ENOUGH by Nancy Lord

You watch your father sleeping in his chair by the window. The wing chair holds him as though he is something small and fragile, something it will fold up around as he sinks farther into it, into himself. The pink of his scalp shines through the part in his hair, hair that is plentiful still and a white the color of absolute absence. Light from the window catches the spackle of his cheeks, the silvery bristles he misses when he thinks he is shaving but is perhaps only moving the electric razor over a portion of, or maybe near, his face.
Your father is “reading the paper,” his main activity of the day. This involves holding up a section of the newspaper and looking at it, then falling asleep. The paper slips to his lap. It crumples in his hands as he grabs or squeezes or holds onto whatever, in his dreams, he is grabbing, or squeezing, or holding. Now, as you watch, the bunched-up paper is released and slides to the floor.
Your father’s hands continue to be busy on their own, in his lap. He looks like he might be playing an instrument, his fingers moving across a keyboard. Or sewing, pushing a needle through cloth.
In his previous life, he claimed to be without musical talent, although he loved listening to classical concerts on the radio and for more than fifty years sang in his church choir. In his previous life, he did not sew. Or maybe he did sew. He was a doctor, so – yes, he must have sewn incisions.
Now he is working his buttons. He is undoing his shirt.

You have been reading, learning about plaques and tangles in a diseased brain. The plaques are clumpy and brown, like tumbleweeds that have blown in and taken root in the spaces between the neurons. The tangles are long dark stringy fibers, like vines; they are not in the spaces but within the neurons themselves, winding through the cells, choking. They are kudzu.
This is how you picture your father’s brain: a landscape taken over by invasive weeds. This exotic and ghoulish growth is squeezing out the native order, taking over, cutting off the pathways.

Your father’s face is tightly set, jaw drawn in, and his eyes are focused on the carpet in front of him. He is trying very hard to think of something. He asks, “What is the name of the place where I live?”
You say, “Hillcrest Terrace.” He has lived at Hillcrest, a retirement home, for seven years.
A minute later he asks, “What is the name of the place where I live?”
You have adopted a way of answering these repeated questions that, you hope, won’t hurt your father’s feelings if he should realize that he has asked the same question more than once. You act as though your first answer didn’t entirely answer the question, and you make your second answer more precise or somehow in recognition that your first answer wasn’t sufficient.
This time you say, “Your building is called Hillcrest Terrace. The other building that you might have been thinking of is Pearl Manor. Some people you know live at Pearl Manor.”
A few minutes later he asks, “What is the name of the place where I live?” This time there is a slight emphasis to the what, as though he knows he has already asked this question, and he is admitting that he doesn’t remember the answer.
You say, “This is Hillcrest Terrace. You have a lovely apartment here. It’s a very nice place, don’t you think?”
“Yes, indeed,” he says.

Your father has lost his watch again. He complains of this each day, that he has lost all his things: his watch, his wallet, and his keys.
His wallet is, in fact, in his pocket. It wouldn’t matter much if he did lose it, as you long ago removed everything important, leaving only a few dollars and a museum membership card. His keys to an outside door and a post office box are also not lost. They remain in the tray by the door where he leaves them when he comes into the apartment. He deposits them there each time he comes home unless he forgets and keeps them in his pocket or, unless, when he leaves the apartment, he picks them up and then puts them back, because he can’t remember if he’s leaving or just returning. In that case, when he does leave and then comes back, he can’t find his keys because they are already in the tray.
You look for his watch in a desk drawer in the bedroom. You look in his sock drawer. You look in a bathroom drawer and find it there.
He is delighted that you have found it. His face wears a look of amazement, that the lost thing should be found at last.

According to the psychiatric social worker, there are three objectives in caring for those with Alzheimer’s: safety, comfort, and moments of joy.
Joy, you decide, overstates the objective. You will settle for moments of happiness, pleasure, contentment, peace. You will settle for any one of these no matter how simple, oft-repeated, or temporary they might be.
This listing becomes, for you, a sort of mantra to guide and get you through each day: safety, comfort, moments of happiness. Safety, comfort, moments of happiness.

