All the Leaves are Brown, And the Sky is Grey ...

Wow, the last ten days have been so challenging I haven't been able to blog. We've had the final hot days of the California summer season, and I, watching things at my parents' home, realized I was approaching meltdown myself.



I took a few days off during this final heat wave and headed up to the Sierras where it was really beautiful: but even then I couldn't write about it. I visited all the little Gold Rush towns: Twain Hart and Angel's Camp, Copperopolis and Murphys, Sonora and Railroad Flat, winding my way through Calaveras County and crossing the Stanislaus Rivers. It was good to get away, but I knew there were big decisions looming about what to do regarding my father.

I could see he was losing his ability to walk, which happens with some kinds of dementia of the Alzheimer's type. He's losing his motor skills. He's having trouble feeding himself.

Even with 24-hour care at home, we can't manage him if he can't walk. We would need two people 24-hours a day, and that's not even practical.

So I came back from the mountains relaxed and feeling better about things, but still aware that I would have to do something: that is, aware that somehow I would have to get my father into nursing care.

Nursing care is something no one in the family wants for Dad, least of all Mom who, upon hearing that we're going to do it, will go ballistic (which is why I haven't told her yet). Dad himself will be confused and upset by the change, and thus it will at first seem worse for him. And I will actually have more responsibilities, because I'll have to spend more time driving to see him, so I know he'll be okay, and driving my mother to see him, and helping to manage his care at the nursing center because you have to stay on top of things to ensure the one you love gets the best of care.

Then, yesterday morning, Dad couldn't walk at all and wanted to go back to bed after breakfast. I knew something was wrong and we took him to the hospital. He had a low grade infection and they didn't admit him, but that simple thing has wiped him out.

Thus I've visited a new skilled nursing center to see if they have room for Dad and to see if it is something he might like. Or might not hate as much as I imagine.

My sister and I have done this drill already once this fall, as you may recall, and the day we planned to move him, the Big Fancy Nursing Home on the Hill didn't have a bed for him, and my sister and I didn't really like the BFNH's attitude. So we backed down and let it go another month and now, here I am. Looking for another place.

I never thought I would say this, but I would rather go out and cover a 7-11 shooting, live, for the six o'clock news.

The place I've found, if they will take him, is smaller than the BFNH and closer to my house and my mother's house and is adjacent to the local hospital. It is sunny and bright. How they might treat him there, I can only discover once he is there.

But I must do this this week, because if I leave Dad at home, unable to walk, he or my Mom or one of the caregivers, or even myself, will get hurt trying to transfer him from bed to chair to bath, and then we will have another candidate for nursing care on our hands.

Come to think of it, perhaps I should just check into the place with my Dad so I can get a complete rest.

These are awful decisions we have to make, but there we are. Life, as my parents have known it at their home in Los Altos for more than half a century, will change and it will change forever. My parents had the option to make decisions about these things much earlier in their lives, when they were living in healthy retirement, and they chose not to do that.

So now they must rely on their children to make these choices for them. Just as we once had to rely on them.

We are in the midst of our first touch of autumn in Northern California now and the state is as achingly beautiful as ever. But, we are having a break from what P.G. Wodehouse once called our "relentless sunshine." It is somehow appropriate to the tasks I have at hand.

Autumn in California, as the leaves change on the maple tree just down the street ...

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Memories of Old Dad: Loving the Dad of Today

We, as humans, are so much inclined to judge a person by how he looks, that we spend most of our lives misjudging the people we meet. This is probably in our DNA: we meet to mate, to fight, and to hunt as our ancestors did, long before Freud explained to us the inner meaning of all our curious behaviors.

My father is so very handsome, I'm sure he spent most of his life surprising people by not being at all what they expected him to be: that is, if they expected him to be suave, charming, sophisticated and as elegant as he looked.

Look at that picture of him with his Jaguar XKE. He looks like an ad from Country Living or Gentleman's Quarterly. And I think I've explained that he wasn't like that at all. He was a serious nerd, in the nicest meaning of that word.

