Dementia and My Dad, a Sort of Memorial

This is a post about what my dad used to be like, before the dementia- only the good parts, I mean. There was plenty of bad, really bad, so bad that I am not going to talk about it. A friend who knows us in real life told me this week he wishes he had known my dad before the dementia, and an internet friend asked if my dad was always this obstinate. That got me started thinking about who my dad once was compared to who he is now, and the part of my dad that most of you would have known if you had known him- if he had written in this blog, for example. You would have known the good parts, because he saved the horrors for his nearest and dearest. So here we are with the good:

He really was brilliant, and he could hold an intelligent and interesting conversation with just about anybody on just about any topic. He was curious about everything, and he never met a stranger. We visited every historical marker on the road on every trip we ever took (and we took a lot). We went to museums, archeological digs, Indian ruins, ghost towns, and more. He wanted to know all about everything. Everywhere we lived he found out all about the history and background of the town, sites of interest and more- within a few weeks of arriving.

He was an excellent cook- a gourmet. He cooked dinner every Thursday night starting sometime when I was in junior high school, and not one of us, not my brothers, and not the foster sister who lived with us for a couple years, ever would miss a Thursday night dinner.

He had been interested in acting in college and was in the drama club. Over the years I have met some of his old classmates- one was the dean at the college I attended, sometimes it was just somebody at church, once or twice it was the parent of a college classmate. Without exception, everybody I ever met who 'knew him when' eagerly asked me, "Did your father keep up with his acting? I never saw anybody act like him. You should have seen him in..." Usually it was Death of a Salesman that they found most memorable. Apparently that performance was something incredible to see.

He didn't keep up with his acting, at least, not exactly. When I was small he used to take me to a children's theater production every weekend to watch plays, but he stopped that by the time my brothers came along. But what he did do was read aloud to us- dramatically, with flair, with character, with panache. Winnie the Pooh as read by my father was the perfect Pooh. Disney is always a cheap imitation, but Disney compared to my dad's readings is no contest at all. He was absolutely the best ever. In fact, the closest thing I can think of to the experience of listening to my father read aloud would be Kenneth Branagh reading The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis. If you've heard that, you have some idea what I got to listen to almost every weekend while I was growing up. My dad's reading aloud in character was every bit as good as Branagh.

He went to India for three months on a mission trip, and he and my mother bought us some Winnie the Pooh records- read by some famous narrator . My brothers and I hated them- they were all wrong, we said, and that strange man had no idea of the right way to do Pooh.

We went on camping trips regularly, and, except for the nightmarish first few hours of every single camping trip I can remember, the part where he forgot how to set up our tent and raged at the world for this flaw in the Universe, these were fun trips. He did a lot of the cooking, and most of the cleaning. He and my mother would entertain us around the campfire with guessing games, riddles, tricks, and then we would all sing together.

He played the piano extremely well. When he was a small child taking lessons, he said his teacher's mother had also been a piano teacher- a very good one. He said the older woman would lock herself away during all the other lessons except his. For his lessons, she would come out and sit in the room to hear him play.

We didn't have a piano in our house until I was about 9 or 10 years old, when we got my mother's old piano. And yet, he simplie picked his incredible playing right back up, and he would play the piano most nights while we were going to sleep. He didn't do it for us- it was for him, but it was beautiful, and I loved it. Once I was very angry with him and I told him I hated it, and of all the things I ever said in the heat of an angry argument with him (and there were many such), that is the only one I remember, because it wasn't true and I could see it hurt him. I am glad to be able to say that I did apologize for that years and years ago- within five or six years of saying it, and I was able to tell him it wasn't true and never had been. He claimed not to remember me every having said it, and I don't know if that is true or not, but I didn't care. I just felt better letting him know that I had always loved his playing.

When I was growing up he preached amazing sermons, drawing in references from science, history, archeology, literature, and more- and I never saw him use notes until after the stroke. Just this week an old friend from the seventies left a comment on my facebook asking how my dad was doing and telling me she had always loved his sermons on archeology and the Bible, he was so interesting.

He was a gardener as well, and we benefited from the fruits of his labors more than we probably appreciated.

