by Kelly Rimmer
and work and the boys…and to be honest, I kind of assumed
you’d come to me if you needed to talk.” It’s obvious from the
way her voice drops as she says this that she’s hurt I haven’t. I
don’t know how to explain to her that she’s the last person on
earth I could have talked to about my current situation—Ruth
Turner, the very concept of The Perfect Mother, in human
form. “So anyway, I just thought we’d have coffee and a chat
while Gus and Harry bust past that monster lock Dad installed.”
I dump my bag on the table and don’t quite manage to hold
back the sarcasm as I ask,
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“So the door wasn’t jammed?”
“Sorry,” she says ruefully, glancing back at me as she makes
my tea. “But you have to admit, it doesn’t make much sense.
Why on earth would he install a lock like that? It’s a dead bolt
designed for an external door. I’m a little nervous about what’s
in that attic now, to be honest.”
“Me, too,” I admit. “I was up half the night thinking about
it.” At least it was partly Dad’s mystery attic that kept me awake.
I’ve been sleeping less and less and the insomnia isn’t always so
easy to explain.
“How did we miss it, Beth?” Ruth sighs suddenly. I look at
her in alarm, thinking she’s referring to me, but then I realize she’s still talking about Dad.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I think we were so focused on the
heart issue, we didn’t realize there was another condition at play.
We noticed he was different after his retirement, remember?
You even asked me about it—you all did. I just thought it was
him coming to terms with the changes in his physical health…
adjusting to the new stage of life.”
Dad founded Walsh Homes when he was a single father with
four young children. He worked with his hands and built houses
and eventually a business that supported our family in a com-
fortably middle-class lifestyle. Given that I’m struggling to keep
my head above water with one kid, I just have no idea how he
managed. He outsourced the cleaning every now and again and
we had help from Aunt Nina and a part-time nanny until Tim
was old enough to supervise us after school, but for the most
part, Dad handled every aspect of our household on his own.
I hope he thinks it paid off. I never doubted that we’d made
him proud, but lately I’ve been feeling so guilty. The result of
all of Dad’s nagging about school is four grown children with
solid educations, two of us health professionals, yet not one of
us smart enough or at least aware enough to notice that it wasn’t
just his heart that was failing; his mind was going, too.
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Kelly Rimmer
“I feel so guilty,” Ruth admits, her voice husky. “We took
the kids to see him yesterday and he’s completely lost. I just wish
I’d pushed his doctor to do some more tests after the heart at-
tack. I suspected something was up then. It was hard to put my
finger on what was wrong.”
The heart attack came out of nowhere. Dad was swinging
a hammer with the team on a job site when he collapsed, and
at first, it seemed he’d just need medication and some lifestyle
changes. It soon became apparent though that his heart was dam-
aged, and we were all in for a second fright because the cardi-
ologist soon determined that Dad was in heart failure. Still, the
doctor seemed optimistic that we had years and years left with
Dad if he looked after himself. Dad had been cleared to go back
to work and he seemed excited to do so. His sudden retirement
came as yet another shock.
I still remember that day. I’d just arrived home from work
to the phone ringing, and when I ran to pick it up, Ruth was
sobbing on the other end. At first, I thought the worst—maybe
another incident with Dad’s heart…maybe a more serious heart
attack this time. Instead, Ruth told me he’d given her the busi-
ness and had decided to paint full-time.
“Paint?” I’d repeated. “As in, paint houses?”
“No, Beth. Paint. As in, paint abstracts or landscapes or… I
don’t know. Something like that.”
“But… Dad doesn’t paint.”
“Well, apparently he does now.”
Dad loved his job and he loved his company, and that’s we
tried to talk him out of retiring, even Ruth, who stood to gain
ownership of the family business. But Dad he was adamant. He
said he needed a quieter lifestyle, and that giving up work would
mean less stress on his heart. This was what he needed for the
next chapter of his life, and in the face of such determination
and logic, who were we to argue? He’d certainly worked hard
enough to be entitled to rest if that’s what he wanted to do.
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And it actually seemed Dad had been hiding an extraordi-
nary talent. He’d never been trained in visual art, but soon he
was prolific . He was painting all kinds of things—abstracts, por-
traits, landscapes—his talent seemed endless. Hunter even has a
series of Dad’s artwork on the wall at his law firm, a collection
his boss commissioned. They are vivid and clever and layered.
