Wisconsin

In 1962, my grandparents bought some land and a little cabin on Lake Mildred, a small spring fed lake in upper Wisconsin.  In my early childhood my family would go there for sometimes as long as a month in the summer.  Some of my earlier memories are of bouncing along in that1971 Subaru, the one where you could peel up the mats and see the road going by through the rust, all the way up to Wisconsin.  Me, my mom, my dad, a cooler, a sewing machine and a month's worth of projects, books, toys. 

Once we were within the last half hour, long white wooden signs in the shapes of arrows would appear at intersections of roads curving to meet at unconventional angles.  "The Larsens," "Teagues,"  "DeZeutles" names of families were painted on the arrows to direct lost guests or confused family members in the right direction through the homogenous wooded roads.  The last curves of the road to my grandparents' summer house were the best, as the trees closed in and became more dense above us.  Finally, the entirely wooded "Shoreview Drive" would turn to the left and become a path with two tire ruts.  The path would fork, and we would go to the right.  Coming slowly down a set of gentle but bumpy hills, the little red house with a green roof would come into view.  A sign saying "The Andersons" was hung above the door. 

When I was small, it was a paradise with boats, swimming, fish and grandparents.  When I started getting old enough to want friends, there was another girl my age who lived year round at the lake with her grandparents that I would play with.  Somewhere along here, life began to intervene.  My grandmother died.  My grandfather's Alzheimers meant that my dad would come up for the entire summer so that his father could still spend the summers here in place that was familiar.  My dad always wanted me to come, and devised various strategies to get me to spend time there, including bringing friends, finding a local music store that would let me practice the piano in one of their spare teaching studios and a paddle boat.

Despite his best efforts, when I started to be a teenager, it became unbearable.  Following an incident involving a bicycle, a dog, a couple cans of paint, one of those arrow signs and a swarm of northwoods mosiquitos, I asked to be sent home early and as soon as possible.  I was 14 and I did not return until my late 20s. 

The first trip as an adult was fine.  I was worried but it was enjoyable and a nice break.  I rowed out to an island daily for alone time and score study.  The loons were nice, but I was ready to return to civilization after the four or five days. 

Fast forward a few years, and I went again in the midst of an odd transitional summer while deciding whether or not to spend another year in the UK.  I visited my father in Wisconsin, ever his summer hideaway, even with his own father long gone and his new wife being 'not a fan' of the woods, mosquitos or even the hint of bears.  He gave me his blessing and I went back across the ocean to continue my pursuit of dreams.

Two years later, back in my own country yet so far away from what I've always known that I feel like I'm in another foreign place, I learn that my father now has Alzheimers.  Once a probability and now a fact that it turns out he had been hiding from me for eleven years.  This came out because another murky northwoods incident involving my father and his younger brother, age 68 at the time, trying to take down a dead tree by themselves.  The next year, I fly to Wisconsin directly to spend some time with my father while my uncle is away on business.  I am glad that I came, because it seems clear to me that he shouldn't be alone up here.

A couple of years later it is doubtful if my dad can make it to the lake at all.  My uncle mailed us the keys, and my boyfriend, his dog and I fly to Ohio, rent a car and pack my dad in for the trek.  It was a wonderful week.  Even though my dad was having trouble stringing enough words together to make sentences to express himself, we discovered that his powers of profanity were still uneffected as he tried to get his legs and knees in and out of the slightly too small rental car.  We also discovered that despite having to ask which token was his on every turn, my dad could still play and win at Monopoly.  We watched on TV as congressman Anthony Weiner of New York City resigned, and my dad got a great laugh when we explained why.  We did as much with the lake as we could, but getting my dad into the boat to take a ride was harrowing, and he didn't enjoy the ride very much as his mistrust of Paul's boat driving was apparent. 

Fast forward to another summer and my father is much, much worse.  We decide to try, but are prepared to go without him.  This time we fly to Chicago and my step mother drives my dad there to meet us.  We transfer him to our rental car, bigger than last year after our experience and he settles uneasily into the backseat with the dog.  Everything is slower.  He certainly couldn't say who I am, but he does know that I'm not a stranger and important.  Stopping for dinner becomes a nightmare when I offer my dad a choice of condiments for his burger.  Bad idea.  He tries to use dirt from inside his glasses case as pepper on the burger.  He takes 10 minutes to deal with a small cup of ketchup.  Finally we make it to Wisconsin.  My uncle and his girlfriend are waiting, and we are very thankful because we needed their help this time. 

