemed comfortable in such a world, whereas I had to break away, sometimes going wild with sex, drugs and rock and roll just to prove I was free of the constraints.

  Only six months ago there weren’t enough hours in the day for my father, and now there’s almost nothing he wants to do. He gets up in the morning, shaves, showers and eats breakfast. Then he usually stays alert for a couple of hours, especially if the skies are clear and sunlight pours into the house. Then a nap, and Harriet comes over at one so I ca
n go to the library. She gives Dad lunch, leaves at three, and I often find him asleep when I return.

  Sometimes, revived after dinner, he wanders around the house reaching out to books and photos, old calendars, notebooks and maps. He picks them up, sometimes carries them around with him, and I think they stand in for his memories and his once vast knowledge. When I pull down the first volume of Horizon I find an article on world population by Julian Huxley, a manuscript page of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and an article by the British traveler Freya Stark on Ephesus and its temple, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

  In the foreword to that volume my father wrote,

  History speaks to us often in riddles, in a Delphic voice. Yet it is clear that we in America today are the inheritors of many a great golden age, heirs to much of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, and to the strength of a little island off the coast of Europe which bestowed poetry, literature, manners, and certain explosive ideas of freedom on half the earth.

  I love how he gives manners equal billing with poetry, literature and democracy. I wish I could ask Dad about that now and about those articles and their authors. But I had my chance for decades, and whenever I came for a visit I was too wrapped up in tennis with Al, or croquet with my son, or some novel I was reading, to slow down and listen to what my father had to say about culture and history.

  February

  When I spoke to Gerry Elovitz after Dad’s evaluation, he urged me to investigate some local nursing homes. Like my brothers, he assumed that sooner or later I’d find it too difficult to look after my father at home, and we’d have to move him. This may yet be true. I’m not blind to the hardships of taking care of someone who can’t walk, who can’t shower or dress or feed himself. My goal is still to keep Dad at home—but to check out the options, I called one of the places Dr. Elovitz had recommended, a nursing home with a dementia unit.