An Alzheimer's Almanac:
Once a man, twice a child

By María Eugenia Guerra

Once a man, twice a child. Over my lifetime, I've heard the dicho so many times, but only now that my father is ill do I comprehend the colloquialism in full.
There is a way my sister and I feel to each other when we walk together from our father's house. It is sometimes the frailty of him that tears away at our composure, the need he has to tell us something in a vocabulary now pared down by the escalation of the disease, the struggle he has made to articulate what he feels but for which he no longer owns the words.
Other times it is understanding that he hasn't a clue who we are or that what we have talked about has no meaning beyond the moment in which the words were spoken. This in stark contrast to the man who always took into account the views of his children.
Using the scanner in my office, I've made a chart for the refrigerator door in my father's house. A picture of each of us forms the chart, bears our names and birth dates, the names of our children, where we live, and what we do for a living. When I gave him the chart, he wept, telling me no one had told him he had children. He wept inconsolably like someone who had missed the opportunity to love what had been his all along.
I miss him terribly. I miss his counsel and his musings. Sometimes it is his kindness and wisdom that I recall, remembering the garden variety misdeeds and the more serious red-handed infractions that brought me to a stern chat with him in his car or at his office, conversations that might end, depending on how seriously I had veered off track, with, "You never give up on your children."
One day recently as I sat with him at the kitchen table, my sister on her way out the door kissed him on the forehead and said, "Bye, Dad." He looked impish and said, "Quien sabe quien sería, she always calls me Dad." I started to say, "Well, you are our Dad," but the words never made it out. I pulled the chart off the fridge door and once more told him the story of us.
There is this way we love our mother now, making sure she knows we are nearby. Sometimes we speak with our eyes, for she is very sensitive to speaking of things my father won't understand. She spares him any discomfort and accords him every respect, sometimes answering us by rote, "You'll have to ask your father about that."
There's much to learn about this illness from which there is no reprieve, remission, or return. If there wasn't a bit of hilarity and much dearness along the way, the despair -- that of knowing that nothing will slow or alter this ever-increasing downward spiral -- could kill you.
Sometimes my sister and I double back to try to find the place that might mark the beginning of the disease, before the diagnosis. I remember being stunned several years ago at the serious attention he paid to a piece of Ed McMahon mail that apprised him he would be a millionaire, something that normally would have found its way quickly to the trash can. My sister said it was the constant telling of his war chronicles that told her he was in trouble. Whatever might have been the place, I feel a rush of unspent panic for the moment he must have recognized the disease had begun to claim him. Or was it as we would like to believe, that he never knew it had arrived?
It wasn't long ago, near the end of the decade just past, my father and I as we worked together at the ranch had one of our customary discourses about the pathos of mortal life and the hereafter. He said, "Even after death we go on living as long as we are remembered."
There is a surreal nature to recent times with my father, moments in which I understand that although I've lost him in this world, in loving memory, mine, he persists. These are moments of something akin to an alignment , a shoring-up, of meaning and time -- now with an overlay of then -- moments I lose my breath to this measure of love.