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I hung my coat and purse in the closet and headed for the kitchen. I missed being able to drink coffee, but my mom usually kept some decaf on hand for me.
I tried not to think about how I’d spent much of the last three years of my life, either pregnant or grieving a lost pregnancy. But Dr. Segal kept urging me to set aside my superstitions and paranoia and embrace motherhood. Because that was when I was most happy, and being happy was good for the baby.
In the kitchen, my father sat in a recliner near the arched brick hearth, which was original to the 170-year-old house. This house probably held more memories than my parents and I put together.
My mother was stirring some sugar into his demitasse of espresso.
“Hey, Mom,” I said, meeting her next to the island for a giant hug.
“Oh, my,” she remarked at my enthusiastic embrace. “Are you in a good mood today?”
I kissed her cheek and smiled. “Of course. I get to spend time with my two favorite parents. Hey, Dad,” I said as I joined him near the hearth, planting a loud kiss on his cheek.
“Hey, sweet pea,” my father said a bit dully. “Sit down, sweetie pie,” he said, pointing at the chair next to him.
I didn’t mention that sweetie pie and sweet pea were his nicknames for Lina. Maybe he just got confused by my happiness.
“How’s the baby?” he remarked, and the question made my muscles tense.
Was he asking about the pregnancy? Or did he think he was talking to Lina and asking about one of her children?
I swallowed my apprehension. “What baby, Dad?”
He turned his attention away from the crackling fire in the hearth and looked at me like I was crazy. “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”
I chuckled sheepishly as I realized he was more lucid than I had imagined. “Sorry. I thought… Well, it doesn’t matter. The baby’s great.”
“Girl or boy?”
I glanced down at my nearly five-month baby bump. “Actually, we’re not going to find out this time.”
He waved away my response. “Bunch of hogwash superstition.”
My mother gasped. “Teddy, that’s an exceptionally rude thing to say.”
I laughed. “He’s right, Mom. I’m working with Dr. Segal to break my superstitious thinking, but some things are more difficult. I expect we’ll probably find out the sex of the baby eventually.”
“Of course you’ll find out eventually,” my father said with a roll of his eyes. “You’ll find out when it’s born. But why wait? Back in the days, we didn’t have those fancy 3-D ultrasounds. When you were in the womb, they were basically taking wild guesses. ‘Maybe it’s a penis, or maybe she’s got a very large thumb.’ That’s what they told us with Carter. Remember that, Ruth?”
My mother set the espresso on the small table between the two chairs in front of the hearth. “What has gotten into you today?” she asked as she crouched in front of him so he’d be forced to look at her.
“I’m just happy to have my rabbit here. You can go now, dear.”
My mother looked reluctant to leave him now, but eventually, she stood up and placed a tender kiss on his forehead. “I won’t be long,” she said, but her voice wavered with uncertainty. She’d be gone for a while.
I rise from the chair, but my father’s attention remains fixed on the fire. “I’m going to fix myself a decaf. Are you hungry, Dad?”
He shook his head, never taking his eyes off the flames.
A chilly rainstorm in May was not typical Philadelphia weather, but I had always preferred gloomy days. Like my father. In recent years, before his diagnosis, he would only write from September through May, taking the summer off. It was convenient for me, as it meant I always had a brunch companion during summer break, while Marc was working, and I had eight weeks of unpaid vacation time.
My father claimed he couldn’t write when it was sunny. He said it was a habit that had been ingrained in him as a child. When it was gloomy, he stayed inside and wrote stories. When it was sunny, he went outside and played.
We’d visited my father’s rural home many times before my grandmother died. My father had spent quite a bit of money fixing up the house he’d grown up in after his career took off. My grandmother passed away comfortably in bed with my father and Aunt Margaret at her side.
I brushed aside worries that my father would be alone when he died as I stirred some sugar into my cup of decaf.
“Have you heard from Aunt Margaret lately?” I asked as I made my way back to the cozy fireside chair.
He shook his head again without saying a word.
Strike two.
“Do you want to watch a movie? We can rent The Martian,” I said, taking a seat.