Your mother, who is at last back home after having recovered from a compression fracture in her spine, falls and breaks her hip. Your father stands by passively, seemingly undisturbed. You, on the other hand, are horrified by the knowledge of what broken hips mean for the elderly: the traumatic surgery, the long recovery, the physical debilitation as unused muscles wither away, the possibilities of infections and blood clots. At your mother’s age, you know that a majority of those who break hips do not survive, succumbing not to the fracture itself but to any one or all of those other opportunities for everything to go wrong.
But later, when your mother lies across the bed waiting for the EMTs to arrive, your father pads into the bedroom. “Where does it hurt?” he asks. He places his hands on your mother’s bare thigh and presses very gently, here, and here, and here, probing with practiced hands, the gentlest and surest doctor’s hands you can imagine.

When you call your father, the caregiver answers and carries the phone to him. You hear her say, “It’s your daughter, Nancy.”
You say, “Hi Dad. How are you?”
“Just fine, thank you. I’m the only one who seems to be.”
You assume he’s talking about your mother.
“Have you seen Mom today?”
“Yes, of course.”
His voice is strong and sure, and you are happy to hear it. You make some more conversation, but what you really want to know he can’t tell you. He doesn’t know how your mother’s doctor’s appointment – her first since breaking her hip – went that day or whether your sister is still there or has gone home. After a while, you ask him to let you talk to Phyllis again.
“Who?”
Phyllis has worked for him for six months. In the beginning, he spoke of her as “the woman who comes around to help people,” but he has never been able to remember her name. These days he does not seem to distinguish among any of his four caregivers or to recognize them when they arrive at the door. “Phyllis,” you say again. “Phyllis is right there.”
Now he hands the phone to Phyllis. You hear him say, “Talk to this girl again.”

You are trying to get your father to walk with a cane. You do not call it a cane. You call it a “walking stick” and point out that hikers and mountain climbers use walking sticks. He will have none of that.
You try, at least, to get him to walk with his hands free, so that he might catch himself if he falls. But he continues to shuffle around the grounds, his hands either in his pockets (when he has not remembered how to tighten his belt to hold up his trousers) or clasped behind his back.
When his hands are behind his back, you place him in your memory on ice skates on the frozen lake, gliding effortlessly across the distance, fast and fearless, shoulders back and hands resting together, just there at the top of his tailbone.
“Just like Hans Brinker,” your mother would gush, every time.

In your family, you don’t talk about Alzheimer’s disease. You have never said to your father anything about Alzheimer’s disease, in any context, and he has never mentioned it, either.
Alzheimer’s is your father’s diagnosis; the doctor told you this only when you asked. He told you the scans showed voids in your father’s brain, shrinkage, places where nothing is happening, where the neurons have been destroyed. The doctor must have told your father his diagnosis, but then – your father would not remember this.
When you go with your father to his next doctor’s appointment, the doctor gives him a memory test. The doctor invites you to be in the room when he looks at the result on his computer screen and says to your father, “I’m worried about your memory.”
Your father says, one of the longest, most complete, clearest sentences he has spoken all day, “There’s nothing wrong with my memory.”
The doctor prescribes a new drug. You add it to the pills your father takes each day. After a week, he has all the side effects: more fatigue, more confusion, sleep you cannot wake him from, hallucinations. He believes he needs to get something from the basement and can’t be convinced that his retirement home doesn’t have a basement. He walks around looking for the basement and the thing he can’t name that he must find there. He is unsteady on his feet, falls at night and can’t get up. The caregiver can’t lift him, and the security people at the retirement home won’t help because of “liability”; they call for the EMTs.
You stop the new drug and he returns to his previous state, the one that now seems desirable.
Your father does not have a problem remembering his doctor. He doesn’t know his name, but he knows he doesn’t like him. He says this whenever the matters of doctors and drugs come up.

