He enters quiet as a wizard, head slightly bowed. A tall man older than my dad, his hair, beard and mustache are long and white, and I’ve seen him tromp down a snowy driveway not seeming to notice the icicles dangling from his chin. In the hairy nest of his face his eyes hide like indigo buntings.
Dad has been dying for several days now, sleeping around the clock, and Tim didn’t call to say he was coming this afternoon, nor does he say much when he comes. Mom goes to answer his soft knock, and he embraces her, embraces me, then walks silently over to the foot of Dad’s bed.
“Looks like you’ve got two angels looking down on you, Jim,” he says, glancing at the black-and-white posters of John Prine and Bob Dylan above Dad’s bed. He doesn’t say much else, pulls a harmonica out of his pocket and begins his song of lament. More monastic than melodic, Tim chants like a hermit come off his ridgetop to bellow for a dying man, singing about a Paradise my dad will surely recognize.
He comes to the refrain – And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County/ Down by the Green River where Paradise lay/ Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/ Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away – then he lifts his harmonica to his lips and wails on it. The chords of breath and reeds are tender as the song, as the crucified river, glorified.
It’s hard to imagine actual Paradise. The word, by its nature, is too much, too big, like a wall around a garden. But here where I kneel, where the music-maker sings to his dying friend about a suffering river, angels and Mom looking on, is Paradise human-sized: pain uplifted by friendship, the massive yet very quiet arrival of love in the dying place, chanted in the tone of one man’s voice; breath transmuted through reeds, beauty fleeting but imprinted on memory. Paradise, or at least one room in Paradise, the one where Dad dies.
***
A different day, a different room. In this one, the doctor takes a plastic brain out of his closet and tosses it onto a table like pair of dice. The various regions of the brain, each a different color, tumble apart, and he picks two of them up and tells us how these are shrinking in Dad. He proves this by asking Dad some simple questions that Dad can’t answer. I want to throw up as the man speaks, but I choke down my emotions, glance at Dad and wonder how he is hearing this.
Soon after, Mom and I sit in a larger meeting room down the hall where a team of brain specialists awaits. The doctors show us PET scan images of Dad’s brain. An abyss of blackness has grown among clouds of white, giving us physical evidence of which parts of Dad have actually gone away. They tell us the two conditions Dad might be experiencing – Alzheimer’s disease or Lewy body dementia – that more tests will be able to determine which it is, and the percentage chances that offspring might experience each.
Again, I don’t throw up, but ask a question instead: “What’s the difference between the two?”
The first doctor explains that with Lewy body, a person can hallucinate, and often those hallucinations are of spiders or snakes.
“Why spiders or snakes?” I ask, assuming someone must have researched why such mythically pregnant creatures visit these folks.
No one knows, he answers, then suggests it’s probably because they’re universally feared.
In this room, such logic is not surprising. Something is universally feared here, but I don’t think it’s snakes or spiders.
***
The doctor’s visit is helpful in many ways. Seeing the brain scan obliges Mom to fully embrace what has happened to her husband. After years of not being able to get a diagnosis and trying every holistic path possible, Mom finally accepts that physical healing is unlikely.
And as much as I don’t like the words “dementia” or “Alzheimer’s” – the first, so close to “demented,” is frightening, the second so reductive and strange-sounding – having a name for Dad’s experience does bring relief.
But helpful as they are, my soul rebels against those rooms where the brains are plastic, suffering is diminished to black-and-white images, and the human being – the one sitting there made of flesh and breath – is evidence of statistical models. Helpful as they are, I don’t like those rooms where nothing holy is bothered with. Those kinds of rooms have too much influence in our culture, shape too much of how we perceive each other. A diagnosis becomes too much of one’s identity.
Sure, Dad has Alzheimer’s, but does he have anything else? Are all the heavenly and earthly rooms in Dad’s soul vanishing into the black abyss of those brain scans, and now he’s only a reduction, something less?
Is there evidence of anything more?
***
Standing at the foot of Dad’s bed, Tim comes to the final verse of his lament:
When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am.
Tim might be the only person in the world who can sing John Prine’s song so truly.
In their friendship during Dad’s final years, Tim mostly ignored Dad’s diagnosis. I couldn’t tell whether this refusal to acknowledge Alzheimer’s was a conscious choice or just Tim’s laid back way or if he just didn’t pay it any mind.
Regardless, Tim never talked much about it. The two would go on long hikes together or play guitar in the basement. Long after I’d assumed Dad couldn’t do things like play ping pong, Tim came back one day and said, “Hey, man, your Dad can kick some butt in ping pong.”
In this room where Dad dies, other people bring other songs, but this one can only be Tim’s: a song about a river polluted, yes, but a part of Paradise still; a song about the very earthy Paradise, Kentucky, yes, but at the same time about Paradise, Paradise; a song with a suffering river flowing through it, yes, but that just can’t help smiling at that river, so beautiful it runs to Heaven.
*To hear John Prine’s “Paradise” click here.
I hope you are feeling fine on this beautiful, snow covered Saturday. I congratulate you on a beautifully written piece. I think your father is very proud of you in your meaningful, lyrical prose.
Thank you for sharing