Stand with me on Man’s old planet, gazing north when sky has darkened; follow down the Dipper’s handle, half again and veering leftward. Do you see it? Can you sense it? Nothing there but cold and darkness. Try again with both eyes covered, try once more with inner vision, hearken now to wild geese honking, sounding through the endless spaces, bouncing off the strange equations. There it glistens! Hold the vision, warp your ship through crumpled spaces. Gently, gently, do not lose it. Virgin planet, new beginnings. Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein

Heinlein wrote of wild geese as a symbol for moving on, following the call of nature. His character, Lazarus Long, knew his time to move had come whenever he could hear them in his head. As he held the dying hand of a woman he deeply loved, she whispered to to him, “Can you hear them?”

When I first started writing this series my father was still alive. We harbored hopes of his recovery though we knew his chances for long term survival were minimal. LBD kills eventually, but a little bit at a time. Eventually you lose too much functionality, too many pathways become corrupted, and too many sins accumulate to the point of full shut down. I don’t subscribe to much faith and I don’t see how his condition is connected to anything about him as a person. He wasn’t being punished for past misdeeds or ancient sleights. God did not look down, deem him in need of dementia, and place a supernatural hand upon his brow, robbing him of coherent thought. He simply had a disease for which there is no cure. Like many before him my father was struggling with a condition he didn’t understand, but would ultimately come to kill him.

However, the way in which he handled the disease is neither sad or heroic. How we handle adversity can come to define a person. Dad chose to keep most of his condition a secret, many times the symptoms creeping into the light accidentally. He’d ask about the child who ran past the bathroom door, the little girl. There was no little girl, but my son dashed past him five minutes before. He might laugh when told it was Tuesday, not Sunday and say what we all say, “Where has the week gone?” It’s a subtle form of lying that we allow the elderly, but in someone sick it’s deadly.

Throughout this entire series I’ve tried to focus more on what happened to him, chronicling his condition for others. I struggled to leave out interpretation or determination of the facts, trying to describe each phase without slipping in “gut reactions” or false outrages. In that quest I found the need to be honest with myself too; my father’s illness should have been crushing to me, but it wasn’t. I found with the help of my brother we could get him to places, move him around his different rooms, and generally express compassion for him. While my father didn’t inspire great deeds of self sacrifice, I found caring for him somewhat satisfying. I think my brother did too. My father clearly needed us in those final months, something never expressed before. I know he’d have done the same thing for me.

I respected my father, mostly. He taught me to get up every day and go to work, no matter what. I’ve missed fewer than 20 days of work due to illness in my 29 years of work. He taught me to control my emotions, though I suspect the value in that one will prove more dubious over time. He also taught me things a parent probably doesn’t know they’re teaching. In response to how my father lived I’ve tried to show him how far it could have taken him.

My father lived his life simply, watching TV and eating out as much as he could. He lived as comfortably as his social security check allowed, complaining the way we do about our roommates. Such and such throws away my mail, or drinks my sodas. My son doesn’t respect me and yells at me. They whisper about me all the time. He wasn’t used to roommates since he never attended college. In hindsight we know much of his anger was due to his illness. Dad’s perspective on his surroundings always seemed petty to me, but perhaps his LDB inflated every encounter with my brother.

Without our help my father might have died sooner, bereft of friends or the confidence to venture out into the streets. Perhaps for a time he’d have fared better with familiar streets around him. But he’d surely have died from loneliness, something shockingly easy to do in my opinion. When your fear becomes greater than the ability to act you retreat to the safety of your room, your surroundings, the things you can control. His sad little room felt restricted and cold. I wonder if he found it comforting with his TV, his computer, and his bed. The animals he said annoyed him really gave him comfort I think. I wish Dad had told us sooner about his mental state. Perhaps we could have done some things differently.

Lewy Body harms the family in a different way. I look now at pictures of my father from a time when he was “normal” and happy. The look in his eyes and on his face are strikingly different in some cases, not so much in others. I can’t tell what he’s thinking in any of them, but sometimes he looks happy and sometimes he looks far off and away. Sometimes his face contorts in a grimace as if he’s eaten something bitter. I like to take candid shots so maybe he did eat a bug. But you know in some photos he was beginning to slip. You think, “That day he got panicky and had to leave before sundown to drive back home.”

It’s strange. I know he’s gone, but the father I remember most is still this combination of my childhood and the last three years. With time I’m told the best years will shine through. I’ll pull his face up and what I’ll see are the things that make me smile. The movies we saw when I was a child. The nightly Wheel of Fortune/Jeopardy duo. The times we ate lunch at the furniture factory. Poker night at my aunt’s house. Even sitting on my sofa two years ago watching Storm Chasers.

When the geese call me home I hope that’s what I leave behind to my son. Intense memories of his time with me. And I hope I can find the memory of the smile on my son’s face, the touch of my wife’s hand, my first kiss, even the taste of pizza. I hope I can remember them all one last time and be at peace with it.