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Sue Miller writes a loving tribute to her father

by Jeanne McDonald

When a parent is diagnosed with a long and deadly illness like Alzheimer’s Disease, everyone within the familial sphere is involved. But the primary caregiver who has also suffered through this laborious journey remains burdened even after the patient passes on, still grieving with the residual pain of seeing a dignified, loving parent reduced to irrational behavior, overwhelming paranoia and unrelenting anger.

The beautiful and elegant writer Sue Miller nursed her father through the illness to his inevitable death, driven by abiding love and impelled by attempts to protect him against thoughtless caretakers, the brutal force of the disease itself, and his helpless abandonment of reality.

Despite the irrationality of her mother, Sue Miller was reared in a loving family whose linchpin was her father. Her novels—The Good Mother, Inventing the Abbotts, Family Pictures, and others—reflect the joys and sorrows of family life. But nothing had prepared her for the dark tunnel into which her father fell in 1988, and into which she, like Alice, tumbled after.

After James Nichols, a fourth-generation minister and retired professor from Princeton Theological Seminary, died, it took Williams almost 10 years to begin the memoir she calls The Story of My Father (Knopf, 2003). For several years after his death, she says, “I continued to suffer from...seizures of grief, unexpected and uncontrollable bouts of sorry and rage....” The open wound finally began to heal when she began to record the story of his life: “[H]ere is my father, in memory. Here, look at him, sitting in his study.... He’s a small handsome man, Semitic looking...with a strong down-curving nose, skin that shadows to olive. He has dark hair.... He wears glasses when he works, and often a jacket and tie.”

Although Miller had noticed signs of forgetfulness in her father, the first hard evidence of his disease came the morning in 1988 after he had been picked up by police in western Massachusetts, lost and irrational. At breakfast in Miller’s house the next morning, he complained, “You know, the little children in the basement wouldn’t say a word when I spoke to them.” Then: “There goes one!” When Miller patiently explored the house with him to confirm the absence of any children, they sat in silence for a while. “Finally he smiled ruefully and said, ‘Doggone, I never thought I’d lose my mind.’”

But that was exactly what happened. Alzheimer’s feeds on the mind, bit by bit. “The visual pathways in his brain began to fail.... The first thing to go had been his ability to read, to connect those symbols on the page with a meaning.... Increasingly now, too, he misunderstood—misread—the visual.... And now...those synapses stopped working in his brain, as he “unlearned” seeing.... His own shadow underfoot on a sunny day...was often an irritant, a strange black animal dogging him. He would sometimes kick or swat at it as we walked along.... And what were the impediments he saw late in his illness that caused him to tiptoe so carefully over something I couldn’t see, or to get down on the floor and crawl around it?”

He sometimes became violent, and he had delusions, too. “I came to feel,” writes Miller, “that these were the residue of dreams, dreams that seemed no less real to him than the fractured reality he had to live through each day....” As her father slipped more deeply under the control of the disease, visits—especially leaving—became more and more heartbreaking. “Say...are you driving?” her father would ask. “I was wondering if, maybe, you could give me a lift home.”

Miller’s story is shocking and sad as she examines all the things she did do that might have been the wrong things, or the things she didn’t do that could have been the right things. In the end, what she settled for seems exactly right. “...I tried to imagine what I would want, dying, to feel loved, I thought.... So I held him. I stroked his face, his hands. I kissed him. I spoke the names of the people he’d loved.... The last few days, as his body labored, I told him over and over it was all right to let go.... By then, I think, he wasn’t conscious.... But I kept doing it, in part, I suppose, as a kind of consolation for myself.”

This book will make you weep, but it will also give comfort to those experiencing exasperation at an Alzheimer’s patient’s behavior. Sue Miller gives both confirming information and loving advice. And, in the end, yes, a kind of consolation as well.

April 29, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 18 © 2004 Metro Pulse