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| Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash |
My dad has dementia. I saw him a few weeks ago for the first
time in a few years. The global pandemic made visiting my elderly father with a
heart condition and diabetes feel irresponsible. When I finally made the trip
over, the man I saw was not the man I grew up with.
The dad I knew was an elemental force. He wasn’t a tall man,
but he made up for any lack of height with volume and intensity. He had a big
beard that made me think of bears and a big belly that jiggled when he laughed.
He was the kind of man that would learn the life story of the checker in the supermarket
in the time it took them to ring up his food. I always envied him that, that
easy familiarity with strangers.
I remember talking to a friend of my dad when I was a teenager.
We were waiting outside a church for him to finish talking to whoever he was
talking to. Waiting for my dad while he was talking is a recurring childhood
memory. The friend of my dad said something to the effect of, “A lot of people
know Jesus because of your dad. He’s a great man.” It felt good to have someone
respect him so completely like that.
Somewhere between then and now, the dad that was my dad ceased
to be. But that doesn’t get the experience quite right. It sounds like he was
there and now isn’t. That’s wrong. He’s there. And he’s not there.
You can think of the soul and the body as two independent
things. The soul is the source of your you-ness, and the body is a meat machine
that moves your soul around. The whole idea is roughly equivalent to a pilot (the
soul) operating a sci fi mech suit (the body). As with many analogies, this one
is overly simplistic. But it helps with my visualization of my dad.
I did not really talk to my dad much while I was home. He
was asleep most of the time, and not really communicative the rest. When he did
speak, his voice was small and quiet. Soft. Un-dad-like. It made me think of distance.
In retrospect, it felt like he was untethered from himself.
As if his soul, formerly ensconced in the biological machinery of his body, was
knocked loose and hung onto his body only by the slenderest of threads. And
that looseness, that distance, hindered his ability to access all the functions
of his body we take for granted.
I can see and hear and access memories and process thoughts because I am firmly seated in the cockpit of my body. But not my dad. He is distant. He is here and not here. The old man I saw seated in his red recliner is my dad. And, in another sense, he isn’t. At least, he isn’t the whole of the man I call dad. Part of him is distant, held loosely to his body by ephemeral cords that bind him here, but not closely enough to allow him to be whole.
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