The Story of My Father by Sue Miller

minutes one time when he seemed not to know who I was, but he always greeted me warmly when I first arrived; he always understood, in the first flood of pleasure, our relation to each other. I knew other people whose parent or spouse had lost this part of memory nearer the beginning of the illness. I knew how painful, how isolating that was, and my gratitude that this part of his brain was left to Dad—to all of us—was deep.
    The visual pathways in his brain began to fail. The first thing to go had been his ability to read, to connect those symbols on the page with a meaning—though he could still pick out words separately, evidence that the problem was not purely with his eyesight. Still, it was his eyesight he blamed, and it was with his eyesight that he wanted help. He had had cataracts removed while he was in Denver, and in fact one cornea had by now clouded a little again, so I took him to the eye doctor for that; we drove to the hospital in Concord one day and I watched as Dad sat forward in the darkened room, his chin resting on a stabilizer, and the laser quickly, magically, cleared that eye again.
    But it didn’t give him back what he had imagined it would—his ability to read and, beyond that, probably, some old sense of himself. He went on asking me, each time I visited, to take him for another appointment to the eye doctor, to get him a new prescription, a new pair of glasses, and I continued to put him off. As time went by he grew irritated at my slowness to respond to his need, at my indifference, as he must have seen it, to his dilemma.
    And so finally, unable to bear that, I scheduled another appointment. I asked the doctor ahead of time to try to help my father understand that new glasses wouldn’t help. And because he was a doctor, because he was a man, my father listened to him, and for a few days remembered:
There was something
organically wrong, but it wasn’t with his eyes, it was with the messages between his eyes and his brain.
And then he forgot and began to agitate again for another doctor’s appointment.
    Increasingly now, too, he misunderstood—“misread”—the visual. Oliver Sacks has written about our way of seeing as being learned; and scientists have begun to understand that, if certain visual synapses—electrical connections between nerve cells in the various visual systems of the brain—aren’t formed and “exercised,” built up, by a certain age, they can’t be developed later. Sacks speaks of a blind patient whose sight was given to him surgically in middle age who never learned “how” to see certain things.
    And now I watched my father as those synapses stopped working in his brain, as he “unlearned” seeing. Shadows became for him not the absence of light but dark
objects,
as perhaps they appear to infants and little children. Their presence was inexplicable and disturbing to him. His own shadow underfoot on a sunny day, for instance, was often an irritant, a strange black animal dogging him. He would sometimes kick or swat at it as we walked along.
    In the later stages of his illness, he stopped “seeing” food on the left side of his plate. At first everyone worried about his appetite, because he was growing so thin anyway. But then an attendant noticed the pattern. He was pleased and excited to report to me that if he simply rotated Dad’s plate a half circle, he’d soldier on and clear off the whole thing.
    Some “hallucinations” may have been simply mistakes. I thought for a while that his seeing a bull in the yard outside his window was hallucinatory until I noticed in the Victorian iron bench out there two curving back pieces like horns and, below those, a pair of floral motifs that looked like eyes. Just a misreading of what was there, then, not purely an invention.
    Sometimes it wasn’t clear what was going on. One day, as we were leaving his room, he gestured at his bathrobe, hanging from a hook. “Dave Swift,” he said, and laughed. “He’s