He was a witty and erudite writer, very clever and entertaining. When I was in college he and my mother both wrote me pretty regularly. His notes were typewritten because his handwriting was sprawling and hard to read, and efficiency was important to him and he typed faster than he wrote. My classmates mostly thought that was really strange- type written letters from your father? But my classmates also would see me laughing over them and come to hear what was so funny, and by the end of the year, Dad had quite the little fan club- students who would ask me, "So, get a letter from your dad this week? What did he have to say?" My foster sister went to a school in another state (I went to Oregon, she went to Texas), and she came home saying the same thing- all her friends wanted to hear her read Dad's letters because they were so funny.


He had a stroke at 48 years of age, and he lost a lot of his mental marbles then. It frustrated him immensely, but if you didn't know him before the stroke, you would not have known there was anything the matter with him. A family friend who knew him before the stroke said he guessed it was hard on dad, but my dad with half his marbles still had more mental muscle than most people- and this was totally true. Sadly, this is also when he lost the ability to read aloud quite as he used to. For several years he would still read Winnie the Pooh to the grandchildren, but he had lost the flair he once had.

In many ways, he was actually nicer after the stroke- it seemed to make him more humble, more open with his affection, less impatient with others, more understanding of other's imperfections. My eldest was three years old when he had his first stroke (he had many other mini-strokes over the years), so none of the children have really known their Grandpa pre-stroke. They missed out on the real Winnie the Pooh, the best of the music, and the clever sermons. However, they got the doting, affectionate, far more patient Grandpa 2.0 version, so maybe it balances out.

Here's the kind of intelligence he could still muster after he lost half his marbles- He had been to Korea when he was a very young man- around 19 years old, I think. He learned to speak Korean, but he never had the opportunity to use it again after he got out of the service at about 21 years of age. Decades later, three years after his stroke, he was visiting us in Japan, and while we were out and about I introduced him to a friend of ours from Korea. My dad immediately started talking with her in Korean. Let me tell you, it is a very bizarre experience to see your father suddenly conversing at rapid pace in a foreign language you've not really heard him use. He was frustrated with himself because he was so rusty, but she was amazed at his proficiency and later told me that her husband, after five years of marriage, didn't speak as well as my dad, and Dad had an impressive accent that most Americans didn't manage to master. She could hardly believe it when I told her it had been nearly 30 years since he'd used his Korean.

There are a number of reasons why, when I was growing up, my dad was so hard to live with in all those ways I am not sharing.

But I have long thought that one of the reasons for his dismal level of patience was just that he didn't really realize how exceptionally brilliant he was. When it came to pursuits of the mind and music, everything came easy to him, so easy that he truly could not understand that other people, like his children, were not being deliberately obtuse if they didn't figure something out immediately. He really, honestly, deep down in his truest self, thought that most people- and especially his children- were simply not using their God-given brains (oh, if only I had a nickel for every time I heard him refer to my 'God-given brains' in a rant...). If we would only try to apply ourselves, we, and the rest of the world, would understand whatever it was he had understood instantly while we were trailing far behind in dimwitted cluelessness. He really did believe that when we were being stupid we were doing it on purpose, to annoy, because he simply was too brilliant himself to be able to understand that sometimes being in the dark was not simply a matter of intellectual laziness.

I don't have the same relationship with my dad that my children have with theirs, or that most people I have seen have with their fathers, because my dad was not really much like most fathers I know. To be brutally honest, most people I have known who have had a childhood much like mine (the parts I am not telling you about)- they choose not to have any relationship with their dads at all when they reach the age where they have a choice. My youngest brother is one of those. I chose otherwise, so here we are.

Sometimes when I write about dementia related issues, people will respond with very sweet, kind, and empathetic comments. Sometimes their very sweetness makes me feel like a bit of a fraud. Although I have shed some tears over it, I am not exactly heartbroken, because that's not the kind of father he was. I make a lot of jokes about the dementia and put things in as amusing a fashion as I can muster because that is who I am, who we are, most of the Common Room. I think I get that from my Dad, actually. But even when I feel like a fraud, I appreciate those sweet comments. Just because we didn't and don't have the sort of relationship most people take for granted, that doesn't meant I am never sorry, sad, frustrated, disappointed, worried, upset, unhappy, and sometimes angry about what is happening to him.

As hard and horrible as he was to live with when I was growing up, I do find it terribly sad to see the dementia burning holes through that once magnificent mind, leaving it a tattered remnant of what it once was, leaving the scraps of a dementia devoured shroud.