What My Father’s Experience Taught Me About Memory and the Brain

A couple of years ago, in the middle of the night, I crept downstairs to find my father sitting at the kitchen table, sobbing like a child.

My mother was beside him, trying to comfort him, an activity that took up more and more of her time. He was 87 and had dementia. It wasn’t unusual to find him upset or confused. But on this night, something seemed to be happening to him in real time — in 1941.

He was 6 years old, and was leaving Pittsburgh, the only home he had ever known, for an Air Force base in San Antonio, where his father had been ordered for duty. He and his parents were traveling there by train, transferring in Chicago.

It was the beginning of a lonely, difficult time for my father’s family, moving between Air Force bases in the South, where landlords sometimes turned them away because they were Catholic. An only child, he had been allowed to take one pet with him, a canary he was carrying in a birdcage.

As they were changing trains in Chicago, the bottom fell out of the cage. The canary flew out, up into the vaulted atrium of the station’s Great Hall. There was no way to get the bird — there was no time, they had to board a train to Texas. So my 6-year-old father shuffled after his parents, holding an empty cage.

In the years that had elapsed, he had negotiated arms treaties with the Soviets, had advised presidents, had served as a U.S. ambassador, all with the same watchful, wisecracking reserve. I thought I knew who he was. I could count on one hand the times I had seen him cry. Now here he was, sobbing over the canary as if it were yesterday.

This was all, it seemed, because of his brain. He had fallen hard in their house in Washington, D.C., smacking his head on the hardwood floor. Blood rushed into spaces in his brain, and cells starved of oxygen began to die. Eventually, he was diagnosed with vascular dementia, which is most often caused by strokes.

For five years after that, my parents lived with my family outside Boston, and we learned firsthand how brain injury affects behavior. My father recovered in some ways, but he became chaotic, his thoughts broken into mirror shards.

The biggest problem was that he had no idea where he was. Specifically, he did not know why he was living with us in Massachusetts, and no matter how many times we tried to remind him, over and over, he tried to leave. We would catch him packing the car, and gently — or not so gently — guide him back into the house.

This child-father was full of surprises. He bought surprising things: Five laptops! A cruise on the Norwegian fjords! Recurring $2 donations to every Democrat running for any office, anywhere! Once, in a weeklong cascade of Amazon deliveries, we received seven identical birdbaths from China.