Now, with his disease, there is so much of his life he does not remember and the nerd part of him has kind of faded away. But he still remembers that Jaguar! Not because it was elegant, or exclusive, or expensive-looking (naturally he bought it from a guy for just a few thousand dollars and restored it himself) but because of its engine. That is after all, the root of the word of his profession: engineer.

"That car was really hard to drive and I had to work on it all the time to keep it running," he told me the other day, remembering the Jag as if he'd just let go of it recently. "But when you took it out on the freeway, I had to work hard to keep myself from getting a ticket. That car was really fast." And he smiled, remembering it.

I told him about the bumper sticker I had seen on an old Jag that read: All of the parts falling off this car are of the finest English craftsmanship. He laughed and said, "That was the Jag. But she really could go."

Cars, airplanes, trucks--anything with an engine--always interested my Dad. He actually liked working on them himself, even though he always could have afforded having someone else do it for him. Once, he was working on a Ford Thunderbird we owned and he seriously cut two of his fingers. Thoughtful and kind as he was, he held his fingers together with his other hand and went to a neighbor and asked to be driven to the hospital. He didn't want to frighten my mother. When he was settled at the Emergency Room, the neighbor then came over and told my mother. When Mom arrived at the ER to check on him, her face was so white they almost admitted her instead of my Dad.

We were at the doctor recently for my Dad's three-month checkup and after the doctor had told him how healthy he was--blood pressure, blood oxygenation, weight, all the rest--he asked the doctor if it might be okay for him to drive again. My mother and I looked at each other with seriously raised eyebrows.

"No driving," his doctor wrote on a pad for my now-totally deaf, Alzheimer's afflicted father.

"Well, I knew you were going to say that," said my Dad, "but I thought I should at least ask."

When I told the story recently about having the firemen take my father upstairs to my apartment, and the confusion that resulted, my sister said it made her sad, because the Old Dad is gone.

Well, she's only right in part, I think. And anyway: some things about the Old Dad were somewhat challenging. I remember very distinctly how the Old Dad once gave one of my boyfriends a tour of the City of Palo Alto Sewage Treatment Plant, primary, secondary and tertiary systems included, and how I wanted to disappear into San Francisco Bay as he discussed how the effluent was treated, in colorful detail. That was the Old Dad, all right.

And the one we have now hasn't left that guy behind entirely. He still remembers the engine power of his old Jaguar XKE, and how it felt when you shifted it into fourth gear and it leaped ahead on the freeway.

And dementia or not, he still wants that feeling again and still wants to drive a car, God forbid. Fortunately he never mentions the sewage treatment plant, which he helped design and where he spent the last part of his career. But he still remembers he loves us, something the Old Dad was much more reticent about than he was about sewage. I didn't make it over to see him yesterday, because a friend of mine is very ill, and today Mom called to say Dad wanted to know if I was okay and wanted me to come over as soon as possible.

For every time in life there are compensations. I miss the Old Dad too. But I'm learning to love the New Dad just as much for whatever time we have left to love him.



I had a new camera one Christmas and got Dad to pose for these pictures. He looked so happy--not always a look you saw on Dad's face.

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Your Brain on Alzheimer's: The Chance for a Do-Over?

My father and his sister, my Aunt Helen, in the backyard of their home in Alabama, about 1925.

One of the interesting things about the Alzheimer's type dementia my father has, is that the range of his faculties are impacted in different ways. I think I've mentioned before that his vocabulary is undiminished and words and phrases like "formidable" and "halcyon" and "field expedient" (a military term) trip off his tongue as they always have and are used correctly and in context. He can still write a short, intelligent letter.

His reading comprehension, on the other hand, has gradually faded so that this man who used to enjoy the convoluted sentences of Ludwig von Mises, William Shirer, and William F. Buckley, among many others, now finds it difficult to focus on any kind of reading. He likes for me to take him to the library so he can find a book to read, but when we check one out for him, he doesn't read it. The idea of reading enjoyment is there, but the ability is going.

