Talking to my dad over the phone is getting more difficult. He remembers many things about me and where I live, but his own daily activities and plans are becoming hazier and harder to discuss. Even talking about politics at a rudimentary level was more difficult today. Who is John Boehner? Where is his district? After asserting that Marcy Kaptur is his congressman, which she is, he then told me that her district goes all the way to the Indiana line, which it does not. It actually goes in the opposite direction along the lake and encompasses Sandusky. These slips are in the realm that was previously unimaginable for my father. Even when I was in high school, he might have left the oven on all day, come home to some small, charred shape on a pan and have no recollection of what it might have been or why he had put it in the oven, but he could tell you every intricacy of state and local political information.
In an attempt to find something else to talk about, I googled my grandfather, and much to my amazement, his full name brought up quite a bit about him. I came across a description of an archival collection at Northwestern University with documents pertaining to his tenure and work there. The PDF started with a biography that was accurate and gave me some information that I had not known before. Within the results I even came upon a sight that boasted pictures the matched my grandfather's name. Some were the facebook type photos of modern people with the same name or a kitten in a football helmet, but two of the photos were actually of my grandfather!
My dad was able to latch onto bits of information as I read it to him. He would either say that a name or some information was familiar or he would help to fill in some detail or connection with what he had been doing in his life while his father was busy with some accomplishment that graces his resume even in death.
My grandfather was a well respected and very successful man by all the standards of the world. Until I had read this official biography by his employer of over thirty years, I had not quite realized how much so. Despite his brilliance, hard work and great success, he was struck by the same problem that is now stealing my father's mind, struck at the very time that he should have been enjoying the fruits of his labor.
The year my parents were married was the year my grandfather retired. I was born the year after, the first grandchild. By the time I was five or six we knew that my grandfather had this problem. My grandmother had become suspicious when he started paying his bills twice. The former Associate Dean, Professor of Marketing was paying his own bills twice. When I was 7, my grandfather was 75, and he still knew me then. By the time I was ten, he was a bit foggy on who I was exactly. Tall for my age, even then I resembled my grandmother who had passed away a few years before. Waking from a nap he could mistake me for her without his glasses, yet outside playing with a friend he would refer to the two of us corporately as "the boys," a reference to his own two sons.
A large part of my childhood was spent watching my grandfather decline and my father taking care of him, as much as he could. Also an academic, my father would take my grandfather to his old lake cottage in Wisconsin, a place he still remembered, and they would spend the summers there together, my father "doing research" and my grandfather puttering around. One summer my grandfather painted all of the decent wood and wicker chairs white. There had been a can of white paint in the garage. I suggested to my dad that he leave some paint stripper out next and then some wood refinisher, since he wouldn't remember and could then restore the chairs. My dad didn't think that was a good idea.
Gradually and painfully my grandfather slipped away. My father, the good and dutiful man, didn't have the heart to even pull the feeding tube when he finally entered a completely vegetative state one month before his death. He finally passed away when I was 17.
Later in the day after our conversation and my bit of Internet research, I sat in a staff meeting at work staring out the window and doing a little math. What was my grandfather like at my father's current age? How old were they both when diagnosed? If I project my grandfather's case onto my father, how much more time do I have left with him? How much longer will he know me? How much longer can we have some semblance of a conversation?
And when this subsided, I thought about my own life choices and wondered how much this has effected them, remembering that I dropped out of my doctoral program only a few months after I found out about my father's diagnosis. Not that I believe that their choice of academic lives led to their manifestation of the same disease. Rather, I am overwhelmed by the seeming meaninglessness of such achievement and of academic pursuits, especially when it is lost so cruelly and so quickly. Did they enjoy their work or did they look forward to enjoying their lives later? Their academic lives and capabilities, that part of them that took up the largest portion of their vitality and strength, was the first thing to go. What can that mean?
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