"My father was an associate editor of Life magazine at 23 years old, and at 33 he was managing editor. He was an independent New Englander who didn't believe in telling anyone what to do. But at 91, he was losing his language and his memory, and I was making decisions for him." This is how John Thorndike began describing the man who is featured in his book The Last of His MInd: A Year in the Shadow of Alzheimer's (Swallow Press, 2009) in his talk last month at The Tattered Cover Bookstore.
John Thorndike's memoir of moving to Cape Cod to take care of his father in the last year of his life is an articulate, and sometimes poetic testament to the love between a son and his dying father. It is also a meditation on the question of coercion. "He always backed me up in what I wanted to do," claims Thorndike, "and never told anyone what to do." Having been raised in a household of free thinkers, Thorndike argued against the notion of providing his father with activities, and even food, when he was uninterested in even getting out of bed.
"I argued against psychotherapists' recommendations to bring him to the community center to socialize. They'd say, 'That's what he needs.' But whose to say that my father should do things that make him happy or make me happy?" pondered Thorndike.
Thorndike even went to the extent of not feeding his father, giving him water or dressing him for a couple of days at a time, in order to not "coerce" him into doing something that he didn't want to do. Yet, as anyone who has been a caregiver of an Alzheimer's patient knows, people whose brains are strangled by amyloid plaque are incapable of making rational decisions, and ultimately regress to a state reminisicent of early childhood.
As parents we are responsible for providing food, shelter and clothing to our offspring. Are we not also responsible for caring for the bedridden, demented elderly?
A liberal home in which one is encouraged to think and act for himself is laudable. But in the instance of caring for an aged parent with dementia, the philosophical conundrum of coercian becomes something best left to reflect upon after the patient has passed on.
About the author: John Thorndike, formerly of Boulder, Colorado, lives and writes in Athens, Ohio. HIs novels are Anna Delaney's Child and The Potato Baron. His first memoir was Another Way Home. The Last of His Mind is his latest memoir.
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