His personality is different too. He was quiet and reticent before, except with children, and with the onset of his disease he is far more social than I have ever known him to be. When I take him for coffee, he chats with people at nearby tables, especially the young. More than once when we've gone out for a walk he has suggested we knock on the doors of our neighbors to see if they'd like to come over and chat. Usually these people are at work, or at school, or out doing the many things people do in California, so I discourage him; but, the impulse intrigues me.

My father grew up in a small suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, called Homewood, where his father served as president of the city commission and a number of his relatives lived on nearby streets. He's told me more about his life there in the last year, than I ever knew before: for example, how he used to run through the backyards of his neighbors to get to his great aunt's house. She supplied the baked goods for the social hour at the First Presbyterian Church and she would always save him a piece of cake. One of his close friends growing up was George McHuchison, a cousin several times removed, who also lived nearby. There were lots of aunts and uncles within walking distance.

I've speculated that this new social impulse is a regression to the life he lived as a child. Unexpressed during his adult years with my more constrained mother, his love of social contact has reasserted itself with the onset of his disease.

My friend Anne, a social worker who facilitates Alzheimer support groups for families of dementia patients, says she thinks the meaning of the changes I see is more complex. Her theory is that Alzheimer's patients somehow know, deep inside their subconscious, that they have a chance to do a few things over: express love to someone that they couldn't express before, act out anger and frustration they've stored up for a lifetime, and share both criticism and praise they've always had to censor.

I don't know if Anne's theory is true or not. We do have an aunt in my family who was always a contentious person and who, when she contracted Alzheimer's disease, grew quiet and serene. Did she always want to be that way?

My father now has frightening incidents of agitation and anger. Has he been storing these up for a lifetime? When he isn't agitated, he is extremely loving to me, something I have missed from him all my life. He's told me I'm beautiful and smart and that he knows I can succeed at anything I try. He tells me he needs me. When I'm not there, he repeatedly asks my mother when I'm coming to visit, and when I am there he always asks to go with me when he sees I'm headed out the door.

What a strange mixed-blessing is this disease. Such a trial for all of us who love Dad, with soupçon of joy thrown in to make us able to bear it.

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Visiting my father in California these days almost always involves the unexpected, so I'm not quite sure what I will see when I arrive there this week. In February, when I made my first visit of 2008, everything was just great with the parents as far as I knew. Mom didn't say there was anything wrong with Dad, and my Aunt Ruth was even going to be there, making it a double family get together.

From the moment I walked in the door, it was clear things were not okay. Mom and my aunt were in the kitchen laughing and carrying on but I found my father in the back hallway struggling to get into the kitchen to see me. He was in such great pain that he was hunched over and pushing a chair, holding onto it for support. I knew he had fallen about a week before and hit his head and seeing him now, I was afraid he had also broken his hip.

"Oh he is just so spoiled," my mother said. "I'm the one's that suffering. I have a terrible cold." She was not happy when I called his doctor, set an appointment for the next day, and rushed out to get him a walker. At the doctor we learned Dad had a fractured pelvis. He went immediately into the hospital, and it was there, in the disorienting conditions of a hospital room surrounded by nurses and other strangers that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

"When I woke up this morning," he told me on the first day, "I thought they had remodeled my room."

"You're an engineer Dad. Does this hospital room look like your remodeled bedroom to you?"

"No. No it doesn't now. But I just thought ... " Over the three days he was in the hospital he constantly asked for my mother, always worried that she wouldn't know where to find him. I spent a lot of time assuring him. He worried about remembering his phone number--and I went over it lots of times with him, always finding him comforted when he learned he could still recite it from memory.

