by Ted Kessler
Alzheimer’s stories feel painfully idiosyncratic when you’re living through them, but many follow an uncannily predictable trajectory. In the winter of 2008, my mother slipped on some ice and was injured just badly enough that she could not, for what was expected to be a few days or so, look after my father. He was taken into an NHS care home, where his condition abruptly degenerated. With the divide between public life and home life removed, his attempts to repress the disease took on a desperate new intensity.
Soon after Christmas, my father barricaded himself into his room on several occasions, and was removed to a hospital psychiatric ward, where his condition was eventually stabilised. He had, though, been defeated: he could not do anything for himself now, in fact could barely talk, and seemed, at last, benignly accepting of his situation.
For the last few months of my dad’s life, he lived in an absolute shithole of a private nursing home because it was the only place in my home town that accepted patients with severe dementia. The purported benefits of private healthcare are that competition forces up standards, but in a small north Midlands town that can only sustain one Alzheimer’s facility, such standards can be blithely ignored in the pursuit of profit. My father spent his final days in a place where no one had bothered to wash the bloodstains out of the curtains; where farcically underpaid, undertrained and unmotivated staff blasted Radio 1 at octogenarians as they were spoon-fed dinner; where the windows overlooked a river, and a small lake, but were set so high in the walls that the residents could not see out of them from a seated position. My mother and I were horrified and powerless; my father seemed calmly oblivious – though, not for the first time, it may have been a mistake to try to second-guess what was going on in his head.
A collateral cruelty of Alzheimer’s disease is the way it robs family and friends of their memories. By the time he died in June 2009 – a few days after his eightieth birthday, three months after the birth of my second son – it had been so long since my father was entirely himself, it was hard to remember what he used to be like. For his funeral, I tried to piece together some thoughts and, though I hope I wasn’t quite deluded enough to propose canonisation, I said something about how he never gossiped or sniped at people; how he never seemed to be envious, or bitter, or vindictive.
He could be irritated by trivialities, but his deeper tolerance of my moods and choices seems, with hindsight, to be verging on the superhuman (I write now, transparently, as a father), even when those choices must have been bewildering to him. He never complained that his only child, the first in the family to go to university, couldn’t be bothered to endure a graduation ceremony that would have publicly validated his pride. He never told me to cut my hair when I let it grow untamed for years, though he was the sort of man who wore a tie to mow the lawn.
I didn’t realise what I was learning at the time, but he taught me some inspiring things; by implication and consistency, not by didacticism. Cricket, he intimated, is a wonderful game, but it’s hardly a tragedy when Nottinghamshire lose. You can play records by the Fall all you want, but one day you might grasp that Duke Ellington is pretty good, too. And unstinting love can be a vital presence in your life, even if it cannot always be articulated.
John Mulvey is the editor of Uncut magazine.
I FOLLOW MY FATHER
My Old Man by Tilda Swinton
I follow my father.
I follow my father as he makes his way down the greenhouse, delicately tottering forward, swaying slightly back, swinging his hip sideways, then plunging onward, as if to a deep beat. As a disco move, it’s pretty slick, insouciant, even. As a mode of reliable perambulation, it is a feat of keen nerve.
My father was once a contender for the four-minute mile. Then he went to his war at nineteen and was wounded sharpish. Being prepped for an MRI scan last year, the routine question about any bits of metal in him jogged his memory for the first time in 70 years: he remembered hazily hearing a doctor bent over him in a field station mumbling something about leaving the bullet where it was in his thigh so as not to cause any more fuss. Within a month, similarly dedicated to fuss-lessness, making his way back across Germany to his regiment, he was shot off a tank and lay for twenty-four hours before being found a second time. With a robust sense of family tradition, his own father having lost his left foot in the trenches in 1917, he lost his left leg at this point.
I follow my father as his stairlift creeps him up the stairs. His dog tucks under his knees on the footrest for the journey, citing the same special privileges as those faithful companions immortalised under the heels of mossy stone knights on their perpetual backs under chestnut trees or vaulted ceilings.