The week is good, but my dad is confused by food and needs to be constantly reminded which room is his.  My uncle helps get him dressed and supervises a shower.  He brings him down to the pier where he has bought solid folding chairs with good arms so that he can get in and out.  He puts a fishing pole in his hands, but my dad isn't really interested.  He seems as content to be there as anywhere, but he sleeps a lot.  The one time we got a true response from my dad was after dinner the first night when I made the  mistake of talking politics with my uncle.  My uncle is a great host, generous bartender and a Republican, the only one in our extended Anderson family.  So we were argued for quite some time about various politicians and elections past, and my father was very engaged listening and then had something to say.  Actually he had a lot of say, and went on for some time.  The only problem was that it came out as what I can only describe as word salad.  The cadences and tone of his speech were the same as they always had been, but the words were all mixed up and didn't make any sense. 

When we were getting ready to leave Ohio at the end of our trip, I knocked on my dad's door early to say that we were getting ready to leave.  He actually got up quickly so that he could say goodbye.  How could I know that this really was goodbye for us?  Three months later he was gone.  I spent my childhood watching my grandfather go down so slowly and so painfully with the same disease that I never expected this.  I look at what happened and what was ahead, and I do see it at least intellectually as a blessing and last summer as an amazing gift. 

In the midst of all of this, I have come to love Wisconsin, even almost crave being there.  This whole year I've been thinking about sitting on the lake in a kayak and watching the loons and eagles go by and just being. Although it definitely has something to do with my dad, it is not only my missing him that makes me want to go.  I find a great and beautiful stillness there.  My life is frenetic and busy and I love it, but I am starting more and more to crave stillness and be ok with not always being. 

I've only had one dream with my dad in it since he passed, but we were in Wisconsin and he was talking to me.  He was sitting on the sofa in the place it used to be.  Two weeks from today, we fly out.  

Three and a half months

A few days ago, I woke in the morning after a dream where I had been with my dad in Wisconsin.  He had been sitting on the sofa positioned in the way it had been for years until last summer.  After this dream, I felt as if I were dwelling in a cloud of sadness.  It is March.  My dad passed in November, and ...  I wish I had words for this.  I am crying now perhaps more than I did then. 

Part of me wonders if this is borrowed sadness.  Sandy, my dad's wife, posted on FB that tomorrow will be the anniversary of her infamous first date with my father in 1988!  This would be the date where my father's wardrobe made...  quite an impression.  Luckily, she looked past this and the rest is now history.

I feel as if I see my father in everything right now.  In see him in his books on my shelves.  I see him in the mattress pad that Paul washed and that my dad bought for me once.  I see him in cleaning out my old car for sale and finding an old cassette tape that he gave me on my seventeenth or eighteenth birthday.  I see him in my desire to mange my finances well.  I see him in Elsa the dog, to whom he took a great liking and remembered longer than anyone else he met so late in life. 

Yesterday, I took to watching a mindless serial TV program from the 60's on netflix while I worked on things.  This morning I did that again, but with the realization that I've been doing this to cover everything up.  Recently, my life has finally slowed down a bit from the fever pace it had been going at since September.  It is good to have time to be a little slower and perhaps a little more real, but at the same time - other than over the Thanksgiving holiday - I really haven't stopped since my dad died.  Work and activity, all of this going and going.  I did kind of resent it yet I enjoyed and craved it, too.  Now with just a bit of spaciousness, I feel as if I've been left in a room with everything else cleared out except a certain sadness that I had been avoiding.

Even now meeting this sadness feels like an indulgence.  In an hour and a half, I must leave for a concert.  I have to sing and sing well. Maybe I just need to turn that 1960's serial back on to have something to put back in front of that sadness.

January 3rd in Mentone, Indiana

I wish I knew what to say, but sometimes there really is nothing to say, or maybe nothing worth saying.  I'm 'home' in Ohio for the first time since my dad died.  We buried his ashes on Thursday in the cemetery in Mentone, Indiana where generations of my forebears are interred. 







It was especially hard for his wife.  She found it comforting to have his ashes in the house.  It was a part of him and this was something that I really don't think she was ready to do.

 No one wants to sleep my dad's bedroom.  It doesn't feel right.  For me, the main thing is that the house is too clean.  I miss his clutter and newspapers around everywhere.  Logan, his step-granddaughter, keeps saying that she sees him or expects to see him in his chair or walking around.  My uncle's resemblance to my father took her by surprise.