I was so worried about him I spent one whole day at his bedside, talking with him. Near the end of that day he told me he was going to take a nap and--ever the polite gentleman from Birmingham, Alabama--he asked me if I minded. No, no, I said. I have to go home and have dinner with Mom. He put his head back on his pillow and looked at me before he closed his eyes:

"You know, Robin, I think this is the first day we've spent together in, I don't know, forever," and then he smiled a little. "It was nice," and then he went to sleep.

Mom didn't seem to want to visit Dad in the hospital. We think this was because she couldn't accept the idea that he was ill and being in denial helped her get through it.

"Your father is doing better because he's made up his mind," she has told both my sister and me recently, much to our mutual dismay. "I wish he'd make up his mind not to have dementia," I said under my breath, but I don't think my mother heard me.

Denial is a defense mechanism. In fact, at a Thanksgiving gathering, my sister heard a story from a family friend that illustrated this. The friend was a fireman who once went on a call to the home of an elderly couple. The woman was dusting when they arrived and said her husband had fainted in his chair.

"I hope he'll be all right. We have to leave to visit our grandchildren in half an hour," she said. But the fireman found that the old man in the chair was dead, and had been for some time.

"He must be able to travel", said the old woman, with some impatience. "We really do have to go."

But the old man was gone already. It must have been a shock. It was probably the first time in many years the old man had gone anywhere ... without first checking with his wife.

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Touching on the Roots of Honesty

My father with his pumpkins: on the porch before his illness was evident (ten years ago) and on the front walk after the onset of his disease. He was still an amazing gardener: look at the size of his pumpkins! The thing around his neck is a high tech hearing aid developed by a professor at Stanford University. He no longers wears it as even his residual hearing is gone.

We’re having a discussion about honesty in our family: actually, my sister and I are having the discussion with regard to our parents. Our elderly father has dementia of the Alzheimer’s type, a disease that is eating away at his mind and we are learning each day that dealing with him requires telling him some untruths. At the same time we are from a family that has always lived in parallel universes when it comes to honesty. My sister and I are trying to come to terms with what is right and what is wrong, without getting ourselves lost in a sea of situational morality.


Our father is from a long line of Scot Presbyterians. He taught us by example that truth, no matter what the consequences, was always correct. He was so honest, in fact, that if you asked him if he liked your new haircut, he would give you his honest opinion in every circumstance. “I’ve seen you look better,” he would say if that is what he thought. His sister, my Aunt Helen, was just like him. Once we were at dinner at her club in Aiken, S. Carolina, and in a loud voice she said to me across the table: “What is the real color of your hair, Robin?” The chatting in the club stopped, as it used to in those Merrill-Lynch commercials, and diners in the small room leaned forward to hear my response. I decided that honesty was definitely the best policy in this circumstance: “I have no idea, Aunt Helen. I haven’t seen its real color in years.” Everybody in the room laughed, as did my Aunt, and that was the end of the questions about my beauty secrets.

On the other hand, we were raised by a mother whose vanity made honesty a challenge. Since Mom turned 40, she has told everyone she doesn’t need glasses because by exercising her eyes she has learned not to need lenses, in order to see. The fact that now, at 87, she still tells this tale yet uses a magnifying glass larger than a refrigerator is something we don’t mention, except in whispers. She still tells us frequently that her hair has very little grey in it and that she goes to the hairdresser once every few months just to “touch it up a little.” Since, like her daughter, she hasn’t seen the real color of her hair in years, this is another story that would not bear much scrutiny. In addition, she has always told everyone who would listen that she was the smartest person in our family and that our father could barely cross the street without her help. When he got sick and she was required to manage the family trust we realized what an untruth this was. Dad had invested their savings in a wide range of instruments in a broad range of institutions, none of which our mother understands. Beyond these small things, I learned, at an important juncture in my life, that my mother lied about her values and that of all her lies this one was the most hurtful. Her devout Christianity shrouded a person who never put others first. I struggled with years of anger and depression before I could accept these things about my mother as weaknesses and thus learn to forgive her. I have had to do this without, at the same time, continuing to enable her and that has been a narrow line for me to walk.

You can see what I mean by parallel universes.

