The Theft of Memory: Losing My Father, One Day at a Time - Hardcover

Kozol, Jonathan

 
9780804140973: The Theft of Memory: Losing My Father, One Day at a Time
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0804140979 ISBN 13: 9780804140973
Verlag: Crown Pub, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

A Library Journal Best Book of 2015

National Book Award winner Jonathan Kozol is best known for his fifty years of work among our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable children. Now, in the most personal book of his career, he tells the story of his father’s life and work as a nationally noted specialist in disorders of the brain and his astonishing ability, at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, to explain the causes of his sickness and then to narrate, step-by-step, his slow descent into dementia.
 
Dr. Harry Kozol was born in Boston in 1906. Classically trained at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, he was an unusually intuitive clinician with a special gift for diagnosing interwoven elements of neurological and psychiatric illnesses in highly complicated and creative people. “One of the most intense relationships of his career,” his son recalls, “was with Eugene O’Neill, who moved to Boston in the last years of his life so my father could examine him and talk with him almost every day.” At a later stage in his career, he evaluated criminal defendants including Patricia Hearst and the Boston Strangler, Albert H. DeSalvo, who described to him in detail what was going through his mind while he was killing thirteen women.
 
But The Theft of Memory is not primarily about a doctor’s public life. The heart of the book lies in the bond between a father and his son and the ways that bond intensified even as Harry’s verbal skills and cogency progressively abandoned him. “Somehow,” the author says, “all those hours that we spent trying to fathom something that he wanted to express, or summon up a vivid piece of seemingly lost memory that still brought a smile to his eyes, left me with a deeper sense of intimate connection with my father than I’d ever felt before.”
 
Lyrical and stirring, The Theft of Memory is at once a tender tribute to a father from his son and a richly colored portrait of a devoted doctor who lived more than a century.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JONATHAN KOZOL is the author of Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and other award-winning books about young children and their public schools.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

The Onset of an Illness

My father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994 when he was eighty-­eight years old. He was a neurologist, with an extensive practice in psychiatry as well, and had taught for many years at one of Harvard’s major teaching hospitals. It was one of the doctors he had trained who made the formal diagnosis of his illness.

The earliest signs of problems with his memory appeared about four years before. There would be times when he found it difficult to summon up the name of someone he knew well. Now and then, he’d also lose his purchase on a set of facts with which he wanted to support an argument. At other times, he’d briefly lose his sense of continuity in the course of what was otherwise a cogent conversation.

But my father had tremendous social competence. He’d navigate these awkward moments with congenial ease. He’d smile at his own mistake, then offer me perhaps a glass of brandy, and sit down and question me about my work, or tell me of a book that he was reading, or share with me an anecdote about his own career.

Sometimes he would light his pipe. (He liked to take his time packing the tobacco.) The aroma of the smoke as it rose up about him remains in my memory, comfortably intertwined with the sense of relaxation, confidence, and calm that I identified with all those other quiet and consoling conversations we had had over the years.

Then, in 1991, he started to get lost at night when he’d go out to take a walk in Copley Square, which is in the neighborhood of Boston where he and my mother lived. He’d come home three hours later and report perhaps that he had made friends with a couple visiting from London or Geneva, or that he had been at Buddenbrooks, a bookstore that was close to his apartment, and had had a conversation with a foreign student whom he might have met there. My mother would worry terribly, of course, when he was gone so long. His interesting narratives, I thought, were meant to reassure her.

In spite of his confusions, he continued to try very hard to get some work done every day. He had given up his medical practice by that time, but he was determined to complete some papers he’d begun—­ summations of ideas that he’d developed in the course of his career on the neurological and psychiatric origins of certain forms of pathological behavior. A friend of mine, a teaching assistant at a local university, was helping him to organize his thoughts and bring coherence to his writing. On occasion, when my father asked, I would help him too.

It was not long after this, however, that my father’s restlessness would overcome his capability for concentration. After an hour or two of work, he would push the pages aside, get up from his desk, put on his jacket and an overcoat, if it was cold weather, go down to the lobby of the building, and head off into the nearby streets for another of his evening journeys.

One night in 1992, he asked me to sit down with him in a room of his apartment that he’d been using to store an old examination table and some other items from his former office. He said there was something he needed to discuss with me. He told me that he hadn’t yet decided whether it was wise to discuss this with my mother.

After he had closed the door, and both of us were seated, he started to lay out to me, in fairly graphic terms, what he described as “new and more specific indications” of problems he was having, which, he said, were “clearly neurological.” He checked again to be sure the door was firmly closed and then began explaining to me what he meant by “more specific indications.”

He said that he’d been having “spells”—­he added that he did not mean by this the incidents of memory loss, which he called “amnestic spells,” but something “of a different order altogether.” He spoke of these as “brief attacks of interrupted consciousness” during which he recognized “a sudden cutoff from my own surroundings,” “a definite blocking of ‘capacity,’ ” lasting “maybe only for a millisecond or for several seconds or a trifle more.” These episodes, he said, had been preceded in each instance by “an aura of impending danger” that he likened to the sense of warning epileptics often feel just prior to a seizure.

He did not say this with the urgent sense of self-­concern one might expect a series of events like these would ordinarily arouse. Instead, he spoke as if he was attempting to position these events at a distance from himself, so that he could speak of them with the detachment of an interested observer.

“I can pinpoint this as a neurologist,” he said, and he speculated that his recollection of what he’d been observing in himself might hold potential value for clinicians and researchers. For this reason, he plugged in his office tape machine, which he had used to dictate letters and reports on patients he was treating, and he recorded the remainder of our conversation.

He said that the amnestic spells were “clear-cut indications of degeneration of the cells in the cortex of the brain and in the hippocampus,” and he showed me by the placement of his hand exactly where the hippocampus lies. He speculated also that “mini-­strokes of very short duration,” which he termed “a vascular phenomenon,” were in all likelihood the reason for his episodes of interrupted consciousness.

Even more specific was the detail that he brought to the portrayal of that aura of anticipation that preceded this. He described it as “a feeling of uncommon and uncomfortable heat, ‘a hood of heat,’ as it were, that someone or some unknown force is drawing down over my forehead and my eyes . . . , as far down maybe as my chest or throat,” and in another and, to me, more memorable phrase, “a feeling of impending desecration of my own autonomy—­a premonition of my imminent removal from contextual reality. . . .”

During that experience, or intermingled somehow with the loss of consciousness that followed, my father told me he was suddenly aware of “a very bright light,” like that of “a locomotive bearing down upon you in a station.” But then, after a moment of reflection, he corrected this from singular to plural—­“No. Not a single light. Many lights”—­and then, as if he was, step by step, retrieving the experience with more and more precision, he said, “I’m now recalling it more clearly. This was not a static light. It was more like flashing lights, coming up in rhythm. Thousands of lights shooting upward . . . and symmetrical. I remember that this frightened me. I needed you to know this.”

It was the first time in the conversation that he let himself concede that he had been alarmed by this experience. “Those flashing lights are warnings of irregular electrical activity in the neurons, or between the neurons, which may terminate quite rapidly—­or may not. In my case, it ended very quickly.”

In the most recent incident, he recalled, “As I was coming out of this, I was aware of being very cold. There was cold sweat on my upper lip. Your mother was with me. She could see me shivering.”

When I asked him where he was, he said, “In a restaurant. We were having dinner.” As the attack subsided, he went on, “I heard a loud voice. ‘Harry, are you hearing me?’ ” Although my mother realized that he wasn’t well, he...

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Verlag
Crown Pub
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804140979
ISBN 13 
9780804140973
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
302
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