You are remembering an evening a few months back, a time when your father’s brain could still locate most of the words he needed. He said to you, “I want to tell you about my life.”
Your father has never been a talker, and you in fact know very little about his life.
That evening, this is what he says:
There were two teachers at his school – sisters – who were very kind to him and encouraged him in his studies. They found him the scholarship help to go to college.
Another benefactor loaned him money for medical school. When your father went to pay him back, the man would not take his money but told him to help someone else in the same way. (You know that he did this, many times over. When other doctors were buying vacation homes and sports cars, your father was supporting scholarship funds and youth organizations.)
Your mother tricked him into marrying her. He was sick with mononucleosis and she, a student nurse, nursed him back to health. Then, she came to visit him when he was with the Coast Guard, and somehow the visit turned into a marriage ceremony. He is happy that she was so aggressive in pursuing him, because he was shy, and she has been the perfect wife because she has always been sociable and taken care of everything.
When he was in the Coast Guard as a medical officer he saw a lot of the North Atlantic Ocean. His ship’s sister ship disappeared mysteriously, without a trace.
He has had a fortunate life, your father tells you. He has been very lucky his whole life.

You have learned that the average human brain is home to about one hundred billion neurons. These are linked to one another with about one hundred trillion pathways. Each neuron has appendages that branch from it, axons that carry impulses away, dendrites that receive. The point of contact between an axon and a dendrite is a tiny little space called a synapse. A single neuron can have one hundred thousand synapses connecting it to other neurons.
You are mesmerized by these unimaginable numbers and the pictures that form in your mind as you try to make sense of this information. You read that a piece of the brain the size of a grain of rice contains roughly a million neurons, ten billion synapses, and twenty miles of axons.
You have also learned that memory is a system and a process – the interaction of all those neurons connecting to one another, networking around from different regions of the brain. Each act of remembering creates a brand-new memory of that memory, with the neurons processing it along similar but always different pathways. Two things (at least) result from this: Memories change with time, since they are not fixed but are always being recreated, not things but unique processes. And, each act of remembering reuses some of the same networking, strengthening the particular connections and pathways that support that memory.
This explains why your father continues to remember key events and images from his childhood and early adulthood. Over the years, he’s replayed these in his mind so often they’ve traveled lots of different routes and built multiple, sturdy connectors. These things he has told you – his gratitude to those who helped him get an education, to the perfect wife who chose him, to surviving the war when so many others did not – these are the things he has thought about most often, thoughts that most securely wire him into who he is.

You are driving your father to a dentist appointment. He recognizes the route and tells you where to turn, even though you have directions. You say, wanting to make him feel necessary, “I’m so glad you’re with me to show me the way.”
Your father says, “My father took me to this dentist.”
You think, with sinking heart, now he is really getting crazy.
Then you realize – no, this is just another tangle. This is a blocked firing in the brain. You already know that pronouns are a problem; he and she get confused, my and your. Names get unattached. Generations get lost in the spaces. You are learning to decipher the new language.
You say, “That’s right. Rob brought you here. Your son brought you here before.”

At the nursing home, where your mother’s broken hip is mending, your father wheels her chair through the halls. You walk beside them, poised to grab your father if he stumbles or the chair when it veers threateningly toward another patient. Your mother introduces your father to the nurse distributing pills, to the woman who keeps asking for the way home, to her roommate’s visitor. She puffs up with pride as she tugs on your father’s sleeve. “This is my husband, Dr. Lord, from the Elliot Hospital.”
You leave them in a sitting room to visit by themselves. They hold hands. You wonder what they talk about, if they talk. You know your mother assures your father that she’s just fine and that he’s not to worry but to eat all his dinner.
When it’s time to go, they cling to one another, patting each other’s hands and arms. Your father bends over your mother as she stretches toward him, the cords tight in her creped throat. Eyes squeezed shut, they press their dry, closed lips together.
Your father says, “Good-bye, sweetheart.”

