In Search of My Father (Part 1)

April marked the seven-year anniversary of my father’s death. Seven is the number of completion. I’m not at all sure what affect this little tidbit of information will have on me once April 24, 2008 arrives. Will it end seven years of wondering whether or not I did all that I could do to help him? Will it calm the intensity of my grief? Will I miss him any less? I doubt it.

The man I grew up loving and admiring all my life passed away with a heart attack due to complications from diabetes. For many years prior to his death, I struggled with his physical deterioration. I watched a once strapping specimen of a man with smooth, caramel skin, and a laugh that could wake the sun from its nighttime slumber, waste away to a frail and barely recognizable shell of his former self.

I didn’t fully understand at first what I was witnessing. Of course, my intellect kept telling me the man is older now, past sixty, changes in his health are to be expected. Decline in mental capacity is eminent. Get a grip. It happens to everyone. Yet, in my heart, I knew that something else was wrong.

Father/daughter relationships … 

I have many happy memories of my early childhood with my father—memories that blinded me to depth of his illness. Because of my lack of understanding, I took Daddy’s gradual decline into a state of apathy and his indifference toward his family and his home as a personal attack. Why is he so cantankerous all of a sudden? I thought to myself. Why is he so mean? This unrecognizable father in his every waking moment seemed extremely unhappy. The look of pain on his face revealed an acute sense of disappointment and despair. He was slipping away, his very soul drowning in the deep, black, murky waters of some abandoned well. I wanted desperately to relieve him of his pain, but I didn’t know how. There was so much I wanted to say but the words wouldn’t come, and the same was true for Daddy.

Then, one day a conversation with a co-worker sparked a deeper investigation into my father’s drastic change in personality. “That sounds like Alzheimer’s,” said my co-worker and friend, Lorraine. “My mother had that, and your father’s symptoms sound exactly like what I went through with her. You need to get him checked.”