You Decorated My Life
There’s something familiar about him as I stare at him asleep on his twin-sized bed at the nursing home in Albany. His hair is the same color I’ve always remembered it — pure white and combed over the top of his head. He lies on his back with his mouth wide open, sucking in the stale air of the room.
His face isn’t wrinkled — you’d never imagine he’s 79-years-old — but his skin is shiny and stretched tautly across his cheek bones. Lowering my ear to his face — I wait to hear him breath and watch as his chest slowly rises and falls. I kiss him on his forehead and whisper, “Wake up.” But he never does.
I joined the U.S. Army Reserve at 17 and deployed to Iraq a few years later. For a year, I snapped photographs and wrote articles for The Anaconda Times, my base’s local newspaper. I learned that my father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s six months into my tour.
I forced myself to call home one April night in 2005. My mother answered the phone. “Dad’s in the hospital.” My father, then 71 years old, became depressed. He had quit going to work and stopped eating, locked himself in the room my parents once shared, and begun drinking again. When he was brought into the hospital, he weighed 115 pounds and the doctors warned that he would’ve died if he never crawled out of that bedroom.
Sometimes I wish he had died in that room. Truly losing him, laying him to rest, seemed easier to accept than any life he’d ever live again. Maybe it was a selfish way to think. But he was a reminder of the war and how we all got it wrong.
Four days later, I was on a plane heading back to New York to see him. My mother was wearing an ugly green jacket with fake fur around the hood when she met me at the airport. She had lost about fifteen pounds; her toothy smile couldn’t shield her nervousness. We drove straight to the nursing home.
I walked down the hallway in my sun faded desert camouflage uniform. My boots pounded the shiny tiled floor. With each step, I dreaded the nearing reality. We stopped outside of his door — it read “Frederic Hoit.” No one called him Frederic. It was Bill. Why didn’t they know that?
He was asleep in a pleather recliner. I touched his shoulder and he grabbed me. He ran his fingers over my nametag that read “Hoit” — the same that had appeared on his Army uniform decades earlier. He asked how Germany was. I bit the inside of my cheeks to keep myself from crying. I watched as his light gray sweat pants began to change color. “Oops,” he said. “I couldn’t hold it.”
My father is hollowed out. Like a soulless carbon copy that breaths and lays on a bed. His eyes, a dusty brown, are void and foggy. He smiles with false teeth and hair grows out of his ears. His mind is static — I watch as he struggles to connect thoughts and ideas, faces and voices, the past and the present.
“Hey mom,” says my father. “If we had a daughter what would we have named her?”
“Uhh, we’d name her Kate. . .” my mother says, looking at me as I sit on the floor.
“Oh.”
“What?” I ask. “You don’t like that name?”
“Ah, it’s okay. . .”
“Bill!” says my mother. “That’s our daughter Kate.”
“I knew that!”
When I first came home from Iraq in 2005, we tried to pretend like things were normal. My father would come home for Christmas and Thanksgiving. He’d play with our cat and get angry when she’d jumped on the kitchen table to smell his coffee. My mother would force him to carve the turkey but grow frustrated when he couldn’t hold the knife steady.
“Mom,” I yell. “He can’t cut the fucking turkey… he has Alzheimer’s. Why would you give him a knife?”
I’d buy my mother Christmas presents and sign my father’s name to the tag. When it came time to exchange the gifts, I’d load his lap with poorly wrapped boxes and he’d pass them to my mother. “Merry Christmas!” he’d say, with an oblivious look.
I introduced him to my boyfriend and he’d immediately take on the protective dad role by offering a sturdy handshake — but his intimidation would soon diminish after he would ask, “So, where are you from?” for the fifth time.
When my parents celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary on February 15, 2006, I hooked up my iPod to speakers in my father’s dorm-style room. Kenny Rogers’ “You Decorated My Life” — the song they danced to on their wedding day — bounced off the walls in his room and into the hallway.
“All my life was a paper once plain, pure and white…”
My father took my mother’s hand and they wrapped their arms around one another — both forgetting I was there.
“And you decorated my life, created a world where dreams are apart…”
She rested her head on his shoulder while he smiled and took small steps in his slippers.
“There was no harmony; life meant nothin’ to me, until you came along…”
That was the last time they ever danced. That was the last time I could pretend things were normal.
As the gaping holes expand in his brain, swallowing memory after memory, we are left with only the disjointed fragments he has left. His flat face lights up only when he talks about his days in the Army. The Korean War was heating up and instead of being drafted, he volunteered for two years.
Life in the Army wasn’t very glamorous but they are the only memories he holds onto. Traveling to Ft. Dix, New Jersey — the same base from which I deployed — and then making his way to Ft. Ord, California, he wondered what he had gotten himself into. But something happens when he starts to talk about his time in California.
“Katie, have you ever been to San Francisco?” he asks. “Aw god, it’s beautiful. My favorite city. I’d like to visit again.”
“I’ve been there,” I say. “Did you ever visit the Tenderloin?”
“The ocean, the weather. . .” he says. “Can we go there?”
He’s wearing black sweat pants and an oversized t-shirt, white socks with loafers and in need of a haircut. I look at the nametag wrapped around his ankle: Frederic William Hoit.
“Sure,” I tell him.
He smiles and closes his eyes. I think of the father I once had — the father I knew before the war. Bill was a used car salesman turned confidant to students pursuing their GEDs at a small school in Schenectady. He bought me Maxi Pads when I got my first period and my first real bra from Fashion Bug. Bill was the man who quit drinking when I was 12 because our family was falling apart.
He would sit by his police scanner when I told him I was going to a party. Then he would call if the cops were on their way, “Get outta there, Katie.” Even when times were tough Bill would still slip me a twenty-dollar bill when he’d drop me and my friends off at the mall. He used to tell me stories about his days living in Texas and Oklahoma — the way the moon lit up the sky; he’d press his lips together and make the sound of the howling wind.
He was my dad.
Now, there are mood swings and medication changes. There was the day he kissed a female patient. He has had arthritis in the hips, a close call with pneumonia, and breathing problems. He uses a wheelchair and questions why he is there — stuck in a nursing home with visitors only on Sunday mornings and the holidays.
When I sit next to my father now, I have questions. What if I never went to Iraq? Would he have ended up this way? Why did this happen so soon? Who’s going to take care of mom — she’s only 65? What does he remember about us? Who will walk me down the aisle?
But I never ask these questions. I watch him as he sleeps away days, waking only to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and vanilla ice cream. I read him the history of the United States Army and play his favorite song Mambo No. 5 by Lou Bega. I bring him gummy bears and sneak in his favorite Boston Kreme donuts.
Thirteen days later, the day after my 21st birthday, I headed back to Iraq. I left my mother alone, childless, and husbandless for another six months. I left my father in a nursing home wearing adult diapers. That was nine years ago. But I can’t break the habit of searching for him — searching for a flicker of light, a sign that Alzheimer’s has not taken all of him yet. I search because I want him to know who’ve I’ve become. I search because I want him to know how sorry I am. I search because that’s all that I have left.
But as his memories have faded — so have mine. The memories of Iraq have morphed from children begging for water, of wounded and bloodied troops lying in a hospital bed in Balad to my dad lying in a nursing home. The anger has subsided. The tears have dried. He’s the only memory that still remains of my war.
When I’m feeling courageous, I ask him if he knows why he’s here in the nursing home.
“Not really,” he says. Why?”
“Do you know what Alzheimer’s is?”
“No. What is it?”
“It’s a disease that deteriorates your memory.”
“That’s what they say I have?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s probably true. What’s a memory?”
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