It’s October 27, 2019. I’m sitting across the table from my dad. Or the shell of him. Or whatever’s left after the shell starts to crack too. He wants a new computer, so my mom asked if I’d bring him an old laptop to play with. She’s hoping this will be good enough. At the moment, he’s using it to shop for a new computer. To fill the silence that drops like a gulf between us, I sort through my mom’s mostly neglected CD collection looking for something to put on. I come across the Beatle’s #1 album, a big seller in the 90s that started something of a comeback for the Fab Four, if they ever actually went away. My dad is tapping around on the old HP laptop and I pull out my newer MacBook Pro. He eyes it jealously. I’m just starting into some grading, thinking that maybe he’ll be entertained long enough for me to get through a few overdue papers, when he asks for his stylus pen.
Dad has Parkinson’s Disease, which makes touchscreens nearly impossible, so several years ago he started collecting these pens with rubber tips so he can tap at his phone, or iPad, or even his watch — with varying degrees of success. It’s hard to reconcile this frail old man — his weight having fallen precipitously close to the 100 lb. mark — and his stylus, with my dad, the computer whiz. I learned my ABCs sitting on his lap before a massive Atari computer in the early 1980s. My love of technology comes from him, though I was always jealous that his analytical, engineering mind was better at understanding how machines actually worked. He could fix computers; I only ever learned enough to break them. Never satisfied with the specs of store-bought models, Dad always built his own machines, and they always featured his particular flair. A favorite was the PC encased in what looked like — but wasn’t actually — a fish tank.
***
There’s an obscure character in the DC universe called the Decreator. He’s a kind of anti- God; in fact, he’s supposed to be God’s shadow and, in the Doom Patrol comics, he’s summoned by the Cult of the Unwritten Book to unmake the world. Of course, in the end, the good guys win, but the Decreator can’t ever really be defeated so, instead, he is slowed down. He is still unmaking the world, he’s just doing it so slowly as to be unnoticeable.
***
Parkinson’s Disease began unmaking Dad’s body first, but the advance was slow. There were tremors, of course. The first signs of what would come, but they were mild. This went on for a while and we could almost ignore it. And then, at some point, it became difficult for him to swallow and his voice took on a rasp that it hadn’t previously possessed. I was thinking about this recently, about how long he lived with the rasp before it became a whisper. I was thinking about what his voice sounded like before, and I honestly can’t remember. Was it deep? Bellowing? I don’t think so, but I really don’t remember.
Now, nobody can understand a word he says. He can’t project. When his voice first
started to go, his doctor’s suggested some voice exercises that would keep it stronger longer. He was supposed to shout like a banshee, essentially. But my parents owned a bed and breakfast inn and this would have been disruptive to guests, so, for a time, he would sit in the car and scream there. I was always jealous that he could do this — that he could just scream at the top of his lungs whenever he felt like it, with the blessing of medical professionals. Anyway, he did the exercises for a time and then stopped. And then, as the doctors said it would, his voice continued to degrade to the point that I can’t understand him on the first try ever. Add to this the mental degradation — when I ask him to repeat what he just said, he can’t remember — and communication is nearly impossible.
But communication with Dad was kind of always impossible; we never talked. My mom
and I had a near-constant dialogue. We never stopped talking. And maybe if we had I would’ve had something to say to Dad, but Mom is a vacuum for conversation — all the words end up in her. If Dad and I had talked more, I wonder, maybe I’d be better at interpreting his halted and gurgling speech. I don’t know. But he’s rasping now, and pointing and indicating that he wants his stylus. I hand it to him and he says something that I don’t understand before he starts tapping away at the screen of the laptop I brought for him.
It’s an old laptop; I got it in 2006, before my wife and I set off on a trip to East Africa. It
had a built-in camera — a novel feature at the time — and other media capabilities that I thought we needed for our trip. It was the last PC I owned before switching to a Mac. It still runs, though the battery doesn’t hold a charge and you have to turn Wi-Fi off and then back on again to get it working. I managed to install Windows 10 and clean it up with the hopes that it will satiate Dad’s need for a new PC. Dad’s doctors say that a side effect of the Parkinson’s meds is compulsiveness and obsession, which is supposed to explain why he’s so deadset on buying a new computer even though he has one that we bought for his birthday, the last time these urges came on. Anyway, it’s not looking likely that my old laptop is going to satisfy the desire. He’s tapping the stylus against the screen with increasing frustration, even as I keep telling him that it’s not a touchscreen.
In the moment, this makes me so angry. Like, I either have to get up and walk out of the
room or scream at him at the top of my lungs. But it would be months before I could say why.
***
On a Thursday morning in January, Dad fell. Again. It was a slow fall. He was holding
Mom’s hands on the way to the bathroom in the morning as she rushed to try to get him ready for the taxi that takes him to adult daycare. His legs just gave out, Mom said, and he slowly crumpled to the floor. And once he was on the floor, she couldn’t pick him up. She said he felt like dead weight. Dead weight. And he was doing funny things with his hands —holding on to the sleeve of his shirt, picking at things that weren’t there. Then, when his eyes rolled back into his head, she called the ambulance. They live in a small town, so two ambulances showed up. Mom said it felt like a dozen guys. And not one of them asked for his name. That’s what she said, suggesting that asking Dad’s name was a dignity he deserved, but didn’t receive.
