A visit from The Healing Muse: 'Heathens for the Day'

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Nancy Geyer is a writer from Washington, DC, whose work has appeared in the Georgia Review, the Iowa Review and New England Review. She sent us a poignant essay about caring for a parent who's experiencing cognitive decline. Here's her essay, "Heathens for the Day," which reminds us how illness spreads suffering throughout a family.

When I arrive at his house with a suitcase, my father leads me upstairs to L's bedroom and says, "I trust this will be satisfactory?"

He sometimes speaks in such formalities, jokester that he can be, but these days, I'm not sure what's what. Is he playing the proprietor of a rooming house because he needs time to figure out which daughter I am? Should I pretend it's only a joke and act the paying guest?

L, my half-sister and twenty-nine years my junior, is away at college. It's late in the evening, so I read for a while in her bed, then turn off her bedside lamp. There are glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling, as there were on mine long ago. I can't discern any familiar constellations, though. Maybe L, unlike me, attempted to arrange the stars herself, our father sensing, even then, that he was not up to the task. Or maybe what's up there is accurate, a part of the sky I don't know.

In the morning, when I go downstairs, my father looks befuddled by my presence. I don't want to risk offending him by stating who I am, so I casually ask if he's brought in the newspaper. He looks in his study, where there's a note on a whiteboard to remind him that his wife is away, and concludes that he hasn't. After opening the front door and peeking out, he puts on his raincoat and unfurls an umbrella to fetch the paper from the far end of the front walk.

"You'd think they could have tossed the paper a little closer to the door," I say when he returns, dripping. My words are met with silence.

After I shower and dress, my father, who now sleeps on the first floor, comes upstairs and calls out "Hello." I go out into the hallway to let him know that he and I are the only ones at home. He's changed into a jacket and bow tie.

Oh no. He thinks we're going to church. The newspaper must have reminded him; he relies on it as a calendar, somehow remembering to drop it into the recycling bin each night. But I'm not sure how to get to his church. I doubt he even goes anymore.

I fear that my father, a retired professor and Methodist minister, will tell me they're expecting him, that he must take his place in the choir. But instead he says brightly, "So we're going to be heathens today?"

Thank God. "Yes," I say, "we're going to be heathens today!"

I ask him if he's had breakfast and he says he can't remember. So I make toast and he sprinkles it with cinnamon sugar. When we've finished eating, he clears our dishes from the table and washes them. He never did these tasks while I was growing up. Perhaps running water and a plate in his hands give him a purchase on the here and now.

An hour or so later, I remind my father that he wanted to shave. He goes upstairs to the master bathroom. I wait a few minutes and then go up to see if he's found his razor and shaving cream. "I wasn't looking for them," he replies, clearly annoyed. Stubble agitates him, makes him imagine a full beard, so I gently tell him again that he had told me he wanted to shave. Silence. Later, back downstairs, when I ask him if he'd shaved, he feels about his face and says, with obvious satisfaction, "Why, yes I did!"

This is how the rest of the morning goes, and then the afternoon, each of us feeling our way.

For dinner, I take the easy way out and order in Chinese food, my father's favorite. He begins his meal by unwrapping and cracking open his cookie. A child might do this -- reach for the cookie first -- but my father's main interest seems to be his fortune. "You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough," he reads aloud.

"That's not very helpful," I say.

"No, it isn't," he responds.

We eat the main course and then he picks up the fortune again, as if for the first time. "Not true," he finally says. But before that sour thought has a chance to hang around, an ice cream truck goes by to the tune of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm." My father leaves his chair and rushes to the piano to accompany the truck as long as it lingers in the neighborhood, which is for quite a while. He plays in plays and we sing and sing, our song stuck on repeat.