Truth is a challenge again, this time with regard to our father. The dementia he is suffering from gives him the fears of a child. One day he is agitated because his nurse puts him in a pair of sweatpants—for comfort—and he is convinced the family is trying to make him wear trousers that have no pockets for his wallet and keys in order to diminish his value as a man. Another day, he is upset because he fears a neighbor, who has done a good deed at the house, has designs on our mother’s affection. His anger about these things can be frightening. One of his nurses is especially creative in dealing with him. She will tell him she will call the neighbor so he can talk to the man. Then she pretends to dial her cell phone, pretends to let it ring and then tells my Dad, “He’s not home. I’ll call him tomorrow.” This simple pantomime works well because the nurse has taken his concern seriously, my father’s immediate need has been satisfied, and when the next day rolls around he has forgotten his worry about the neighbor.

But our mother doesn’t like this and has told his nurses not to “lie to my husband.” I have said to my sister that we are not lying to Dad, we are lying to Dad’s disease.

The Bible says that we should not “bear false witness,” and it seems to me that this is a good starting point for analyzing one’s use of the truth. Are we bearing false witness, when we shape the facts we tell our father to fit his illness? When we don’t confront our mother with her need for glasses or the true color of her hair? I don’t think so. I think we are attempting to act with compassion and kindness toward two damaged loved ones. I hope, if I live long enough, someone will do the same for me. And I hope, while they are at it, they will make time to take me to the hairdresser. You know, just for a little “touch up” at the roots.

Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess Who Left a Powerful Legacy

Above: Rita Hayworth as the Love Goddess and dancing with Fred Astaire in "You Were Never Lovier" photographed by George Hurrell.

I was reminded by a documentary on Turner Classic Movies recently that the beautiful actress Rita Hayworth (1918-1987) was a victim of Alzheimer’s Disease, which took her life at the young age of 68.

Hayworth’s story sounds like the plot of a Hollywood melodrama. Born Margarita Carmen Cansino, she began dancing with her father, Spanish born Eduardo Cansino, at the age of twelve. Performing one weekend in Tijuana—the Mexican border city where the movie people came to party, gamble, drink and engage in various other kinds of behavior they didn’t want covered by the Hollywood press—she was spotted by a talent scout from Fox and signed to a contract.

She played small parts in small movies—you can see her at the age of seventeen in a bit part in Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935)—but after just a few years it appeared she was headed for obscurity. Then, an L.A. car dealer twenty-two years older than she, mentored her, married her, and wrangled her a contract at Columbia Pictures. At Columbia, Harry Cohn changed her name, lightened her hair, slimmed her down, raised her hairline and made her a star.

When World War II broke out, she was a gorgeous 23-year old. A photograph of her in Life magazine sitting on a bed wearing a black negligee, became one of the most popular pin-up pictures of the war. As Eli Wallach put it (he was a soldier when he first met her, several years before the beginning of his own successful movie career): “Just looking at that picture helped us all better understand what we were fighting for.”

At Columbia, her marriage to the car dealer ended when she fell in love with co-star Victor Mature. But when Mature entered the service, actor/director Orson Welles entered Rita’s life and the two married. Her famous black dress in Gilda (1946), in which she sings “Put the Blame on Mame” is designed with a large gathered bow just below the waist line, allegedly to hide the tummy she had not yet lost after the birth of her first child, Rebecca Welles (1944-2004). Orson Welles seemed to have a voracious appetite for everything but his beautiful wife and their marriage also ended in divorce, but not before he starred her in the truly strange Lady from Shanghai, for which he cut her beautiful hair and bleached it blonde.

Like many movie stars of her era she had worked hard to achieve fame and fortune and seemed unequipped to handle its consequences in her life. “They went to bed with Gilda,” she is reported to have said, “but they woke up with me.”

