On Needing To Be There For My Father

Left to right: my father, me, my mother, and my sister, on my parents' 50th wedding anniversary

I’m the kind of nerd who finds connections between whatever I’m doing right now, and something I saw while watching Doctor Who. The show’s looming presence in my life colors my values, interests, and ability to process experiences. This weekend, I spent copious time contemplating the episode “Twice Upon a Time,” in which a digital reconstruction of the Doctor’s comapanion, Bill Potts, says: “I am the real Bill! A life is just memories. I'm all her memories, so I'm her.”

My father admitted aloud on Saturday something his family had long suspected: his memory is going. His doctor screened him and declared his memory loss only moderate, nothing worse than men his age regularly face. His doctor cleared him to continue driving, though his ability to recognize landmarks is diminishing, and he needs his wife there to remind him where everything is.  He’s still my dad, but maybe a little less so.

If Bill Potts is right, if memories make us ourselves, where does that leave my father? Which memories are, precisely, “him”? At present, he hasn’t forgotten anybody’s names or faces, important life events, or major history. However, he’s sketchy on making new memories, which means having long conversations with him—as I learned this weekend—is becoming difficult. He needs my mother around to maintain his focus and remind him where he is.

I haven’t always been receptive to my father and his memories. Because he frequently had little interest in the present, and often wanted to live, morally, in the pastoral recollections of his youth, his memories often didn’t seem relevant to me. Now that they’re fading, I realize those memories have nobody left to keep them alive. He hasn’t recorded his thoughts, like mine in this blog; when his memories leave him, they will vanish forever.

Someday, maybe soon, he’ll start losing meaningful experiences from his past. What happens when, for instance, Dad gets restless and reaches for a cigarette, forgetting he quit smoking nearly ten years ago? Will that experience jar him? More important, will it jar him enough to make new memories? Or will it become something he has to experience time and again, because for him, the event is fleeting and momentary? When will it start changing him?

The science fiction I enjoy often romanticizes nonlinear beings, who experience all time simultaneously. Yet watching my father struggle this weekend, I thought: such creatures would be incapable of growth and development. When all meaningful reality exists right now, we have no ability to have new experiences, or put old experiences into context. We can’t grow. We can’t be better people than yesterday, nor have hope of being better people tomorrow. We just exist.

In my youth, as I’ve written before, I wanted to stop history in some beatified past, which happened to correspond with my father’s youth, though I favored the hippie culture he rejected. I wanted all change to halt. So did he, for different reasons. Yet watching him this weekend, struggling to drive around town without guidance, or have sustained conversations, I realized (and I think he did too) that halting change has horrific consequences.

Yet for him, that decision is made. Therapeutic memory treatments, he tells me, have made little impact. The present, for him, is dwindling, and the future with it; soon, this diminution will start squeezing his past, too. That means the burden falls on me, someone whose faculties remain intact, to experience past and future for both of us. Put another way, I have to take responsibility for being present with him, because for him, every moment will be this moment.

He’s losing the ability to change, but I’m not. My ability to respond, to adapt to his requirements, gives me new opportunities to incorporate his experiences into my own. While he’s losing the ability to grow individually, we can grow together, which means I have a rare opportunity to be there for him. I can help him exist outside the moment. I can be present for him, just as, in my childhood, he was present for me.

Because I think Bill Potts was ultimately wrong. We aren’t built from our individual memories; that’s arrogant and egotistical. Our experiences matter, but we require other people to put our experiences into context. Western individualism and neoliberal economics forget that we only exist together, collectively; my family, friends, and community give me context and meaning. Now, as his present retreats and his future shrinks, I can be my dad’s context.