I was worried that the fog and rain would delay my flight to Pittsburgh, but we took off on time and landed early. I had the back of the plane to myself, which was of course pleasant, although in the interest of making a small political statement about the importance of public health I kept my mask on. I also didn't want to catch anything and pass it on to my father, who's living in a memory-care unit with a group of seniors, all suffering from some form of dementia. As it turned out, there was already a case of Covid in my father's unit, but he tested negative, so the rest of the family and I took him to dinner. I was both surprised and not surprised to see firsthand how his dementia is getting worse. Reading or hearing about something can help, but it can only take you so far.
My father still recognized me, but he doesn't remember one day from the next, so each time he saw me, he asked when I had arrived, how I got here, and how many days I was staying. Perhaps even worse, his longstanding tendency to be sarcastic, even caustic, seems to be overtaking the more appealing parts of his personality, which means that he often seems agitated, incapable of answering basic questions -- 'is your hearing aid working? can you hear us?' -- without making a bitter-sounding joke about it or launching into an hominem tirade or hallucinatory conspiracy theory. In the past, I had sometimes been able to divert his attention back to his more placid memories -- of his childhood, his business, his time in the army -- but this time he could not be dislodged from talking about, e.g., 'the fix being in' on a horse race in Canada that he knew all about, and that we would soon enough see. There were moments when he seemed content, such as in the dining hall when one his friends said hello to him, but these moments were harder to find than they had been in the past.
On Friday morning, my brother, mother, and I drove to Mount Oliver, which is only a few miles away from where I grew up but was not a neighborhood I had ever seen, in part because it's more urban than the white-bread suburb of my childhood and in part because of the hilly geography of Western Pennsylvania, which is filled with spaces and towns that are hidden by the twisting roads. As in New York City (and Key West), in Pittsburgh, there's an unchecked epidemic of private vehicles being stored on public sidewalks. But there are moments traveling these streets when it feels like you've gone back in time, a century or even two.
The weather was mild for January. We drove to a park on Mount Washington, where we looked through the naked trees at the city.
Not being members of Generation X, my brother and mother -- and an unnamed third person wearing a bright red jacket and hat -- were excited to pretend they were in a band for purposes of taking a moody record cover. Sometimes it's isolating to realize that I'm the only person in my family for whom e.g., Echo and the Bunnymen means anything, but most of the time it makes me feel fortunate to have been born when I was, even if that that time is now (much) further away than I had once expected it to be. (In this, all generations are aligned.)
Nearby, we passed a very blue house. It wasn't a choice I would make, but I found it soothing to confront this seemingly benign obsession.
We drove a little further west (I think) to an unobstructed view of the city. I remembered being four or five years old, when the rivers flooded and my neighbors took me to Mount Washington to see the disaster from above. It was hard to believe it was more than fifty years ago, because I could almost feel my wet hands wrapped around the cold, iron bars of the semi-circular overlook through which I peered down at the swirling, muddy waters. I wondered about what was going on my in father's mind; whether his oldest memories were still accessible or if -- as it seemed -- they were sinking away. Due to his physical ailments, which are no less serious than his mental ones, he can't travel very far. A short trip in a car is a challenge. His world has gotten very small. I wondered what I would do in his position: would I be angry or would I be able to make peace with the life I had led?
In my own case, I realized, it's a choice I want to make sooner rather than later.
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