I wish I’d been there but, as usual, I wasn’t.
My father, Richard Field, was not a patient man. But in November 2022, he spent several hours watching his neighbour, Doris, piece together a jigsaw puzzle with the calmness of a heron waiting for its supper. I’m not sure what type of puzzle Doris was completing, but after nearly three hours she held the final piece between her thumb and forefinger, smiling as she sensed victory. My father, who had not spoken a word during the last few hours, and who had barely moved, leapt out of his chair with the agility of a five-year-old. He swiped the final puzzle piece from Doris’s trembling hand and popped it into his mouth. I like to think he grinned as he swallowed the final piece.
The previous time I’d seen my father, he had barely spoken at all. He had recently moved into a care home in north Shropshire, initially just for respite, after Alzheimer’s disease started colonising his mind. I’d arrived at his new residence with one of my younger sisters. We tried to coax our father into conversation and recognition, but he sat in a wingback chair, hunched and sunken, tugging at his unkempt beard with such force that he yanked out clumps. (I winced, but he did not.) We took our father outside, hoping that the fresh air might stimulate him. He turned to my sister and pointed at the pot of buddleias outside the home. ‘Patso’, he said, mistaking his daughter for his wife, ‘look at the poems’.
I have no idea whether my father mistook flowers for poems or whether there was something poetic he saw in that moment. But as I have learned with my father, Alzheimer’s snuffs out narrative; comments are no longer threaded together into conversations but instead are merely a stop–start series of utterances, often bearing no relation to each other. Start. Stop. Begin again. When I spend time with my father, I realise that I am seeking how to gather his scattered comments into a narrative I can understand. Flowers become poems, I hope, because there’s a part of my father still there, whose passion for the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, John Betjeman and Dylan Thomas was matched only by his delight in spending time with people. Until a few years ago, my father could recite long poems and sections of plays by heart. My older sister’s middle name is Cordelia because of my father’s love of King Lear. Now, when his three daughters profess their love, there is little or no recognition. ‘I fear I am not in my perfect mind’, Lear tells Cordelia, a line that my father would have delighted in using, had his memory allowed. In the early stages of his illness, he pinned to the wall of his flat a coaster which read ‘I have lost my mind and I am making no effort to look for it’.
I left the care home as my father sank back into a chair, his fingers fidgeting as he slept, hunched to one side.
Georges Perec’s masterpiece Life: A User’s Manual begins with a preamble about jigsaw puzzles. For Perec, who spent a career making and solving enigmas of one kind and another – including writing (in French) a novel without the letter ‘e’ – puzzles were a way of making sense of the world, a way of understanding how life, often seemingly unfathomable, is in fact a series of intricate puzzles that can be solved. Perec explained the art of puzzles as follows:
the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts.… The only thing that counts is the ability to link this piece to other pieces, and in that sense the art of the jigsaw puzzle has something in common with the art of go. The pieces are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing – just an impossible question, an opaque challenge.
As I have been trying to make sense of my father’s illness, I have thought often about jigsaw puzzles. There are missing pieces in the network of my father’s brain: recognition, nostalgia and contemplation no longer seem to function; his brain is suffocating with a disease that will not allow connections to be made. There are also missing pieces of information as I have tried to thread my father’s life together. He has one cousin, whom I have never met, and no siblings to fill in the gaps about his life. I could not write a biography of my father since there are so many details that drift, like seaweed, pulled by currents and then washed ashore. As I think about my father, I am reminded that we are creatures of narrative; as Joan Didion tells us, we impose stories on ‘the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience’. Biographers pull strands of detail together to make sense of lives, but in so doing they often cover over gaps in their subject’s life history, skating over moments of uncertainty. In my father’s case, the past is mixed up with the present and his future has become relentlessly familiar. He drifts around the care home today as he will drift around it tomorrow, his shipwrecked memories scattered, hidden and lost.
An extract from Walking in the dark: James Baldwin, my father, and me by Douglas Field, publishing in November 2024. Available to pre-order now from all good bookshops, online, and direct from our website here.
World Alzheimer’s Day (21st September) is a global effort to raise awareness and challenge the stigma surrounding Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