In 1948, she fled Hollywood and fell right into the arms of playboy Aly Khan. Once the two were divorced from their spouses, they married, but marriage didn’t end his on-going moveable feast, and Hayworth eventually fled back to Hollywood with her new baby, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan. Harry Cohn put her back under contract. She was only in her thirties, but she looked somewhat older and her real stardom had come to an end.

She still had some good parts ahead. She was only thirty-nine when she played the “older woman” in Pal Joey who loses Frank Sinatra to Kim Novak. And just forty when she played the “aging” beauty in Separate Tables with Burt Lancaster. But she was fragile and life and fame had been hard on her.

There were several more marriages and then her friends began to observe what they called her erratic behavior. Ann Miller said Hayworth invited her and choreographer Hermes Pan to dinner at her house one night and then came to the door brandishing a knife and scared them off. Her nephew said when she came to his birthday party he prayed that “Aunt Rita wouldn’t get drunk that day.” “Late in the day was her worst time,” said her daughter Yasim.

Unknown to them it was not alcohol that was affecting her, but the early onset of a terrible disease. Alzheimer’s victims have difficulty in the afternoon in behavior doctors have now labeled “sundowning.” I’ve noticed this in my father, who is also an Alzheimer's victim.

She was just fifty-three when she attempted a comeback on Broadway, but she found she could not remember her lines. At the age of fifty-nine she was put in the care of her daughter Yasmin, because she could no longer care for herself. In the 1970s, as her disease became apparent, information about Alzheimer’s was just coming to light. Her family, friends, and some of her fans somehow believed that she had brought this problem on herself. She had not.

Researchers are studying the connection between Alzheimer’s disease and family history. Between Alzheimer’s disease and alcoholism. Between Alzheimer’s disease and the use of cigarettes. No one really yet knows if or how a person’s behavior can impact Alzheimer’s. What we can say is that this beautiful, fragile, talented woman was forced to suffer her disease as a public figure. That seems to me to be an ignominy that shouldn’t have to be endured by anyone.

What she could not have known is that changes in technology would eventually introduce Only Angels Have Wings, Gilda, You Were Never Lovelier, and the rest of her films to new generations of fans. The love she always sought was not nearly as ephemeral as she thought.

And her daughter Yasmin has used her wealth and fame to work to find a cure for Alzheimer’s. She serves as Vice Chairman of the United States Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders Association, and she is president of Alzheimer’s Disease International. That’s a legacy Rita Hayworth could be very proud of.

My Father’s Wisdom: Laughing Through the Tears

When you have a beloved parent with a disease like Alzheimer’s there are plenty of moments for tears, so you have to enjoy the laughter when it comes. My sister is out in California taking her turn at watching the old folks and her reports on her adventures always leave me laughing. She writes:

“I believe in using things up and being conservative, but a rubber band around the finger of a rubber glove? Yikes! Then there was the best dinner ever made—two pieces of toast: one with peanut butter and jam and the other spread with cold chicken soup. (We each could have two pieces of toast. It wasn’t two pieces for the four of us.)” At the age of 87, my mother is still very determined not to get fat, so she organizes these "light" dinners after they’ve all gone out to a big lunch. And about the rubber gloves? Her obsessive thrift means she isn’t contributing much to those landfills everybody is worried about.

Because my father is incapacitated now, my sister and I have had to play Sherlock Holmes and Watson to try and sort out our parents’ finances. My father was a wonderful planner for my parents’ future and he diversified his portfolio exceptionally well. He reckoned without my mother’s total lack of interest in finance. Their income is good and she’s still able to write the checks for the electric bill and other expenses, but she has no idea where Dad stashed the reserve funds nor how to get at them when she needs to, nor why she should care! So, as Sherlock Holmes, I sit and play my violin and think up ways for us to follow the treasure map and then I assign my Watson (my sister, the best snoop sister around) to sneak a look into a certain set of files in a certain room I designate back at the old homestead and off she goes, revolver in hand. Her first report from Baskerville Hall, I mean from 911 Echo Drive, was thus: “Mom is her Energizer Bunny self—I don’t know how much snooping I can do.”