You think back a few months, when your father said, “I missed my chance.”
He meant, as he elaborated for you, that he had planned to end his life when he was still able to do so, before he would become a burden to others. He and your mother had a plan. He would drive the car at high speed off the highway and into a bridge abutment.
Driving on the highway another day – you were driving, he was safely buckled in beside you – he pointed out the bridge abutment.
He said again, “I missed my chance. I wasn’t brave enough.”
You knew from the way he said this that it was a profound regret.
When he talked this way, you tried not to react; any reaction, you thought, would only emphasize the thought, wire it more tightly. You said, “that would be very sad” and changed the subject. You pointed out what looked like a hawk, far up in the sky.
You don’t know whether your father still thinks about his missed chance and his lack of bravery or whether the neurons where those thoughts were processed are now mercifully missing.
If the thought or the memory of the thought is no longer to be found, then maybe the regret is gone as well. Maybe the regret ceases to exist.

When you’re with your partner, you try to be light-hearted. “Please shoot me,” you joke. You promise, “I’ll build a stash of barbiturates.”
You wonder if you should investigate long-term care insurance.
At the health food store, you pick up a jar of ginkgo biloba.
Your father has always enjoyed a cocktail before dinner. He no longer knows when before dinner is, but if you tell him that it’s four o’clock and time for a drink before dinner, he will go to the kitchen and make himself a Manhattan.

Your father’s drink-making is one of those well-wired tasks, or belongs, at least in part, to muscle memory stored in a more primitive and lasting part of the brain. He does not always remember that the ice cubes will be in the freezer, or where the refrigerator is, but he can usually find a glass in the cupboard and he can always locate the bottles in the lower cabinet. He pours into the jigger that is always left in the same spot on the counter, and he pours from the jigger over the ice in the glass.
You don’t know if, in his current health and with his medications, alcohol is a good thing or not, but you would never deny him the small pleasure of his daily drink. If he no longer anticipates his cocktail hour nor remembers it afterward, he certainly enjoys each sipping moment and the warm feeling in his throat – perhaps even a feeling in his head that may heighten, for all you know, to a joyous buzz.
One evening, you find a classical pianist on the television and invite your father to watch with you while he drinks his Manhattan. You remind him that he played the English horn when he was young. Alcohol has always loosened your father’s tongue, and words begin to flow from him with a greased ease. He tells you the English horn was difficult to play, and then about a group he played with in college.
You are enjoying this – hearing him talk, learning something about his life before you knew him – even if some of it is, to you, a confusing muddle. He doesn’t have all the language or the sequencing and relationships; you prompt him with words you think he’s seeking, ask the occasional question.
You are thinking that there are, in fact, some positive or at least compensatory aspects to the nightmarish disintegration of your father. The two of you are, at the moment, enjoying the piano music together. He has his drink, and you have your cranberry juice. Fresh air drifts through the open window, and tree leaves flutter just beyond. Your father is remembering a part of his life that was meaningful to him, and you are learning to understand and appreciate him more, to value the small moments.
Your father, face flushed, tells you that, later, one of his musician friends wrote him a letter to ask for help getting a job, and that he never answered the letter. He says this with great sadness. He says he has always regretted this. He looks at the drink swirling in his hand, and you feel his deep, disorienting disappointment in himself.
“Dad,” you say, “that was a very long time ago.”
You want to console him, to tell him that everyone fails his or her friends like that, that young people are naturally self-involved, not to mention busy with their own lives, and that no doubt his friend’s life proceeded just fine without his help. These things may be true, but you know they would trivialize his feelings and deny the high standards to which he has always held himself.
Instead, you tell him he has ten more minutes before dinner.

“You look very handsome in this shirt,” you say to your father as you straighten his collar. You have succeeded in taking away the shirt he wore the previous day before he could put it on again, and he has dressed in the clean one you laid out.
“You better think I’m not too handsome,” he says.
“Why shouldn’t you be too handsome?”
“The other women . . .” He fumbles after the right words.
“Oh, the other women would think you’re handsome and be chasing after you, wouldn’t they?”
He grins impishly. “My, yes, there are a lot of women around here to look after me.”

