Always Too Soon by Allison Gilbert

Author:Allison Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2013-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

I did not go back to Denver. It was very different from my response to my mother’s death, when all I could think was, Oh my god, I’ve got to get there. I’ve got to be with my sister, my brother, my aunt. With my father, it was just like—Ugh, well, that’s over. When my mother died, I had lots of relatives asking me to come for a service. There was no such thing after my father died. He had left behind his friends a long time ago. It was his children, period.

It did not enter my mind to feel a sense of orphanhood when my father died. There are two deaths with Alzheimer’s: There’s when they actually die and get cremated or buried, and there’s the death before that.

We donated my father’s brain for Alzheimer’s research and had him cremated. Within the year, my brother and sister and I came together and had a memorial service among ourselves. My husband and two of my brother’s children were there, too. We put my father’s ashes in a really stupid lake. I can’t describe it any other way—I just thought it was a completely inadequate lake. It was on the Arkansas-Missouri border, and we got on a little pontoon boat with the ashes. I had not grieved until that point. What are you going to say—“He had Alzheimer’s. Thank God it’s over”? You know? He’s gone. And then when we got out there on the lake, everything was wrong. The lake was murky. The hills were too low. My father came from the mountains. That was when it hit. And I just started to sob. I felt very protective, like he deserved a better lake.

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