That commission seemed to represent the start of a whole new,
if somewhat unlikely, career for Dad.
But the reality is, Dad’s sudden interest in art was an early
symptom of a neurological condition rather than a long-hidden
talent, and it was just the start of his decline. Ruth’s right—it
was hard to identify exactly what was wrong, but his presence
and his world just seemed to shrink. He slowly disconnected
from his friends, and while he’d always liked to keep the house
tidy, cleanliness gradually became an obsessive focus. I remem-
ber Jeremy telling me that when he’d come for a visit, before
he’d even set his beer glass down after the last mouthful, Dad
took it right out of his hand, washed it and put it away. Tim
expressed concern about Dad’s weight gain. Ruth was still con-
fused about Dad’s sudden retirement, convinced it wasn’t an
empowered, smart way to live out his later years, but a sign of
an irrational impulsivity and an indication that something was
drastically wrong.
I’m the psychologist in the family, so it was me they called
when they were concerned, and I dutifully assured them Dad
was fine. He’d gone from sixty-hour weeks at the helm of his
own company to endless days with no set agenda. And Dad was
facing a terminal diagnosis—despite the excellent chance he’d
survive for years, the confirmation of his mortality was likely
still playing on his mind. Of course these things were going to
have a ps
ychological impact. Of course he’d need some time to
adjust. I tried to help my family focus on the positives, not the
negatives. I even remember telling Hunter that it was nice to see
Dad talking less and listening more now that his life had slowed
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down. Dad and I have always been particularly close, but after
his retirement, he seemed to have endless time to listen to me,
gazing at me with patient, quiet wisdom.
In hindsight, I was seeing what I wanted to see.
He started forgetting words, which was easy enough to ig-
nore at first. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t communicating—he’d just
pause midsentence and often ask, “What’s that word again?” Or
he’d wave his arms vaguely while he talked about the “thingy”
or “you know, the whats-it.” But it got worse and worse over
time, and soon he was confusing nouns—saying chair when he
meant table, tiger when he meant cat. But he seemed happy,
so much so that he’d developed this adorably innocent laugh.
It’s hard to accept that someone might need some kind of ad-
ditional medical intervention when they are utterly delighted
by every aspect of life. And Dad really was so smiley…so quick
to joy and laughter.
Then one Tuesday evening he came to visit me and Hunter.
Five minutes after he left to go home, I opened the door and Dad
was there on my doorstep again, overjoyed to see us, completely
unaware that he’d only just said goodbye. When we explained
that to him, he chuckled at himself and insisted he was just hav-
ing a “senior moment.” He didn’t seem concerned about what
happened…and he didn’t seem embarrassed. But Hunter and I
were nervous, and so we drove Dad home and then I called Tim.
We made plans to get Dad over to Tim’s hospital for a checkup
later that week, but Dad’s health crisis couldn’t wait that long.
The very next day, the straw house of explanations we’d built
around Dad’s personality changes collapsed entirely.
I was six months pregnant with Noah and I was having a bad
day. I’d had a series of awful appointments with my clients—a
child who was developing an eating disorder, then one who’d
been abused by a parent, then one who was self-harming. Such
a lineup wasn’t unusual, but something felt off in the way I en-
gaged with each child. I was already becoming uncomfortable
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as the pregnancy progressed and I knew I was increasingly dis-
tracted. I wasn’t giving my patients my best—something I’d al-
ways prided myself on. I wondered if I should think about going
on maternity leave early and I called Dad for his advice.
But when he picked up my call, I could hear that something
was wrong. He wasn’t calm or wise, he was confused—the pat-
tern of his speech sounded fluent, but the way he was using the
words made almost no sense. I wondered if he was having a
stroke. I left work and went right to his house, but Dad was in-
explicably beside himself, babbling and crying, and and as hard
as I tried, I couldn’t calm him down.
I called Tim again, and he met us at the Overlake Medical
Center. Tim broke all the rules that day—not just the speed
limit, but by insisting that the staff at the hospital let him do
Dad’s cognitive assessment. By the time he’d finished, I knew
Dad was in serious trouble. Even if my own training as a psy-
chologist hadn’t given me just enough understanding of neu-
rology to interpret some of the results, the look on Tim’s face
would have said it all.
