Dad's Last Year On Earth

Did Dad Have Alzheimer’s Disease?

There has been a debate raging in my family for the last several years as to whether my father had Alzheimer’s disease or not. Several years ago, I met someone that matched my preconception of the Alzheimer’s condition, had long conversations with her that traversed centuries of human history in perfect recollection… only to find that she didn’t know her own or her spouse’s name sitting next to her.

When I moved back in with my parents in November of 2006, as far as I could see there was very little wrong with my father’s memory of names. Except for one time:

I’d been home for several months already when one morning I came downstairs for breakfast and Dad said “who’s that?” to my mother. It seemed completely out of character from what I’d seen and thought he might be kidding, so I replied in my best North Carolinian drawl, “I’m a hired hand Mr. Smith. Oh, and since it bein’ Sunday and all, do you think I might have the day off to run me some errands? Mrs. Smith said she wouldn’t be needin’ me today.” His scowl indicated that my wiseacre sensibilities had worked their charm once more, this time curing his amnesia 100%.

Dad knew everyone’s name in a remarkable display of clarity until the very end. That’s not to say that he didn’t exhibit other “Alzheimer’s symptoms” such as a shuffling gate, violent mood swings and confusion of fantasy and fact… but these last two were also attributes of his normal mind, so that’s not very damning evidence. Admittedly, by the time I arrived on the scene he and my mother were taking more pills than some of the teenage hippies I knew growing up. In fact, most of the time my father looked “high” to me (and this is a person that knows). And there were periods when he refused to take his pills, becoming more “difficult” than usual, so I guess they were necessary, but I remain steadfastly unconvinced that he had classic “Alzheimer’s Disease” and would have liked to see him living a more drug free life at the end. In a perfect world I guess.

His waking hours were characterized by a week, or at least several days of high energy, followed by another similarly long period of low energy where he did little else but eat and sleep (sometimes punctuated by very loud, cacophonous singing for which I was always grateful when he fell asleep again). Other times, piano playing. Some of which was surprisingly good, sounding spontaneously improvised; my mother said she had never heard some of the tunes before. But it was so sporadic that unfortunately I never got any of it on tape.

The periods of activity were characterized by wanting to be to wherever he had been in his dreams. If he had been visiting Ireland (which seemed to be his favorite place), he’d want to get back there. Other times he was all over the eastern seaboard, like the time he wanted to get to South Carolina “to visit his house” upon waking. Since he would have just tossed and turned if he went back to bed, getting back to his dream meant physically going there.

For a while, this meant getting to the airport and getting on a plane and I was to drive him. If I told him I didn’t have a driver’s license, he would offer to drive. But how would he board the plane with no money? Answer: Give him a ride to “6^th street” so he could withdraw money from his account where he had “millions” (as far as I know, there isn’t a bank on 6^th street). I soon learned that bringing up the subject of money was to be avoided at all cost, something my mother knew all too well. Since I was “fresh meat”, Dad now concentrated on enlisting me for the 6^th street quest. My mother was suffering from long term exasperation, so she became a deaf mute around this subject and wouldn’t hesitate to blame me if one of my questions got him started.

So one morning after a long sleep, he came in to breakfast and began describing a strange dream. My mother and I admired his tenacity as he spoke slowly and haltingly after being in the subconcious for so long : He’d been walking down a hill and couldn’t go back up because a force was preventing him. “Finally, something not related to 6^th street!” we thought. We listened patiently until he finished. After a moment of silence, and feeling safe that I wasn’t broaching the topic, I asked him why he wanted to go back up the hill. “To get to 6^th street.” was the answer, and he was back on me to give him a ride. My mother could have killed me (and this was one of those times when I thought this whole thing was just an “act” and was just toying with us). Things finally got easier when I came up with the idea of “confessing” that I was wanted by the police for outstanding traffic tickets (*ahem* not true). Thankfully he believed it and just gave me a “confidence between thieves” smile, never to mention it again (I think he was moved that I had let him in on my “dark secret”).

The problem remained as to how he would get to 6^th street however, so we were on to the “riding his bike to 6^th street” phase. Apparently he had done this before when mom was dealing with it alone. She said he’d go off riding his bike around town sailing through stop signs and miraculously never got hurt. When he got taken home by the police , it was always for something like going into a market and advising the owner on how to market his business better, or trying to collect the rent from a woman who had long ago paid off her home.. (which still reads like normal Dad stuff if you ask me).

By the time I was on the scene, the bike was sitting in the shed, tires gone flat from disuse. So the big quandary in this phase was: he needed a bicycle pump. That’s where I came in. I had to fend off requests to buy him a bicycle pump with a litany of deflections, excuses, and outright no’s. Followed by the attempts at browbeating, concluding with the usual tirade of curses and swears. I’d seen it all before many times (and I’m talking about the last time I lived at home, 30 years ago), so was always glad when we got to the curses and swears part. The home stretch!

