id to take
him places because she was scared that he would fall. Their world shrank as Daddy
became more and more housebound. Friends visited. They came to Daddy when he could
no longer come to them. That is one of the luxuries of living a long time in a small town.
We never got a diagnosis of Alzheimer's or a specific form of cognitive failing.
But we saw his mind erode. Once, he asked Barbara to get him some "B & Bs." He meant
M&Ms
monster dr dre, but he kept saying "B & Bs." In her ten-year-old way, she understood him and
came out with the brown bag of bright candy just the same. He also started sleeping a lot,
getting up to have his coffee and his breakfast, now minus the cigarette, and then heading
back to bed. But he never gave up his drink at night.
When my mother took Daddy to the doctor, one of the questions on the cognition
test was "Who is the president?" And my father, who had been a Democrat for years,
answered, "Some joker from Arkansas." The doctor looked at Mother with a small smile
and then asked, "Who was the last president?" And Daddy had no idea, even though it
was George H. W. Bush, my father-in-law. I thought then, months before George
announced that he was running for governor of Texas, how fleeting all of this is--our
memories
newport red cigarettes, our moments--how four years in the White House and the millions of still
photos and tens of thousands of hours of videotape that accumulate from the highest
levels of a political career can just vanish amid the death of brain cells. George H. W.
Bush was one of the most recognized men on the planet in the year 1990, and now, three
years later, my own father forgets my father-in-law.
My mother was fortunate that she was able to hire help. Friends and
acquaintances would call with the name of someone who had assisted one of their
relatives
monster headphones, and so she found a man to come in each morning to help Daddy bathe and dress
and then had other people who came through during the day
wholesale newports cigarettes, especially to help her if he
fell. Barbara and Jenna went out to visit that last summer. In the past, they had gone
individually for a week at a time, to get to be the only granddaughter
headphones, and the one who
stayed home was, ever so briefly, our only child. But this time they went together. Daddy
still knew who they were, but so many other things had slipped out of his grasp.
In the middle of that same summer, after we'd packed Barbara and Jenna off to
Camp Longhorn, George and I ducked out to a lunchtime matinee movie, Forrest Gump.
Just as we were pulling into the parking lot of the theater, the phone rang in the car--it
seems almost quaint to recall those big car phones now, when most of us walk around
with BlackBerries hooked to our hips. One of the campaign staffers was on the line
telling George that Ann Richards had just called him a jerk. "Some jerk" were her exact
words at a rally in Texarkana. George rolled his eyes, shrugged his shoulders, and we
went in to watch Tom Hanks on the big screen. Although it was shock