My father said little to me during my childhood, although I know that by the time I was twelve he considered me ‘contrary’. He used this word many times with definite emphasis, as if that were the end of it, like he was nailing a banner above my head, or an archivist’s stamp. Looking back, I like to wonder now if it wasn’t a word chosen and meted out with a sense of savoured satisfaction. Although, to be honest, I fully doubt it.
When I was eight, I sat on the floor by the fire, leaning my back against his armchair. He reached down, as he read his paper and absentmindedly twiddled my ear. I had a small winter rip in the seam of the lobe: as he twisted, a trickle of blood made its way down my neck. I could not speak for the confusions of pain and the incredulous delight that he was showing me – however distractedly, however much he had clearly mistaken me for a spaniel – this affection, this physical familiarity and ownership.
I follow my father’s buggy with its bouncy cavalier caterpillar tread over the tree roots and around rhododendron dens as he parlays a running commentary on the particulars of the glories of the May garden wood. I surreptitiously film the back of his head, his conducting arm with its knotted knuckle-end. I am careful not to be caught capturing.
When I was ten, swinging on the back of my dining room chair one Sunday lunchtime, having told me to desist three times, he turned like a twist of lightning and fetched me a spank with the flat blade of the carving knife with such force and precision that there was a pink strip on the thigh south of my summer shorts for a week – and I lost my appetite for roast chicken for a good while longer.
My father has soup for lunch every day except Sunday, now. Soup and melba toast. I have been trying to source double handled soup cups – boullion bowls? – for months. There is now only one left with both ears standing. Does nobody want to drink their soup two-handed any more?
My mother died on a Wednesday morning three years ago in her morphine-powered bed in the drawing room just as he was down the other end of the polished corridor starting on his breakfast. I had opened the curtains after that final night with her: the long labour of her dying was about to fold itself up. When it did, the blessed peace was everywhere.
My father, having been brought to see her, sat alone for a few seconds with his beloved-beyond-all-on-earth for fifty-eight years. I watched him through the interior window as he fished his massive handkerchief out of his pocket and powdered his cheek with it.
When he left the room, his first words, to my brother coming towards him were, memorably ‘Well, your recce to the crematorium yesterday was not in vain’.
Equally memorably, when we sat round the dining room table an hour later with the undertaker, discussing a date for the funeral, he declared ‘Well, my diary for next week is entirely blank’.
As children, my brothers and I dreaded nothing quite as much as a solo drive with my father. His ability to say precisely not one thing to us during an entire journey of several hours was breathtaking.
One day, he lobbed over the top of his paper ‘Treasure Island!’, as my brothers and I struggled with a crossword clue. It was the only time he ever participated in this daily pre-lunch ritual of our school holidays – and the solution was right. Last month, watching University Challenge with my children, he called out the same answer – ‘Treasure Island!’ – after forty years: different progra
mme, bingo again. Double bullseye, however widely spaced.
My father loves Nana Mouskouri. He loves regimental band music. And Morecambe and Wise. And trees. He wears exquisitely jewel-coloured cardigans with their elbows frayed like exotic lilies. He is as handsome and upright as a pale tribal shield. He is grand and childlike, transcendent and lost, in equal measure. He is 90 now. I bring him his favourite chocolate raisins and hide them in a wooden box by his chair. We never refer to this supply. Its reliability has become part of our shared ideology, my old man and me.
Tilda Swinton lives in the Highlands of Scotland. She
makes films, has three brothers and is the mother of twins.
A LITTLE KID DOESN’T
FORGET THAT
Joseph Kessler by Felix Kessler
‘Happy families are all alike,’ is how Anna Karenina begins. ‘Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
Who am I to argue with Leo Tolstoy? His parents died when he was young; his life was long, turbulent, and often unhappy. He also wrote War and Peace among other light classics.
As for me, even the name Felix means happy, as my parents told me. Thanks to them, I’ve been not only happy but lucky.