Undaunted by the failure to obtain a bicycle pump, he’d occasionally go out to the shed and try to ride the bike “as is”. It took a lot of effort to ride a bike with two flats on grass so one day he launched himself from the top of the shed’s entrance ramp and sailed across the grass for a few yards, then fell sideways into a karate style landing on the grass. I would say it was miraculous that he didn’t get hurt, not to mention the ridiculous sight of that being accomplished by an 84 year old guy… except that he did it over and over ad nauseum. I finally got bored and went back in the house.

Of course, with this guy, that’s when his guardian angel takes over to make us look foolish. As soon as I wasn’t looking, he’d invariably go out to the street, do something similarly strange (never once getting hurt), a person driving by would see the whole thing and the next thing you know we’d have a ring at the door with a woman holding my poor elderly father by the hand, telling us some sob story about one of her parents at that age. All the while, the unspoken guilt being on my mother and I as to “Where were we when this poor elderly man needed help?”. It was like having a 3 year old around except this one weighed 180 lbs. and it’s head could turn all the way around spitting vomit if it didn’t get what it wanted... Later I realized that if I had only been a fan of “America’s Funniest Home Video’s”, I could have made his 6^th street bank account a reality with that submission… or public ridicule as an “elder abuser”. You never know how those things will turn out.

When did Dad start getting “Alzheimer’s Disease”?

We have also had discussions as to when this process may have been begun. At first, my mother liked to use the famous example from Sept. 2003 when she and my father visited my sister Dianne at her condo in Beverly. After they left, the neighbor in the apartment below gave her condolences to my sister “on her father having Alzheimer’s”. Apparently she had heard the scene he had caused over getting to the airport on time, the “shuffling gate” when he walked around the apartment, and just assumed “Alzheimer’s” as a forgone conclusion. That was news to my mother who quickly got some medical opinions that agreed with that assessment.

Given that insight, my mother now thinks that the signs might have begun much earlier. In California a few years before, she remembered that he had become more timorous about finding his way around in a car and for the first time, and she had to go and buy the new family car by herself (which she immensely enjoyed apparently). But is it possible that maybe things had begun at an even earlier stage than that? Particularly if one was to consider the idea that his condition wasn’t so much a clinical medical condition as it was a condition of the soul. I can think of a number of incidents that may shed some light.

My father was always given to grandiose dreams of a whimsical nature. In 1985 or so, I was in college at San Jose State U. and occasionally dropped by my parents house on Friday nights to go out for pizza. This particular time my mother was in England attending her father’s funeral with my brother and I went out with just my father for the first time. He seemed to be feeling a little more celebratory than usual. After pizza and a pitcher or two, we drove back to his place and sat talking in the car for a while. This was so similar to what I’d done with my teenage friends (being drunk and all) that it felt kind of strange but I stuck with it. In a whimsical act of storytelling, he related the equally whimsical story of why they decided to move to California, for which I was all ears. It always had astonished me, that after my desperate bid to get as far away from my family as teenage possible: by driving to the opposite coast of the continent, a scant few years later everyone was on the west coast! It felt as if I had precipitated this huge change in everyone’s fortunes without understanding any of it. Finally, some light would be cast on this eerie turn of events.

I didn’t know much about my father’s life as a contract engineer. He started getting decent paying jobs after I’d left home (first to college, then to California) thanks to my brother who went to work at one of those employment agencies specializing in engineering. His was now the life of a nomad as he traveled from contract job to contract job. My mother sometimes went with him, and when she had a job, she stayed home. By all accounts, he enjoyed that life. But on to the pivotal point in question:

In the middle of a particularly hard Massachusetts winter, he’d worked a job in Phoenix Arizona. His face lit up with excitement as he related weekend drives through the desert in a convertible rental car, getting drunk while lifting his new cowboy hat to the sky with a “yahoo” yelp, radio blaring country music (the "yahoo" part was in my mind’s eye from family photo’s and anecdotes from my sisters). I had felt a similar outdoorsy feeling of exhilaration when I drove across the desert for the first time, so I could relate somewhat (minus the over-the-top theatrics). My mother says that he called her from Arizona and told her to “sell the house; He wasn’t coming back.” (and she said he'd bought matching cowboy boots too).

My mother was working the first job that she actually enjoyed and was loathe to give it up for another of my father’s whimsical moves. At first, she decided to stay in Mass. and started planning her move to Gloucester, near her job as a high level manager’s secretary at a company that valued her contribution. Then the older of my two sisters (Christina) decided she wanted to go to Cal. Berkley (near San Fransisco) and wanted to transfer there from Boston University. This changed things considerably so Mom would have to think carefully. My other sister Dianne finally said she’d go too, so she reluctantly acquiesced. It was as if the Gods were conspiring.