When you were twelve your father took your old dog, Dandy – also twelve, and increasingly arthritic – to the boarding kennel at the start of a family vacation. When you returned from that vacation and said, “Let’s go get Dandy,” your father said, gruffly and without looking directly at you, “Dandy’s not coming back.” You remember, as he walked away, the stunned look on your mother’s face and your shock as you realized he had not told even her.
It took you a very long time to understand that your father’s actions were rooted not in cruelty but in both love and grief. He was not cold but fragile, and he could not help you – could not even face you – when he could barely suppress his own tortured emotions. He had truly loved that old dog, and he had made the hard decision on his own, in isolation, without allowing himself any support apart from his own upright character.
How often in your childhood you heard your father complain that human society did not treat people with the same compassion it reserved for animals. Even as a doctor – or perhaps especially as one – he puzzled over this: why we end the pain and suffering of pets, why we prolong it for the people we love.
But that is another thought entirely.
Your father dozes, collapsed into his chair, head fallen to one side. The velvety black dog with the bead eyes and the red ribbon collar, the stuffed animal your mother bought him, hangs over the arm of the adjacent chair, almost within reach, if he wanted to reach for it.

Your father asks, “What time do we go to dinner?”
“Five o’clock.” He has always gone to dinner at five o’clock, ever since he moved to the retirement home. Already today, he has asked you ten times what time you will go to dinner. This time you tell him, “It’s four-thirty now. We go in half an hour, at five o’clock.”
He looks at the clock beside his chair. “This clock doesn’t have the right time.”
You get up and look at the clock with him. You show him the big hand and the little hand. You think you could be doing this with a five-year-old, but a five-year-old would soon learn to read the clock on his own.
After dinner, he looks at the newspaper some more. He looks at the clock. He asks you, “What time do we go to dinner?”

You are grateful that your father is as easy as he is. You have heard all the stories about people with Alzheimer’s who become violent, striking their spouses and caregivers. You have heard about the paranoid ones who accuse everyone of stealing from them, who huddle in fear. You have heard of tremendous arguments, in which the confused person insists on something utterly impossible, and no explanation or substitute will suffice.
You are grateful that your father’s earlier anxiety – when he worried over whatever he was supposed to do next, argued that you were taking him on a wrong road, asked again and again why he was taking pills and where they were coming from – is mostly gone now. He doesn’t try to figure out his schedule, and he gets up and goes when you or the caregiver tells him it’s time. He does what he’s told. You are grateful that he has what seems to you a Buddhist-like acceptance of what is.
You are grateful to have caregivers who are reliable and good. They bring tomatoes from their gardens, they are attentive and kind, when they walk with your father they point out the doves on the roof.
You are grateful that there is enough money for the caregivers and the retirement home, for the nursing home for your mother, for the doctor’s appointments, the prescriptions, the visits from the EMTs and the therapists. You are grateful to your parents that they planned it this way: to work hard and to save, to prepare themselves against being a burden to their children. You are grateful for the government programs – for Medicare – that pay for so much, although you wonder why, as policy, our nation spends so much for people at the ends of their lives and so little for children, education, the poor, and for protecting the air and water so essential for life. You actually know the answer to this, but you disagree with it, as policy, and you wonder what is going to happen when even more people live even longer.

You are tired of doing all the talking. You have praised the weather (another beautiful day!), commented upon the news (more dead in Iraq), reported on the baseball play-off scores and the schedule for the New England Patriots, listed the neighbors you saw out in the hall, reviewed the day’s schedule (visit Mom before lunch), talked about how good the breakfast melon was, mentioned the weather again (it could rain later in the week).
You are boring yourself to death.
You talk about a book you’re reading, Sue Miller’s The Story of My Father. Only you don’t mention the title or that it’s about Alzheimer’s. You say you’re reading a memoir, and you tell your father about the part where the author’s father buys a house, without first inspecting it, from a man who he knows keeps eighty cats. You tell him that the father and daughter had to catch all the cats and put them in boxes to take to the man’s new home, that the cat excrement was feet-thick on the floor and all the old wooden molding and paneling were cat-scratched to shreds, and that the daughter hired teenagers to clean out the house with shovels.
Your father likes this story. He shakes his head, astonished that people will do such crazy things.