“We own that movie. We don’t have to rent it,” my father replied in a bored tone.
Strike three.
I carefully placed my coffee on the table between us. I wanted to remark on the fact he could remember something so specific; something that wasn’t a memory from his childhood. It seemed his long-term memories were the only ones that floated to the surface lately.
I was at a loss for how to have a conversation with my father, a man I’d had more conversations with than my own husband.
“What’s on your mind today, Dad?” I asked, hoping an open-ended question might get the ball rolling in the right direction.
He finally turned his head to look at me. “You never used to get uncomfortable in silence. It was one of my favorite things about you. Always made me wonder: What kind of adventures are going on up there?” he said, his gaze flicked toward my head before he turned his attention back to the fire.
I knew he didn’t mean it as a criticism. He wasn’t implying I had become the type of person who was so uncomfortable with their own thoughts that they dreaded silence. He was attempting to tell me he understood I was uncomfortable with him at this moment. And he was reminding me I didn’t have to be because he was still the same man I’d chatted with over a thousand cups of coffee.
I couldn't be sure whether I was ascribing these high-functioning thought processes to my father erroneously.
In college, one of the things I learned was how vascular changes in the frontal lobe — causing a loss of executive functioning — was one of the first signs of cognitive impairment. Executive function was not a single function of the brain. Rather, it was a group of processes that controlled cognitive processes. Most of these had to do with goal formation and planning, like remembering a critical appointment.
We first noticed something was wrong with my father when he started being unable to recall names. He would tell my mother about a conversation he’d had with his editor, but he couldn’t recall her name. Julia had been his editor for almost two decades.
On one occasion, I called him to ask about an upcoming birthday party for my mother. He was at a restaurant with a friend, and I heard him explain to his friend that he had to take a phone call from his daughter Lina. I thought it was a simple mixup. Lina and I did sound quite similar on the phone. But when he started asking me how the twins were doing, I had to remind him I was Cassidy.
He got very defensive. “I know my own daughter.” Then he asked how my husband, Josh, was doing. I didn’t correct him a second time.
But my father didn’t seem so confused today. I almost wanted to bring up recent memories just to test him out. Maybe the Aricept his neuro-psychologist had prescribed was actually making him better inst
ead of merely slowing the decline.
I shrugged off this silly thought. If there was one thing you learned when a loved one was diagnosed with dementia, it was how hopeless the prognosis was. There was no cure. And because it was caused by so many different factors, hereditary and lifestyle-related, there would likely never be a single cure.
As our world became more connected, and we shared our memories with more people than ever, our older population was losing their precious memories. And none of them had a social media feed to remind them what they were doing five years ago. Their memories would be lost forever. And the rest of us just had to accept that.
As I sat with my father in comfortable silence, I resisted the urge to bring out the old family albums; the older generations’ version of Instagram. I was afraid of rubbing his face in everything he’d lost. Instead, I spent four and a half hours watching my father’s eyes dance through light and shadow.
When my mother finally arrived a few minutes before five p.m., I was emotionally exhausted. Worst of all, I felt guilty for wanting to leave.
My mother rubbed my back as she walked me toward the coat closet. “You’re pale, sweetheart. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Haven’t I?”
She didn’t reply, but she held on a little longer when I hugged her good-bye.
After leaving my parents’ house, I stopped at Dunwoody Elementary School to grab the eyeglasses I’d left in my classroom the day before. While there, I took a moment to sit at my desk and reflect on my afternoon with Dad. Somehow, everything he said felt so significant and insignificant at once. I found myself wishing I’d taken out those photo albums. He hated being babied.
I slipped my brown eyeglasses case into my purse and looked at the assortment of items on my desk: iMac computer purchased with a generous donation from Teddy O., the same month I started working at Dunwoody; laser printer purchased with the same donation; a box of tissues for emotional or sniffly students; a snow globe from Austria brought to me by little Hannah Fischer; and hidden in the back of the bottom desk drawer was the empty picture frame where I’d kept Mira’s second ultrasound image.
