This Is Us

Watching My Father Die

The quiet, crushing weight of Alzheimer's

My Father and I near the end.

For the first 12 years of my life, the idea of a “dad” was pretty esoteric. I knew I technically had one, but I’d often go years without seeing him. He was off-limits, “broken.” He had something called “alcoholism” probably because of his experiences in a place called “Vietnam”—neither of which I really understood at age five. All I knew by age 12 was that I’d given up on him. I’d spent too many afternoons sitting on the front porch waiting for him and now understood he just wasn’t coming.

During those years, my mom raised six of us kids alone, an indescribably Herculean task. Through sheer intelligence, grit, and grift, she kept us fed and with a roof over our heads—sometimes it was a hotel roof, sometimes the roof had holes, but we mostly remained dry, and the times we got wet made us all the stronger for it.

After a summer living six of us in a single motel room, she managed to scrape together enough money to make a down payment on a land-contract home for $35,000. As one would expect, it was a disaster—but it was ours. Exposed wiring hung from ceilings, literally every wall had holes, baseboards were nonexistent, and touching the refrigerator and sink at the same time meant a pretty serious electrical shock. So she did what any cash-strapped mother would do and hired a sketchy local handyman to try to patch up the potentially deadly issues. That’s how we met David.

David could fix just about anything. He also was an accomplished chef and former boxer. His overindulgent love of beer and pot had led to a bit of a downward slide and he started day laboring as a painter and handyman.

We were curious kids, and David let us watch as he fixed things. Like magic, over the course of an afternoon, he’d turn dangling electrical wires of death into a functional dining room light. Holes in walls disappeared in a flurry of drywall dust and paint as if they’d never existed. Pots poised to catch leaks from the roof returned to the kitchen after his high-wire shingle and tar act. He was fearless and seemed to understand how everything worked. It was mind-blowing. Through it all, he was kind and patient and talked to us like we mattered.