You know that you had many happy times with your father, but you have trouble recalling specific occasions. Your father was, when you were growing up, reserved and emotionally distant. (You are reserved and emotionally distant.) He was often impatient. (You are often impatient.) He worked long hours and lived in an adult world that didn’t intersect all that often with the world of your childhood.
You do remember, when you were very small, that he read to you and that you adored him for this. You climbed into his lap in his reading chair in the living room, and he read one book after the other – Heidi, Black Beauty, Treasure Island – from the pastel set of children’s classics shelved beside the fireplace.
You remember once going shopping with him right before Christmas, to buy a leather wallet for your mother. He was never a shopper, and the crowds along Elm Street, the fevered buying, the infinite choices – all those must have been oppressive to him. The wallet was his idea, but he asked you which you liked, which you thought your mother would most like. You were honored to be with him and to be asked your opinion.
There were all those hiking trips in the White Mountains – what your family always referred to as “mountain climbing.” Your father tended to be goal-oriented – reach the peak, get to the hut, close the loop – while you cast a longing eye on the polished-rock pools in the streams you rushed past and the mossy hollows inhabited by who knew what enticing creatures. He knew the mountains with a surgical precision: which was which, and when he had climbed each, by what routes, with whom, in what weather. Because he knew all that, you didn’t need to. You could love the mountains in a more general way, and for their gifts to your imagination.
One year your family moved in with your uncle, who had Lou Gehrig’s disease and needed help. Once that year, when you were doing your homework in the little room at the top of the stairs, your father came in to say good-night. He asked about what you were studying and told you not to stay up too late.
Why do you remember this? It was a nothing moment, and yet it stands out in your memory like something luminescent. You were fourteen and your life, by circumstances that held you and your parents to a smaller than usual space, must have become more visible to your father. There he was in the doorway, so kind, so shyly interested in what you might be learning, so concerned that you get enough rest. It struck you then that it was nice of your father to assume you might study more than was good for you. It strikes you now that perhaps he thought he might have devoted too much to his studies, at the expense of something else.

You are trying to think of a word. You want to describe a building that has structural problems. The engineers and building inspectors who look at such things have decided it is unsafe. It is – you can’t for the life of you think of the word for what it is. It has been declared unsafe. No one is allowed to live there. It’s a legal term. It is on the tip of your tongue.
Condemned. The word is condemned. It slips, finally, into your mind. It slips in as soon as you try not to think of it quite so hard.
How could you not think of such a simple word, a word you know and use all the time? Of course you know that word. Why couldn’t you think of it?

At dinner in the dining room, the waitress brings the check. It doesn’t need to be paid, only signed so that the charge can be put on your father’s monthly bill.

Your father looks at the front of the check, turns it over, looks at the back, turns it over again. He holds the pen in his hand and stares at the back of the check. It is always this way.
You prompt, “That’s right. That’s where you put your name.” When he still hesitates, you tell him his name. He writes it down. Now the pen hesitates beside his name. He wants to put his apartment number, but he doesn’t remember what it is. You tell him, “Three, zero, eight.” He repeats this and stares at the paper. “Three, zero, eight,” you say again. He draws three slash lines, like this: ///. Then he writes out the number: eight. He has left a space between the slashes and the eight. Perhaps that is the zero, the nothing he couldn’t think how to make.
“That’s fine,” you say. “Now you’re all done.”
You thank him for the lovely dinner.

In college, for one of your classes, you used the astronomy teacher’s child for a study in language acquisition. You were fascinated with the construction of the child’s first sentences and system of grammar, and you tried to theorize for yourself what sort of organic development was taking place in the brain, what was wired and what was learned.
You remember this as you watch your father struggle for words and to form sentences. He cannot come up with the word for television, but he tells you it’s in a box. When you pull yourself away from the particulars – your father – you think that the process is so similar, and so similarly interesting, to what you observed in college. It is interesting, in part, because it seems to be the reverse.
This is not just your observation, a layperson theory. There is a word for this – retrogenesis, “back to birth.” The order of a child’s acquired abilities, from smiling to speaking a few words to forming sentences and so on, has an almost precise inverse relationship with the lost abilities of someone with Alzheimer’s.
Science now knows that myelin – the substance in the brain that coats the neurons and enables the transmission of nerve impulses between them – is laid down in a sequence, and that that sequence is later reversed in those with Alzheimer’s. The reason children generally don’t have memories before age three is that the ability to make memories belongs to the part of the brain that is last to “myelinize.”
Last to myelinize, first to demyelinize.
You picture the white starchy myelin sheaths building up, thickening, serving as proper insulators. And you see them breaking down, falling away like old asbestos from pipes. Myelin is protein, and so are the nasty plaques that ball up in the Alzheimer brain.
You end up wishing that you had stuck with science in college. You wish you could understand what this is all about. You wish that someone a lot smarter than you would figure out how to keep the asbestos on the pipes and the debris swept up. You wish you didn’t need to think of lousy metaphors.