From there, it was days of more formal testing before the con-
sultant neurologist sat us down and confirmed what we’d finally
figured out for ourselves. The dad we knew and loved was al-
ready leaving us, brain cell by brain cell. His language skills were
in significant decline, and what I’d thought of as patient listening
was actually Dad disconnecting from our conversations. What
we’d thought of as him becoming house proud was actually ob-
sessive behavior. That stubborn change in his diet was a symp-
tom, too, and we soon came to suspect he’d been existing on
that one roast meal with us for Sunday dinner, supplemented by
endless caramel ice cream over the rest of the week—his freezer
full of dozens of tubs of the same brand and flavor.
Even the overnight emergence of artistic skill was no late-life
crisis brought on by the heart attack. It turns out that sudden
visual artistry is a recognized symptom of his particular type
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of dementia—and this particular type of dementia is known to
happen sometimes in patients suffering heart failure.
We’d all missed it, even as Dad walked through years of de-
cline alone, right in front of our eyes.
“I should have listened to you guys,” I say suddenly. “I
shouldn’t have been so quick to justify the changes in his be-
havior—” I trail off at the sound of footsteps in the hallway.
Two young men appear, one carrying a toolbox.
“Excuse me, Ruth,” the taller of the two says. “The door is
off.” He shifts, then scratches his neck and stares at the floor.
“So is there anything else?”
Ruth sits up straight and clears her throat.
“No, thanks, Harry,” she says, then she nods. “I’ll see you
boys back at the office.”
We sit in silence until the front door closes behind them,
then I stand.
“Let’s go check out—”
“Just wait a second first, Beth,” Ruth says, her voice coolly
professional. I bristle a little, but remain standing. I was very
much hoping to avoid the intervention Ruth seemed to be build-
ing up to, and as awful as the detour was, I was relieved to focus
on Dad’s illness for a few minutes, instead of letting her focus
on me. But she gives me a pointed look, and I know distracting
her isn’t going to be easy.
“Aren’t you curious?” I ask, giving it one last shot. I even go
as far as to take a step away from the table and add, “I’m dying
to see what’s up there.”
“Of course I am, but it can wait a few minutes.” When I don’t
move, she gives me an exasperated look and points to the chair.
I guess lifelong training at the hands of a bossy older sister has
left me with some ingrained habits, because I sit heavily. “What
is going on with you? Are things okay with you and Hunter?”
“Everything is fine,” I say impatiently, and I motion toward
the hallway. “Let’s—”
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“Is it Noah, then?”
I
shake my head, and give her a desperate look.
“Don’t you remember what it’s like with a newborn? I hardly
sleep, I’m basically a walking milk machine. It’s hard. It’s sup-
posed to be hard.”
“Sure,” she says, shrugging. “It’s hard, and I had days here
and there with each kid when I felt like it was too hard. But I
didn’t disconnect from you, did I?”
“I haven’t disconnected from you.” It’s a complete lie, and an
unconvincing one at that.
“It’s like you’re here, but you’re not really here,” Ruth mur-
murs. “You come to family dinners, but you don’t say much,
and you’re dragging Hunter out the door as soon as we finish
eating. You’ve been doing more than your share of the heavy
lifting with Dad, but as soon as anyone else arrives to help, you
leave. Jesus, Beth. You even left Noah’s baptism early.”
“Well, he was crying—”
“And Chiara and half of her family and Tim and Ellis and I,
and Fleur and Jez and even damned Alicia all offered to help
you, but you wouldn’t let us. It was like you were looking for
an excuse to leave.”
I scowl at her.
“Come on, Ruth. It wasn’t like that. It was hot that day and
he was miserable. We had to get home so he could sleep.”
“Chiara locked herself in her bedroom and cried for an hour
after you left. You hurt her.”
“Well, that certainly wasn’t our intention—”
“Stop talking about that day like Hunter wanted to leave,”
Ruth interrupts, exasperated. “He was trying to talk you into
staying right up until you snatched Noah up and put him in
the car. Hunter left with you, but only because you gave him
no choice.”
I pause, frowning as I try to remember.
“That’s not how it was at all.”
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“That’s exactly how it was, Beth.” Ruth doesn’t exaggerate,
and I can see she’s telling the truth. I remember feeling so re-
moved from the festivities that day, watching myself through a
thick pane of glass, so tired and frustrated I could barely force
myself to sit through the ceremony at the church. “And what’s
really happening with your job?” she adds now, apparently not
done yet. When I’m feeling better, I’m going to give my sister
a few tips on how to guide someone through a psychologically
