I am one month shy of turning sixteen when my stepfather is diagnosed with degenerative frontotemporal lobe dementia. He is fifty-eight years old, a former lieutenant colonel who received medals for his service in Desert Storm, and a tenured psychology professor who regularly visits local mental hospitals and takes calls from suicidal patients in the middle of the night. One dinnertime, he regaled me with the story of how Lord Byron’s challenge to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to write a ghostly tale led to the creation of Frankenstein. I smiled and nodded my head as I swirled my green beans around on my fork, but I didn’t believe him. He is just a psychologist, after all. How could he pull out random literary anecdotes with such ease? Before him, I never saw a black man harness such a talent. Later that evening, I found out via Google that he was right. After that, I never question his knowledge again. Instead, I drop my eating utensils and rest my chin on my right palm while he entertains me with Shakespearean recitations or hypotheses about Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power. I have to remember these memories when he becomes unable to string coherent words together.
How does it begin? I am not sure. One day as I pull my curtains back to let the natural light into my room, a habit that he encourages me to develop as a tactic to ward off depression, I notice that when he gets out of his car, he falls on the ground. This, at first, doesn’t alarm me. He is six feet, six inches tall. That’s a whole lot of human. He gets off the ground, dusts the grass blades off his backside, and starts towards our front door, but the quiver in my heart ripples throughout my body with more intensity when I watch him forget the groceries sitting on the same patch of grass where he’d fallen. I am afraid to ask my mother what is going on, because I am afraid of what she might tell me. And then he begins to forget the groceries at the supermarket, returning home with only the long receipt in his hand, bewildered because his arms are not carrying anything. He paces around the house in the evening, checking, double-checking, triple-checking, quadruple-checking, quintuple-checking all the locks in the house and the knobs on the stove. When he, my mother, and I go to a wedding expo to prepare for my sister Patricia’s impending nuptials, he is unable to figure out which utensils to pick up, and the names of certain hors d’oeuvres. Small giggles underscore his questions, but by now I know something dark is happening. He is embarrassed, but nevertheless I help him make his plate. We do not speak for the entire ride home. My mother follows me into my bedroom and closes the door behind her. It is gray outside, and the drizzle soon starts. She tells me the truth.
By my sophomore year of college, he has already surpassed the doctor’s initial prognosis of two years. But I cannot think about that right now. I am busy establishing a rapport with my roommate, Denise; I have early-declared as a comparative literature major; I am working on a novel and also cowriting a play for a struggling black-centered arts company. I am not thinking about him—at least, I think I’m not. I am present, but a part of me is vanishing.
My stepfather, my mother, and I are having dinner at home and I smell something strange coming from upstairs. I smelled it before, but I assumed that it was coming from outside. Now, it intensifies, and I casually walk up the steps to see a full laundry basket next to a night-light, and smoke rising to the ceiling. I yell and immediately grab the basket, dragging it down the steps as fast as I can. By this time, the blankets in the basket are on fire, but luckily, my mother has a large towel to smother the flames. All the while, my stepfather stands there as though he is simply watching a bonfire, waiting for the heat to be just right so that we all can make s’mores. He has a cup of water in his hand and he flings it onto the blankets, but by then the fire is out. He is too late. He is far too late. What if I hadn’t been there? What if this had happened while my stepfather and my mother were asleep and I was back at college? What if the house caught on fire and my mother couldn’t escape because she couldn’t convince him that there was an actual fire? What if I had received a call while I was in the middle of my eleven a.m. Japanese class, the police telling me that their bodies were charred beyond recognition? What then?
I don’t sleep that night. Something on the inside of me is breaking, splintering in slow motion into innumerable shards. I thank God profusely for making sure I caught the basket in time, but unconsciously something in me shifts. I have to pace around the house, stand in front of the backyard windows and squint to see if any figures are moving around outside, turn and twist the stove knobs multiple times to make sure that the burners are really off; I have to hear the flicker, see the blue flame flare and disappear, and don’t you move until you do this at least four or five times. I check all the night-lights to make sure nothing is near them, not even a dangling phone cord. I turn on the alarm when I leave, but the confirmation beep does nothing to make me move away from the keypad because I have to stay there for several minutes to convince myself that it is actually working, despite the red light indicating that the house is armed. My heart races whenever I walk past an open drawer revealing knives and forks. I am not suicidal. I want to live. But what if, in a split second, I harm myself? What if I drag a knife down my arm, poke at the skin underneath my eye with a fork, press a burning skillet against my thigh? What if?
I don’t trust myself anymore. Many nights I wake up with both ears ringing, my throat tightening, and my heart sprinting. I don’t know if it is a panic attack or just my new life. It happens to be both: a series of panics. Every night, I set my alarm for seven a.m., but I click it on and off more times than I can count. It does not matter if I see the alarm icon in the upper right-hand corner of my cell phone screen. Did I see it? Did I see it? Did I really see it? If someone were to put a gun to my head and ask me, Are you sure?, could I have said beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was?
I go to two sessions with an on-campus psychologist, but I am afraid of going to her for more because if she finds out that I am losing it, I might be urged to take a year off from school. She categorizes me as having mild OCD. She suggests outside psychologists, cognitive behavioral therapy, maybe even medication. I do not explore any of these options. Black people do not do therapy. Although my stepfather is a psychologist, he is an outlier in my environment.