Your father has taken an interest in women’s beach volleyball. He sits before the television, puts on his old-fashioned black-rimmed glasses that he claims he has never needed, and watches the tall tanned women in their minimal bathing suits.
You know he is watching not the game but the women. He is fixed on the bounce of firm young breasts and curves of bellies, the points of pelvic bones. He is mesmerized by long legs and swinging blond ponytails. He has no idea of the score nor any preference for one team over the other.
The two women who have won a point jump together and slap their hands.
Your father smiles.
You smile. You are happy for the simplest of things.

You wonder what your father dreams.
One morning he tells you he had a bad dream. In his dream a woman took him to an apartment, not his apartment but one similar.
He doesn’t tell you what happened at the apartment, in the bad dream, and you don’t want to know. You wonder if he remembers, and how he remembers, if he can’t remember what he ate for breakfast five minutes ago. He may not even have had a dream.
You say, “Perhaps you got up at night and Phyllis took you back to bed.” Phyllis sits in the living room all night and tells him when he gets up at two a.m. that it’s not morning and he needs to lie down again. He thinks she’s bossy.
“No,” he says. “It was another woman.”
You wish his dreams would be about beach volleyball, and that the women in their bathing suits would be kind to him.

At the retirement home, the residents gather in the activity room. Someone plays a banjo, and the residents sing along, old songs they remember from when they were young.
Your father has given up singing. He claims his voice is no good anymore.
What he does is whistle. You sit beside him and listen to the chorus of banjo and voices, words and notes of songs you’ve never heard but which seem to belong to this group like their own tongues. You listen to your father’s whistle, and it is as melodious as a bird. You listen some more. He is harmonizing with the melody, making beautiful music.

You take your father for a drive to the area where he and your mother lived for many years, after you left for college and before they moved to the retirement home. He recognizes landmarks – the ballfield, the yacht club, the boulder that marks his old driveway. He asks you to drive slowly past the house, and he points out new construction farther along the road.
You stop at the lake that he knows so well, in so many ways – from shore, from canoe, from cross-country skis and skates. He doesn’t hesitate to haul himself from the car to stand in blustery wind along the wave-lapped shore. The maples in the distance, just turning orange and red, glow in the slanted light. The greens among them are the vibrant greens of the same low light, as though the color seeps like sap from the veins and fibers. You take a deep breath, full of the scent of cool water and the beginnings of decay.
You think about the beauty of the moment, and how it lives in the light and the water and the swaying of the trees, and how it also lives in the memories that adhere to the place itself, that draw up from the well the water in different light and under ice, and the trails in spring when the mayflowers push aside the carpet of dry oak leaves, and the cries of loons.
You want to say something like this to your father, but you can’t find the words. Perhaps it’s not a said thing, anyway. It’s a felt thing, and you think your father is feeling the same thing. He is looking at the water and the colored leaves, images that are surely seated against his memories, which, if the broken networking no longer recalls the particulars, at least leave him with the general impressions of this place he still knows. It is a good place, a place of peace.
And if, when, the particular place is lost to him, there will still be, somewhere, the leaf and the water and the distant bird gliding on its wings. They will exist in their own small moments, and they will be enough.
You say the insufficient words. You say, “The colors are really beautiful right now, aren’t they?” You take your father’s arm to walk along the shore.

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Nancy Lord is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review. She is the author of three books of creative nonfiction, Fishcamp, Green Alaska, and most recently, Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale’s Truths (Counterpoint Press, 2004)..