Born in Vienna, I wasn’t yet five when German tanks rolled into Austria and cheering crowds greeted them. Our neighbours cheered, too, when guys (Germans or Austrians) wearing Nazi armbands marched down our street. A little kid doesn’t forget that.
Soon after the Anschluss, Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, my mother began schlepping me from office to office trying to get a ‘visa’. What was a visa? Why did we need it? How I hated that word. ‘Visa’ sounded like ‘vaccine’, though in a way I guess it was: it inoculated us against Nazism, the disease that infected Austria and soon most of Europe.
I couldn’t understand this visa business; we kept going to these dusty offices where people were nasty and rude to my wonderful mother. After one such bad morning, we came home empty-handed to find Grandfather sitting by the window reading his newspaper. Suddenly there were shouts from our courtyard. Were those men in armbands now downstairs about to throw rocks through our window?
My mother rushed us into a bathroom. She pleaded with Grandfather to come from the window, but he just sat there smoking and reading. She shook her head and began muttering to herself, something I had never seen her do before.
Okay, nothing happened. Grandfather David was still sitting there when we came out. But Mother’s own family history hadn’t prepared her for happy outcomes. Her father, like Hitler, was a corporal in Austria’s army in the First World War. Unlike der Führer, Berthold Morgenstern was Jewish and was killed in that war. My mother hardly got to know him, and I not at all.
In the end, we did get those visas and left. So did my father’s parents, three brothers, his sister and their families. And my grandmother (Mom’s mother) came to live with us. None of us had to scrub sidewalks with toothbrushes, as did some Jews while smiling Nazi thugs watched and other Viennese stood idly by. Perhaps you’ve seen those pictures in history books. We were spared that, and far worse: the trains to Auschwitz and Dachau, the desperate attempts to escape the death camps. How did we avoid that when so many Jews didn’t? How did my parents manage to flee when so many wealthy, better-educated Jews perished?
My wife Jair wondered how my father, a bookbinder, understood how urgent it was to get out of Austria. My son Daniel, at seven, also asked whether our neighbours wouldn’t have helped or hidden us if they knew we were in danger. I asked about that, too, not long after we’d come and were happily settled in America.
‘Ah, we knew them,’ Dad said, meaning the Viennese. Does that sound like prejudice on his part? Seeing what ensued, no one could say we’d acted hastily. Immediately after the Anschluss, Jews were urged to leave. ‘We didn’t have to be told twice,’ Dad said. He was prescient: no matter how hard Jews tried later, they couldn’t escape from Austria.
The Nazis let us go after my parents paid various fees and taxes and gave up our home and bookbinding business. Six months after the Nazis entered Austria, we took an overnight train from Vienna and arrived in Switzerland on 19 September 1938, joining my cousins as temporary residents.
Five months later we sailed from Antwerp to America on the Westernland. A picture of my father on a deck-chair makes the eleven-day voyage seem more like a winter cruise than a ship filled with refugees, as its manifest shows.
We arrived on 15 February 1939, less than a year after Austria’s annexation. My father was just thirty-two, younger than any of his grandsons today, and didn’t look that old.
The US welcomed us once we found sponsors, a family of American Jews who vouched for us though they didn’t know us. They were ‘Uncle Joe’ and ‘Aunt Laura’, lived in Jersey City, New Jersey, and so we settled there.
Dad changed his first name from Josef to Joseph and added a middle initial – J for Justus, he said – that the Nazis had stuck on his emigration papers, for Jude or Jew. It was his way of making the best of things.
He’d dreamt of becoming a lawyer. As a skilled bookbinder he found work soon after arriving and said it beat having to master a new legal system, again making the best of things. Still, he was fired from this job on his first day.
He was given written instructions to cut paper into 8 x 27-inch sheets. He’d misread it as 8 x 21; the seven didn’t have the little dash Europeans used. Welcome to America.
Dad did get another job, and four years later (in 1943) he bought a failing bookbinder on 23rd Street in Manhattan. (In going through his papers later I saw it was named Foldwell; I like to think it was the same outfit that fired him.)