It was around that time (1985) that my father started having doubts about his interest in the world of engineering that had so enthralled him for decades. His arrival into the new world of California was full of hope as he not only was in a new country (practically speaking, California is a different country), but had luckily landed his dream job at Lockheed Corp., a top government military contractor specializing in missile systems. In a surprise move of pure moxy, he boldly convinced them that he had done some aerospace related math research and was hired as a direct employee, not as a contractor.

Things couldn’t have appeared brighter at this juncture in Dad’s life. But like all starry-eyed dreams, soon the practical realities hit home and the visions became disturbed by the grinding grit of human frailty. All was not well with one of the largest, most reputable defense contractors in America’s arsenal of freedom defenders. To my father’s pure horror, they were using antiquated mathematical tools to solve the hairiest aerospace problems imaginable... simplistic equations of motion using the basic ballistics equations of Newton instead of the more concise formulations of LaGrange. It was against Dad’s nature to use anything less than the most sophisticated math tools he knew of so he started redoing everything into the Lagrangian equations he knew so well. But it would take too long and he was getting into trouble with his employers. He struggled to keep up with his workload and redoing the equations the proper way but it was too much and he was eventually let go.

There was talk of being sued over “misrepresentation” (of which nothing came about) due to the fact that his experience with it was little more than barroom banter with an engineering buddy who shared his enthusiasm (I stand corrected on this: my mother handed me the research manual of a device he co-developed at Kaman Aircraft which was patented and had very solid applications to aerospace problems. He may have been hired on the strength of that paper. The device was named the Dynamic Antiresonant Vibration Isolator, or “DAVI”). Lockheed has had their share of scandals over the years (like the legendary story of the guy who typed the entire Bible into his laptop computer on company time while waiting for his security clearance… or the guy who built an airplane for personal use on company time… using company parts, for the same reason... and Lockheed was the company famous for the $7500.00 wrench in government audit reports) so I wouldn’t side with them. There was probably plenty of blame to go around.

My father had had a lot off let downs in his engineering career. Lay offs, a decade of unemployment, finally this... Discouraged by the whole world of engineering at that point, he basically retired. He had taken Stanford classes relating to his work at Lockheed and was particularly disturbed by the sheer amount of effort required for even the simplest problems. “There had to be an easier way” he thought. That’s when he hit upon an idea that he could sink his teeth into: a three dimensional number that would simplify the equations that he had struggled with at Lockheed and revolutionize advanced engineering research. Drawing on his early training from Irish engineering schools, he was going to develop a math system similar to Alexander Rowan Hamilton’s “quaternion” but without all the number crunching. It would handle all the complexities of space missile calculations seamlessly, not unlike what Hamiltonian and Lagrangian mechanics did for engineering calculations. Now he had all the time in the world to pursue it. He could patent it, then the rest would be history.

I was studying math and physics at the time, including a class on the same topic related to Dad’s research: quaternions (an updated version they teach now called “complex variables”). My college textbook made the following curious note upon mentioning the contributions of Hamilton: “it is proven mathematically that it is impossible to have a 3 dimensional number. Any multi-dimensional number must be an even number of dimensions.” The text literally singled out the 3-dimensional number as particularly impossible even though (I'm sure) the mathematical proof considers all odd numbered dimensional numbers as equally impossible.
"A lot of engineers have been disappointed in the last 100 years or so." I thought.

The quaternion is a 4 dimensional number thus fitting the criteria. Since Dad had described his number as a “three dimensional number”, I knew that it was going to be an uphill battle for him to gain acceptance. From that source and conversations with my math professor, I concluded that what my father was trying to accomplish was not an uncommon undertaking by amateur mathematicians since Hamilton’s day. Not unlike the search for the “philosopher’s stone”, or the “perpetual motion machine” (except neither of those have been proven impossible)... probably pursued by engineers who like their math based on “terra ferma” and not one iota more !

It always struck me as significant that my father harked back to the original writings of arguably one of the most brilliant (and more importantly, Irish) mathematicians of all time: Alexander Rowan Hamilton. To me, it was more than coincidence that his mathematical research went hand in hand with his romantic love of the olde Irish Soude. I believe that working on his 3 dimensional number theory brought him back to the carefree days of youth, pursuing his first love: mathematics. Once his mind started to go (possibly from all the mental energy expended), all that was left was the nostalgia, which is what I saw. I’m sure his soul is sailing over Ireland to his heart’s content right now. And as soon as he figures out how, he may start haunting some of his old haunts. Just for old times sake.

“Davey” J. Smith