Here is the house in Mentone built by Emra Anderson, my dad's grandfather and my great-grandfather.  Emra was a large animal vet.  My uncle told of stories of watching his grandfather operate on a pig in what is now the garage out back.  This helped to convince my uncle that he did not want to become a doctor

Here I am next to the Mentone Egg.  Life is short.  My father had a good life, but it was certainly of a shorter duration than I thought it would be.  Most of our family lives into their 90s or at least mid eighties.  My dad was just 78.  I may be able to recognize his earlier passing as a blessing given what was coming, but that still doesn't mean that I was ready to say goodbye.  I suppose it is best to try to enjoy the absurdity and treasure what times we do have with each other.

7/25/2009 - Alzheimers in the news

Alzheimer's in the News - 7/25/09

Two summers ago I found out that my father had been classified as the fourth in my extended family to have Alzheimer’s Disease. My step-mother had been using the term “dementia” for some time, but once I heard my uncle use the “A Word” it seemed that everything had changed. Suddenly, I had a context for the changes I had been observing from a far. There was a history, a pattern to relate to, and suddenly the awful road ahead seemed clear. Twelve years of my childhood was spent watching my dad care for his father through his decline through the same disease.

Researchers always seem to be publishing new findings on the causes of Alzheimer’s Disease. One week they report a correlation with a lack of physical activity and the next week there is an article connecting it to a lack of brain exercise. Some make correlations with lower levels of education, unhealthy diets or alcohol consumption. Then there are studies saying that caffeine might slow the onset. The fact that aluminum deposits are consistently found in the brains of the Alzheimer’s afflicted, leads me to look askance at all of those cans I drink from and worry about all of the foil used in past roasts. Basically, everything and nothing has been reported as linked to Alzheimer’s Disease.

In reading all of the latest research, none of these theories has ever had very much resonance with me. My father was always very conscious about exercising and maintaining a healthy diet. He ran in local races and had a passion for oat bran muffins. Though he ate fish oils with gusto, for a large portion of his life he drank up to nine cups of coffee a day. But it turns out that this should have been beneficial! Although he sometimes seemed to be the archetypal absent minded professor, he was doing “all the right things.”

A few weeks ago, I read a BBC news article that linked his type of brain degeneration to elevated nitrate levels. Nitrates are found in fertilizers and insecticides. They are also elevated by the process of grilling or overcooking foods and are found in higher concentrations in processed foods. Ah-ha! Being of Midwestern extraction, processed foods and overcooking are ways of life! “Cooking” in my childhood was more often than not opening some package and adding something like water, oil and scallions. No meal was complete without meat, be it roasted in aluminum or barbequed in the summer. In the summers, farm run off in the water supply raised the nitrate levels in tap water past “acceptable” levels. As a child, I remember articles in the paper stating that the levels of nitrates in the water had now gone past an acceptable level, normally only some fraction of a percentage point, and that the populace should not drink the tap water. At this point we would charge out the store to buy bottled water only to discard this practice when the next newspaper article informed us that levels had returned to a “safe” range. For a shinning moment I thought I had found an explanation.

And then I thought that if all of the other articles had seemed so far apart from my experience, this was just another correlation rather than causation. If this is really a reason, why doesn’t everyone from my area of the country with similar habits have this problem? My easy answer slipped away as quickly as it had come.

10/10/2009 - What is left behind

One morning last week I called my father, a retired political scientist in the earlier stages of Alzheimers. He never remembers that I have called after the fact, but in the moment he is always happy to talk, or rather these days listen more than not.

In my ramblings about my life so far away in California, I mentioned that I had made inquiries about singing on a concert series at the Richard Nixon Library and Memorial. My father, who is reported to have once danced a gig in front of the television set at the news of Nixon's resignation, had forgotten that Nixon had died. When I reminded him that he passed away during the Clinton Presidency, he jovially said that he guessed he hadn't heard much from him in a while.

There is always a lot of talk in my extended family about Alzheimers, as my father is the fourth in the family to manifest these same symptoms. Many of my relatives have said that the losses in the earlier stages of Alzheimers often leave some fundamental essence of that person exposed. My great-aunt Mildred saw beauty in everything, and would tell you about it repeatedly since she could forget that she had already called your attention to the same thing 10 minutes before. My grandfather clung passionately to trying to remember certain facts, first the date of his wife's death and then the fact that she had died. Much later, he expressed a wish to find another woman, a wish that suggested there had been someone else in his heart as well.

