The Theft of Memory by Jonathan Kozol

Author:Jonathan Kozol
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2015-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

My Father and Mother: Together and Apart

For the remainder of my parents’ lives, Silvia or Julia was with them almost every day and every night. The exceptions were on weekends or, very rarely, on a weekday when both of them had to be away. At those times, one or another of the extra helpers Silvia had found would come in and take their place.

One of the best of these extra helpers was the wife of Alejandro, who, like Alejandro, had studied medicine in Cuba. (He had been a cardiologist; she had specialized in family medicine.) Sometimes Alejandro would come with her and stay there for an afternoon, helping when she needed help but mostly simply spending time in Daddy’s company. Lucinda had, by now, become a nurse practitioner and no longer had the time to visit the apartment on a routine basis, so I was grateful for Alejandro’s efforts to look for ways to make connections with my father and stir up his alertness.

Throughout his first two years at home, my father seemed to recognize me when I came into the room so long as I arrived before he had grown sleepy. When I kissed him, he would kiss me back. If he found it difficult to summon up my name, I would lean forward and whisper in his ear, “Hi, Daddy! It’s me! It’s Jonathan.” He would smile and grasp my hand and look at me with that penetrating gaze that, no matter how impaired his memory might be, always seemed to indicate discernment.

Although his ability to carry on a conversation of any length at all had pretty much disappeared at least a year before, he surprised me now and then by the bluntness of an answer he would give to something I had asked. Once, after the second time he’d been in the hospital, a medication he’d been given led to a week of miserable diarrhea. When I asked how he was feeling—it was a dumb question—he gave me an awful look and answered, “Ich bin dreck”—meaning, more or less, “I feel like shit.”

When he was alone with Julia and Silvia, the words he spoke were often in reaction to an act of kindness on their part or, in the case of Silvia, to something she had done that had aroused his anger. Once, when she was bathing him, she said that his resistance to her washing of his “private parts” (that, or “privates,” was the term that she and Julia always used), with which she was familiar now, impelled him suddenly to challenge her with heated indignation.

“You’re not going to get it!” he announced to her.

“I said to him, ‘I don’t want it, Dr. Kozol! I don’t need it! I have a husband of my own.”

I asked her if this made him laugh.

“No,” she said. “He didn’t laugh. He looked as if I’d startled him. I think he was a little shocked that I would say something like that.”

My father’s sense of sexual self-consciousness continued to be obvious to Silvia and Julia for a long time after he came home.

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