Local author's book recounts 'miracle' year caring for father with Alzheimer's

When a parent gets Alzheimer's disease, children can face not only the pain of watching a loved one's faculties disintegrate, but the burden of providing, or paying for, care.

When John Thorndike's father, Joe Thorndike, began to suffer from Alzheimer's, John and his siblings made a decision "“ rather than pay a caregiver to tend their father, or put him in a home, they would use their father's assets to pay John (who writes, farms and owns rental properties in the Athens area) a salary to move into his father's Cape Cod, Mass. home and make caring for him his full-time job.

As it turned out, Joe Thorndike "“ a brilliant writer who was managing editor of Life magazine, founder of American Heritage and Horizon, and author of three books "“ lived only about a year after he began showing signs of Alzheimer dementia. And as his son stayed with him, dealing with the steady decay of his once-remarkable mind, he began to journal about it.

As he wrote and worked, John Thorndike began to dig into his childhood memories, his father's often-confused recollections, and a mountain of notes and files his father had kept over his lifetime.

The result is "The Last of His Mind: A Year in the Shadow of Alzheimer's," a harrowing, quietly moving account of the last year of Joe Thorndike's life, and the discoveries of his son. The revelations are sometimes very close to the bone; Thorndike learns much, for example, about his mother's marital infidelities to his father, and reports them frankly.

Was it hard to make public such intimate family details? Thorndike noted in a recent interview that the confessional memoir mode now has "a tradition that's pretty established." He also pointed out that, "it's my life, too," and added that most living people with some connection to the events in the book "seem to be pretty relaxed about it."

Thorndike admitted that while growing up "I was vastly in awe of my dad" for his confidence and self-made success, his restless mind, and his skill with language.

"I could never have matched my dad," Thorndike said. "His brain was so amazing."

Of course, having such a father creates more than just admiration. "I think there's an inherent sense of competition when you're young, and your father is so accomplished," Thorndike said.

After striking out on his own, however, the writer said, he believed he had made his peace with that old conflict. "I had settled all that, and had written some things that my father could never have written," he said. (He is the author of two novels and a previous memoir.)

In the book, Thorndike watches a once dazzling mind wander into delusions, aphasia, mistrust and, increasingly, isolation.

"After dinner he asks me to replace 'the... the... there, on the table,'" Thorndike writes. "He can't find the word, but points to the lamp until I figure out: the lightbulb."

His father suspects his kids are mishandling his money. He tells stories that couldn't have happened. And he withdraws more and more into himself.

"Increasingly, it made him silent, because he couldn't carry on a conversation," Thorndike recalled. As he went through his father's things, including "three great big black albums" of records, Thorndike said, he was consumed by curiosity about the life his dad had lived, and what his son had and hadn't known about his parents growing up.

"I just wanted to know "“ it was curiosity," he explained. "It always stuns me how little we know about our parents, because it seems so vital."

And as he pored over the records, Thorndike had to work more than full-time tending to his father's needs "“ including cleaning up bowel and bladder "accidents." The job "was 22-7," he joked. It also involved taking sometimes child-like care of a man who had always been independent, proud, and emotionally distant, and who "hated to be taken care of," Thorndike said.

Though the grueling year with his father sometimes made him angry or frustrated, Thorndike said in the end, it was a great gift to have the chance to get to know better a man who had always tended to "hold everything close." Among the confusion, the delusions, and suspicions, there are moments of contact between father and son in the book that are enormously affecting.

"What a miracle that was, in a way," Thorndike said of his assignment. He noted that while he had had his own ups and downs emotionally, he realized at one point during his year of care-giving that "I hadn't had one hour of depression," being too absorbed in his duties to dwell on himself.

"I had an incredibly happy year," he admitted. "I have to call those happy days."

The book is fearless, taking the reader right up to Joe Thorndike's death, son by his side, talking and talking, pulling up memory after childhood memory, not sure if his father hears or understands him as he drifts away.

"Eventually I run out of memories," Thorndike writes. "I've already told him what a great dad he's been and don't tell him again. I just sit beside his silent form, in the warm room with all the sounds that accompany his breathing: the electric heater, the humidifier, the pump on his mattress, the rumbling of the basement furnace."

Published by Ohio University's Swallow Press, "The Last of His Mind" has garnered a glowing review in The Washington Post, where Carolyn See wrote, "This memoir is far too elegantly written to ever state it directly, but the reader is made aware of the high honor involved: The author honors his father in the most profound way and is blessed, in turn, by participating in the most taxing event in his father's life."