Growing up, I always felt that my father's picture should be next to the word "inhibited" in the dictionary. We never talked about feelings, only politics or family gossip. The only passion he showed was for politics, but even that was tempered by his professor's mindset that compelled him to lecture more than converse or listen. As we were talking about the Nixon library last week, some thought came to his head and he started a sentence as we once had talked only to have the idea escape him after two or three words. I did my best to fill in the gaps. Although he no longer grasps the details in the issues of politics, he still enjoys the sport and his joy is evident in his laughter when hearing me talk about the latest antics of John Boehner or some recent fallen Republican.

In his inability to express his thoughts or even form them fully, he is able to share only his 'love of the game.' He also says 'I love you' to me more now than ever before. Although still the consummate partisan, he no longer seems so bothered that his wife is a Republican. (Long before he fell in love with this strong woman, I was raised to believe that Republicans were practically another species.) I hope that he is able to more freely share his love with her as well, especially as she is the one who's daily acts are a testament of love for him.

10/28/2009 - Happy Birthday

Today is my dad's 75th birthday. At first when I called to wish him a Happy Birthday, he couldn't quite do the math to figure out his age. After I reminded him of how old he is, he seemed to remember it throughout the conversation.

Talking to my dad over the phone is getting more difficult. He remembers many things about me and where I live, but his own daily activities and plans are becoming hazier and harder to discuss. Even talking about politics at a rudimentary level was more difficult today. Who is John Boehner? Where is his district? After asserting that Marcy Kaptur is his congressman, which she is, he then told me that her district goes all the way to the Indiana line, which it does not. It actually goes in the opposite direction along the lake and encompasses Sandusky. These slips are in the realm that was previously unimaginable for my father. Even when I was in high school, he might have left the oven on all day, come home to some small, charred shape on a pan and have no recollection of what it might have been or why he had put it in the oven, but he could tell you every intricacy of state and local political information.

In an attempt to find something else to talk about, I googled my grandfather, and much to my amazement, his full name brought up quite a bit about him. I came across a description of an archival collection at Northwestern University with documents pertaining to his tenure and work there. The PDF started with a biography that was accurate and gave me some information that I had not known before. Within the results I even came upon a sight that boasted pictures the matched my grandfather's name. Some were the facebook type photos of modern people with the same name or a kitten in a football helmet, but two of the photos were actually of my grandfather!

My dad was able to latch onto bits of information as I read it to him. He would either say that a name or some information was familiar or he would help to fill in some detail or connection with what he had been doing in his life while his father was busy with some accomplishment that graces his resume even in death.

My grandfather was a well respected and very successful man by all the standards of the world. Until I had read this official biography by his employer of over thirty years, I had not quite realized how much so. Despite his brilliance, hard work and great success, he was struck by the same problem that is now stealing my father's mind, struck at the very time that he should have been enjoying the fruits of his labor.

The year my parents were married was the year my grandfather retired. I was born the year after, the first grandchild. By the time I was five or six we knew that my grandfather had this problem. My grandmother had become suspicious when he started paying his bills twice. The former Associate Dean, Professor of Marketing was paying his own bills twice. When I was 7, my grandfather was 75, and he still knew me then. By the time I was ten, he was a bit foggy on who I was exactly. Tall for my age, even then I resembled my grandmother who had passed away a few years before. Waking from a nap he could mistake me for her without his glasses, yet outside playing with a friend he would refer to the two of us corporately as "the boys," a reference to his own two sons.

A large part of my childhood was spent watching my grandfather decline and my father taking care of him, as much as he could. Also an academic, my father would take my grandfather to his old lake cottage in Wisconsin, a place he still remembered, and they would spend the summers there together, my father "doing research" and my grandfather puttering around. One summer my grandfather painted all of the decent wood and wicker chairs white. There had been a can of white paint in the garage. I suggested to my dad that he leave some paint stripper out next and then some wood refinisher, since he wouldn't remember and could then restore the chairs. My dad didn't think that was a good idea.

Gradually and painfully my grandfather slipped away. My father, the good and dutiful man, didn't have the heart to even pull the feeding tube when he finally entered a completely vegetative state one month before his death. He finally passed away when I was 17.

Later in the day after our conversation and my bit of Internet research, I sat in a staff meeting at work staring out the window and doing a little math. What was my grandfather like at my father's current age? How old were they both when diagnosed? If I project my grandfather's case onto my father, how much more time do I have left with him? How much longer will he know me? How much longer can we have some semblance of a conversation?

