“Who was that who dropped you off, Dad?” She was a very attractive young woman, and Alex wondered if he was dating someone he hadn’t told her about. She knew how bored he was now that he’d retired. And he wasn’t reading the crime books he loved as much as he used to.
“No one, just a friend from work I ran into this afternoon.” He couldn’t tell Alex that she was a stranger who had picked him up and brought him home like a lost child. More and more he felt infantile and not the adult he used to be. The realization of it filled him with rage. He was short-tempered with Alex now, which was the last thing he wanted to be. And she looked hurt when he shouted at her. He didn’t seem to be enjoying his retirement as he had said he would when he announced it to her, and she had no idea it had been forced on him. No one at his old office knew he was suffering from Alzheimer’s either. Only his attorney and his physician did, although increasingly Alex could see that he was confused.
He still bought the newest crime novels by his favorite authors, but he never seemed to finish them, and left three or four of them open, lying around the house.
“Are you feeling okay, Dad?” She worried about him.
“Of course.” He smiled at her. But he noticed that the medication was working less well than it had in the beginning, which the doctor had warned him would happen.
They spent three weeks in Maine on vacation before she had to start high school in September, and he got lost in the woods on their third day there. The hotel they stayed at had to send out a search party for him. They found him easily, wandering around, and Eric was mortally embarrassed when they got back to the hotel. He said his compass was broken, and he’d gotten confused. The rest of their stay was uneventful, but he forgot her name several times, which shocked her. He had never done that before.
She had written a lot of stories over the summer and put them in the binder, but he never read or commented on any of them. And he didn’t offer to drive her to school on the first day. There were lots of subtle changes in his behavior, and Alex noticed all of them. She wondered if he was depressed or worried. He seemed distracted all the time, disoriented when they went out, and he was wandering around the living room in his boxers one day when she got home from school. He had never done that before either. And Elena said he’d been sleeping all day.
By her second month of high school, it was obvious to Alex that there was something seriously wrong with her father. He was confused most of the time now, and even Alex could see that dementia had set in. She called their doctor one morning when he refused to get out of bed, didn’t seem to know where he was, and couldn’t remember her name. The doctor came to the house and spoke to her, and told her what was happening. He found her amazingly mature for a fourteen-year-old. He told her that eventually they would have to put her father in a residential facility, and she said she wouldn’t allow it, and they would keep him at home and care for him there.
The doctor helped her find a male nurse to drive her father and keep an eye on him, and she insisted that on weekends she could care for him herself. All he wanted to do now was sleep anyway. She read to him from the familiar books he loved, although he usually fell asleep or seemed not to be listening to her. She spoke to him as though he still understood everything she said, and treated him with the dignity and respect he deserved, although it broke her heart to see him so confused. The disease was advancing by leaps and bounds, and by Christmas, he recognized no one except her. They added a second nurse. She could no longer manage him on her own. He had wandered down the street in his pajamas, and took his clothes off in the kitchen while Elena stood there and cried, watching him, and then ran screaming from the room. There was no hiding from the reality anymore. Less than a year after the first signs, his mind was severely impaired.
Alex was trying to keep up with her homework, hadn’t written a story in months, and worried about him all the time, even when she was at school. Over Christmas vacation, he stopped eating and wouldn’t get out of bed. After a week of IVs, they transferred him to a hospital and fed him from a nasogastric tube. Pattie and Elena stood with Alex when they took her father away in an ambulance. And then Pattie held her while she cried.
Alex spent the rest of her vacation at his bedside at the hospital, and by New Year’s Day, he stopped recognizing her too. His mind was a blank now, and he returned to an infant state. He slept and cried, laughed for no reason, refused all food, and pulled out his nasogastric tube and had to be restrained.
The week before she went back to school, Alex was with him every night at the hospital, sleeping on a cot next to his bed, even though he didn’t know who she was. And on the first day of school after vacation, she left for class from the hospital, and came back that afternoon. His bed was empty when she got there, and she was startled to realize he had been moved. She wondered if they were doing tests on him again, and the head nurse came to see her while she was looking lost in the room, trying to guess where he was. She knew the minute she saw the nurse’s face. The nurses had grown fond of her during her father’s stay. Alex was very mature for her age, and always polite and respectful to them. And she was obviously devoted to her father. She took care of him like an adoring mother and never left him for a minute.
“I have bad news for you, Alex,” the nurse said gently, and put her arms around her, as Alex went stiff as a board, and knew she shouldn’t have gone to school that day. She hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye to him, but there was no one left to say goodbye to. The father she knew and loved had been gone for months by then. The nurse told her that he had died peacefully in his sleep right after she left for school.
They called Elena for her, who came to pick her up. Bill Buchanan handled everything with Alex, and helped make the funeral arrangements. The church was full, with all the people who had worked with him, and known and admired him. And at the cemetery, she was shocked to see her mother’s grave. Her father had never told her that he’d had Carmen buried there, but now they were together, with her father’s first wife. She went home from the cemetery with Elena, and a few close friends came to visit her, but with Alex alone, most people didn’t want to intrude, and there was no gathering afterward. Alex sat in his room all that night in his favorite chair, feeling him with her.