In the end, tucked inside the cardboard lining of a blue binder, she did find the list Dad made, before he became ill, of his assets totaling his net worth. The assets are scattered throughout the San Francisco Bay Area (and the nation for that matter) in banks and insurance companies and investment firms—some of which have changed hands several times since he made his list in 2001. He was so smart: he also bought rental property, which will continue to support them even if his other investments tank along with the recent economic downturn. One insurance policy he bought turned into an annuity after a certain number of years transpired without his death. My Mom told my sister with some surprise that an insurance check had appeared all of a sudden in the mailbox this month and it turns out that his policy is the source. Now that we have the list of assets, Sherlock and Watson will have to spend some time going down the list, investment by investment, to find out what the money has been doing for the last seven years. At least we have a place to start.

Dad has changed a lot since the onset of his Alzheimer’s but one thing about him hasn’t changed: he hates to sit around. On my last visit I would take him on drives because I know he likes to get out and I myself love traveling the back roads of the Santa Clara Valley. One day we headed up Moody Road to Skyline Boulevard at the top of the Coast Range. For some reason, my Dad had it in his mind that we were going to the library, though I had told him several times we were just going for a drive. As we headed up into the hills he said, “This is a funny way to the library.” And later, “Oh, we must be going to the library at Foothill College. I didn’t know we had a library card to Foothill College Library.” And finally; “Well this is the darnedest way to the library I’ve ever seen!” He’s completely deaf, so I couldn’t write down where we were going until I could find a place to pull over, not an easy thing to do on a windy road in the foothills of the Coast Range. When I was able to stop and write to him he was pleased we were off on an adventure and began to complement me on my driving. It is something he was still doing a month later during my sister’s visit, though he couldn’t, at that moment, remember my name:

“Of course he spoke of that girl who drove so wonderfully in the mountains—turning smoothly, stopping gently on that dime and never getting lost—so impressive a driver that the policemen were impressed by her prowess behind the wheel. Wow!”

Dad also described to my sister something he called the Brown Chevrolet Brigade that guides drivers to their correct freeway exits. We’re not sure where this comes from, except that Dad and I and his caregiver drove the I-280 freeway to San Jose Airport on my last visit to return a rental car I had. We drove in tandem so I could have a ride back and from this his mind may have invented his Brown Chevrolet Brigade Roadside Assistance Program.

It can leave you in tears if you don’t laugh about it occasionally. Here is a man who all his life lived for others, who was intellectually curious, who was fit, who was principled, who went to church and tithed, who did his duty, who loved his family and his country and who now, at the end of his life is rewarded with this disease that steals away his mind. I would cry. But when I was small and found myself in tears, my father would pick me up and say, “Don’t cry Robin. Don’t you know that tears turn to water vapor?” And it is ever thus. We are all just here for a moment and then are gone. We are all just vapors in the midst of transmutation. My father knew it long ago.

Old What's-Her-Name

Just to keep us all humble, after I wrote the blog yesterday about the letter from my father in which he wrote "I love you," my sister called. She's in California keeping her eye on things for a few days and on the way to the restaurant, Marie Callender's, where she was taking my Mom and Dad for lunch to celebrate their 64th wedding anniversary, my Dad said, "I sure wish Robin were here." Not thirty minutes later my Dad said to my Mom: "What is the name of that girl I was telling you about who drives so well?" "Robin?" my mother asked. "Ah yes, that's right," he said. He does love me, I know that. But he can't always remember my name!

You have to remind yourself it isn't the man who has forgotten your name, it is the disease. Another example: my Mom's name is Faye, and one day a few months ago when my father was in rehab after a fall I kissed him goodbye at the end of a visit and started to leave. "Wait, wait, wait," he said and I turned back. "Who is Faye's husband?" He had a look of real concern on his face. I pointed at him and spoke so he could read my lips: "You are." "Okay, okay, okay." He smiled. He was just tring to keep things straight.