In the Spring of 2001 I moved from Seattle to my father's farm just outside of Mineral Point, Wisconsin to help watch after him. After graduating from a small liberal arts college in Iowa in May of 2000, I moved to Seattle to live in a house with a couple friends from high school, folks who went to school at the University of Washington and were finishing their fifth year of engineering college or starting graduate degrees. They had a spare room in the large, non-descript ranch house they rented in the Northgate neighborhood and after a very short stint working as a video game tester for Nintendo I found a job at the warehouse of a small book publisher in downtown Seattle doing menial labor for ten dollars and hour and health insurance. Every Sunday I would call my father to say hello, to see how he was doing.
In the Winter of 1999 he was diagnosed with an early onset dementia at the age of 54, or so. At the time the doctor's best guess was that he had a dementia named Pick's disease, which was characterized by its early onset, amongst other things. With dementias, at least at the time, they only way they could really tell what the exact kind of dementia a person has was to slice into their brain and examine the particular brain plaques that were held responsible for suffocating brain neurons, which is something that could only occur after the person had died. Thus, in 2014 when he died and we agreed to let them do the autopsy, they told us that he had early onset Alzheimer's. Not that it really mattered to any of us or him what it was called, but at least we could say that instead of a rare disease that was difficult to pronounce he had a recognizable condition.
At the time, in my early 20's, not even a year of working, I decided that if I were going to spend some time with my father before his condition got worse, that I needed to do that sooner than later. A couple of things went into my decision too go. My job, obviously, though I liked the people I worked with it didn't really feel like a 'career' but just something to sustain me as I worked on poetry and my long distance relationship with Amy who lived down the coast in Oakland. I was getting tired of both working and our relationship and so moving to the farm for a bit I thought would be a good thing to do, a break from what I was doing and a chance to get time and space to focus on writing. My old friend Joel, who moved to Seattle into that same house a few months after I arrived told me that he admired my decision to go help with my father. Amy said the same thing but at the time and even looking back now it felt more like a duty than a choice, one that I rationalized to make the best of. That if I didn't go now then I might regret it later. Plus I could quit my job.
Talking to him on the phone that first year in Seattle gave me the impression that his mind was deteriorating quickly. I'd call every Sunday, usually in the afternoon. He'd usually be sitting around what we called 'the cabin,' one of two buildings he built on the farm after we sold the original farm house sometime in the early 90's. He and Susan, his second wife, might be watching television or chatting and smoking pot with their artist folk friends. Or maybe he was out mowing the fields or had run into town and Susan would have him call me when he got back. I don't really remember what exactly we'd talk about but I remember that it became harder for him to talk about anything. Eventually, every noun he knew was replaced with the word 'thing' and every place he knew was replaced with the phrase 'over there.' So as, "that thing over there" was a phrase that he came to frequently use. I could tell him what I was doing but over the year it became increasingly difficult for me to understand the references he was making. And he knew that and was frustrated. Sometimes Susan would get on the phone to clarify or maybe at the end, to summarize and clarify what he was trying to tell me. At the same time he was happy to talk to me and I was happy to talk to him. A regular date that Susan said he looked forward to, something to help anchor him and I wanted to be good.
My dad was an interesting man. Maybe a bit controversial, a person that folks might have mixed feelings about. What I can say about him are stories, not so much generalizable personality traits because I didn't know him as an adult and can't judge him by the archetypes of adult types that color my presumptions and interactions. What I choose to remember was that he was a new age 80's dad, someone who read Peck's self-help classic The Road Less Traveled, Bly's treatise on being a contemporary man Iron John, and Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the latter of which I tried to read in high school, searching for wisdom, but couldn't make sense of. He took us to family therapy after the divorce and would proclaim that he was trying to be a good dad, an admission made possible by the discourses of the sensitive 80's man. He was a builder as well, always working on a new project, be it building the houses and buildings he built (numbering four in my lifetime) or tinkering with something out on the farm or refinishing the steps to the basement, or whatever, he always had a project. He was always what seemed to me endless talking to everyone, with the folks at Farm & Fleet, the manager's at Hardee's, or driving around and stopping by randomly at the houses of people in Mineral Point. As a kid I was always waiting for him to stop chatting with folks so we could go home. All of this just a toe in the water, rose-tinted and incomplete. I increasingly admired his generous qualities as I became an adult though by the time I became an adult these qualities were merely memories, my relationship with my dad never an adult relationship.
I used to miss him all the time in my 20's after I had come back to Seattle from Mineral Point, after graduate school and New York and then California with Amy, and then eventually to Indiana for PhD school. It wasn't until he died and our pilgrimage's to the care facility in Juno, Wisconsin ceased, where he spent almost ten years of his life wandering and then stumbling around in a version of hell, one part incommunicable mental fog and confusion, one part institutional prison surrounded by the hopelessly sick and dying; it wasn't until he died, the pilgrimage's stopped, and we were finally able to hold a memorial ceremony did I stop thinking of him as frequently. Days can go by where I don't think of him at all. But here I am, thinking of him, thinking through him to get back to the present.
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