And when this subsided, I thought about my own life choices and wondered how much this has effected them, remembering that I dropped out of my doctoral program only a few months after I found out about my father's diagnosis. Not that I believe that their choice of academic lives led to their manifestation of the same disease. Rather, I am overwhelmed by the seeming meaninglessness of such achievement and of academic pursuits, especially when it is lost so cruelly and so quickly. Did they enjoy their work or did they look forward to enjoying their lives later? Their academic lives and capabilities, that part of them that took up the largest portion of their vitality and strength, was the first thing to go. What can that mean?

2/6/2010 - Christmas Closet

When I was home this past December, my stepmother assigned me the task of helping my dad go through and get rid of stuff in the closet of his office. When I think back to everything that happened during that vacation, the trips that I took, friends I saw, conversations I had or tried to have, my happiest thoughts are of time spent on that bloody closet.

My father's intellectual capacities seem to be declining quickly. I already knew that he could no longer remember phone conversations the that we have or even that they had happened after the fact. I was unprepared for just how much the present moment escapes him. Maybe it is not that the actual present moment escapes him. Rather, it is that he continues to exist almost solely in the present moment and has trouble remembering the ones just past.

Either way, conversations about anything but the distant past seemed to move at a glacial speed, if at all. Ask him what he was doing when President Roosevelt died and out comes a great story. Ask him what he had for dinner or just ordered at a restaurant and he has no idea.

It is with this in mind, that we ventured into his office. In addition to separating things for goodwill, one of the major jobs was to find and shred old financial documents. Once upon a time in the not too distant past, my father had a fair number of investments. In the process of his decline, he lost a lot of money. We don't know where it all went, but by the time we realized how bad things had gotten and my stepmother finally took over his finances a great deal had been lost to shady brokers, market declines, charities, political causes, vitamin salesmen, mail order smoked salmon and God knows what else. What was left to be gotten rid of were folders, binders and old cardboard boxes full of a paper trail of now lost wealth.

On days that I was home, the scene was set with myself alternately poking about in the closet and sitting on the floor shredding. My dad would sit in a chair slowly reading through a box of old class notes. The shredder served as a rallying cry to my father. He would hear it and then come to the office to make sure that I wasn't destroying something important. Invariably he would ask me if I had brought the machine with me. I would tell him that it belonged to his wife, and he would settle into the chair to continue his slow sifting through notes and newspaper clippings.

There were some exciting finds in the labyrinthine closet. My favorite was a letter that he had written to his Aunt Mildred in 1960 when Kennedy was elected. There was also a great stash of forgotten food stuffs buried throughout the closet. I removed 3 expired tins of fish, 4 cans of soup, an expired jar of peanut butter, a box of instant mashed potatoes and a bag of potato chips, mercifully unopened. There was also a 6" X 12" filled entirely with return address labels and other thank you gifts from charities including six unopened American flags.

In the recycled envelopes with tax returns from the 1980's and canceled checks, I found record of a loan that my mother took on after the divorce. My father had cosigned. I also found a three ring binder detailing his father's slow decline from Alzheimer's. I could only read as far as the first letter from my uncle describing some of his symptoms and the infamous incident when he disappeared into the woods in Wisconsin, which resulted in a massive search with a local team and dogs. This was the end of my grandfather's summers in Wisconsin, one of the few places he remembered.

Amongst the recyclables were incredible stacks of investment and health magazines. At one time organized into labeled binders, all of them had my father's tell tale underlining throughout to show that he had read them and what he had found important or useful. I threw these magazines out with relish just as I shredded the record of the loan, I shredded the history of my father's obsessions: investment and avoiding his father's fate through living a better life. Anyone could see how futile both of those exercises turned out to be.

In the days that I worked and thinned out the closet, I got rid of a box of unused candles, bags of clothing, 4 trash bags of shredded papers and a few carloads of recycling. My dad got through about 1 box of old class notes. I kept asking him if he thought he would use it again. He would say, "Oh, I guess not." Then he would part with a few sheets of paper but decide to keep some others. At one point, I asked him what he was reading. He said is was an article about Nixon, but really it was about Bush II.

Somehow, even with the emotional baggage of so much that I was finding, this was a happy time for me. We were doing something together. We barely spoke, but it was alright. We've always been quiet, except for talking about political things or family gossip. This is just how we both are; sometimes socially inhibited but with a lot of pent up passion that spills forth into the things we really care about. We both like to putter, read and run. We enjoy planting things and looking at trees. Though not easily aroused, we both have volcanic tempers but love very deeply and loyally. These things seem to be the essence of my father, and I am sorry that it has taken his stripping bear, his slow deconstruction for me to realize just who he really is underneath all that he had seemed to be for so long.