He had pneumonia. Aspiration pneumonia, which, as far as I can tell, is the grossest kind.
It has to do with swallowing and things going down the wrong tube, which, I thought, was just an expression, but apparently there are tubes and one of them is the wrong one. Whatever the case, pneumonia was bad. As the entire family began to quietly orient ourselves toward the end, pneumonia was one of the complications that Dad’s doctor specifically named as a kind of canary in the coal mine. And, of course, the doctor was right; Dad would be dead within six weeks.
People say this all the time: it was fast, but also it was slow. He went from the hospital to
the nursing home to hospice care in a matter of weeks. How quickly his mind went from barely there to mostly gone. How quickly his legs forgot how to stand, let alone walk. How quickly he was being unmade.
It was fast, but also it was slow. We’d been losing Dad for years — it was almost as if the fundamentals of his personality were tied to his weight. As the pounds went, so went his mind. But nothing made his degradation more real to me than when I realized he no longer knew his way around a computer. When I watched him on that October day tapping fruitlessly at the screen of my old HP laptop with his stylus, looking up at me as if to ask why it wasn’t working and then — maybe seeing the revulsion on my face, or maybe just forgetting what he was going to say — stopping himself, mouth hanging open, before returning to his impotent tapping.
And yet, in one of the many paradoxes of his decline, this was also the moment I would
look back to when he was on his deathbed and I finally began to understand what my love for Dad looked like. It looked like profound admiration. Like awe. My dad was 5’6”. A giant in my family. A giant to me; I only ever reached 5’1”. But it never felt strange to me that I didn’t grow to be as tall as he was. How could I?
Ultimately, it was his way with computers, his way with all things mechanical and technical really that I always admired and aspired too. But I got my mother’s mind. I cry while listening to music and express my feelings in overwrought poetry. I always have. But sometimes, all I wanted was to be like Dad. To put all the feelings away, file them neatly in the same dusty drawer, presumably, that held his hundreds of floppy disks in the house I grew up in. I wanted to know how to take things apart and put them back together. But my mind doesn’t work like his. I can deconstruct, but I can never rebuild.
***
The night before my first visit, with my parents, to the nursing home where Dad would
eventually die, I stayed up too late tinkering with an old computer — Dad’s old computer. It was the one that was working perfectly fine when he first decided he needed a new one. We held him off for months until it began to seem cruel to do so any longer and, with his birthday approaching, my mom gave in and I helped Dad pick out a new Dell desktop computer. It wasn’t anything special, but it was new and he wanted it. I set it up for him and then asked what we should do with the massive old machine that had been humming along just fine under his desk. It doesn’t work, he told me. So I said I’d take it home and see what I can do with it.
What I did was erased the hard drive, installed a new operating system, and stuck it under
my desk. I’d use it as a makeshift server, and mostly as a kind of grown-up science project.
Whenever I got tired of reading or writing or grading, I’d fire it up and tinker. The night before the nursing home visit, I’d got it in my head that I could use the computer as a kind of pre-amp for my record player. All I really wanted to do was be able to switch between headphones and speakers when listening to records so that when I was working late into the evening and my family was all asleep, I wouldn’t disturb them. It seemed easy — maybe for someone else, maybe for Dad before — it would have been. But I couldn’t get it to work right. I know just enough about computers to get into trouble. That night, I took a machine that was working fine, and, in a matter of hours, made it completely unusable. I couldn’t even say what I did, but at around 3AM, I shut it down and dragged myself up the stairs and went to bed. I haven’t tried to turn it on again since.
***
Like most myths, the Decreator exists to help humans understand the parts of our
existence that are otherwise difficult to comprehend. Why does everything decay and die —sometimes fast, but mostly slowly? The Decreator. But I think it’s possible that every creator is also a decreator. That even as we make, we are always unmaking. I think this goes for God as well. Sometimes I think that decreation is as strong evidence for the existence of God as we can get. That we have a sense of what a made thing should be, or was, even as we see it unmade. It’s easier for me to believe in what was, rather than what is or could be because I’ve seen how things can be unmade, and in their unmaking I know better what they once were.
***
When Dad died in March, it was, in some ways, an afterthought. He’d already been
unmade. Parkinson’s Disease had been decreating him for years. It had taken everything I loved and admired about my dad. And yet, at the same time, it also made him available to me in a way I’d never had him before. I knew I loved him — he was my dad — but if I’m honest, I never knew why. It wasn’t until he could no longer be who he was to me that I was able to see him. It wasn’t until he was finally unmade that I could see what he had once been. That day in October as I sat watching him tap, tap, tap on that laptop screen, I wasn’t mad at him, not really. I was mad at the damn disease — the Decreator — that, by then, months before his body followed, was well on its way to unmaking his mind.
Image: photo by Mohamed M on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
- The Decreator - June 13, 2023