As his own boss, Dad was at work by 6.30 a.m. and rarely home before 7 p.m. Mother worked with him, as did five or six African-American women and Ludwig, a German refugee. It upset me when Dad yelled at Ludwig, who had a concentration-camp number on one muscular arm. Ludwig didn’t seem bothered by Dad’s temper.
After Mother was held up for the payroll one day, their lesson (to me) was never to argue with a gunman. They nixed my suggestion to use cheques because their workers preferred cash. Still, they now locked the door on paydays.
In 1944, a year before the war ended, we all became US citizens. I became a real American sooner, thanks both to school and the friends I’d made on our block – kids like Spanky Nelson, Hungry Dunnigan, the Galvin brothers, Frankie Fanelli, Ally Ahearn, Joey Schultz and Jimmy Day, my first and best friend. Not another Jewish boy on that block.
We played stoopball and stickball in summers, rode sleds down the street in winter or sneaked into the nearby cemetery for tackle football on its front lawn. I couldn’t imagine a happier childhood, or better teachers of English and the American way.
Generally, we were very happy with our neighbourhood. When not playing in the street, I’d go to ‘block parties’ our street held for various Second World War causes. Dad might wander by but didn’t join in their draught-beer fests. ‘We’re not that American,’ he’d say, his way of showing disapproval.
All went well until a kid – I don’t know who – knocked on a window during our Passover services one evening. It brought my father to the front door; the kid, or several, had run away by then.
I lowered the window shades on the second Passover night but Dad made me raise them. Sure enough, our window was tapped again. This time my father reacted by opening the door, shouted angrily into the dark and so making the trouble-makers happy. Again, he insisted the shades remain up; we weren’t disturbed further.
It all bothered me less than when kids recited, ‘Matzos, matzos, two-for-five, that’s what keeps the Jews alive.’ Or when an older kid told me, as a compliment, ‘You’re a good Jew, Felix, not like some.’
At a time when American Nazis paraded in Manhattan’s Yorkville, it wasn’t too bad – and I could always find solace practising on the baby grand piano we’d managed to ship with us somehow from Vienna.
Dad did provide embarrassing moments in Manhattan
. To my shame, when he spoke German with my mother I’d walk on the other side of the street to distance myself. Didn’t they know there was a war on? It got worse – louder – if they walked with other German speakers.
Only if they went to Éclair, a café with great Viennese pastries, did I relax among this refugee crowd. He could still embarrass me, studying every check for mistakes, and finding quite a few. But if a mistake was in our favour – charged too little – he’d point that out too. He also showed class by never seeking a better table. Seated behind a pillar next to the kitchen? Fine, food will be warm when it comes.
Three years after the war ended in 1945, we became real Americans. My father bought a much-used 1937 Pontiac, whose bald tyres often went flat. Our Sunday explorations by bus had turned stale: Dad’s desire for a bus ride to rustic-sounding Laurel Hill landed us at the local mental hospital. It gave us a good laugh, but the rust-mobile arrived soon after.
Thinking again about all those trips makes me now recall the later journeys taken with my own family. We might have belonged among those ‘Happy Families’ until I destroyed that by moving out suddenly at a time Ted has recalled so movingly.
My father wouldn’t have acted as I did, or as hurtfully. He would have been immensely pleased that Ted named his son Joseph, after him. But he couldn’t have been prouder, or more honoured, than I was.
Felix Kessler is a writer and editor. He worked at the
Wall Street Journal, as well as at Fortune and Bloomberg.
He has four children, of whom Ted is the eldest.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Like Communism, or water polo, My Old Man has been a purely collective endeavour. If it had been just me at work on this, the enterprise would have stalled with one lonely blog posting about my dad in July 2013. I must first, therefore, thank all who contributed to the My Old Man blog, those whom I cajoled into doing so and those who volunteered their stories as its word spread. The site completely surpassed my meagre expectations for it and grew into a heart-wrenching bi-weekly bulletin into which I had next to no input beyond hosting it. In order of appearance, thanks and praise goes to:
