Finding my Father

(This essay was first published in Connecticut Medicine, May 2011, in the section, "Physician as Essayist," under the title, "Losing my father's mind," as well as by the American Academy of Ophthalmology in the Scope Journal, September 2011).         

My father, Piero de Luise MD, at age 55
Anesthesiologist at
South Nassau Communities Hospital
Rockville Centre, New York, June 1975

Everyone thinks that they know their parents.
I certainly thought that I knew my father.

Dad was this complex distillation of the elements fire and water. He was born on the volcanic island of Ischia, off the coast of Naples, Italy, an environment that created such an intensity in him, a burning curiosity for life and nature, especially for the sea. Yet right below the surface there was always this volatility, an ever-present quickness to be enraged. 

Even my father’s name had an elemental quality to it – Piero – from the Greek petros, “a rock or a stone.”
Of course !  
What a perfect name for my Dad! He used to tell me how as a kid he loved to hang around the craggy shorelines of his beloved island. There he would dive for sea urchins, pluck them from underwater rocks with his bare hands, then quickly scoop out and devour their custardy innards.

My father was a polyglot. He was fluent in Italian, English and Spanish, passable in French, and as a man of his time, an expert in Esperanto.
He told me that he became a physician not so much for a love for medicine, as I had done, but to become a ship’s officer, to sail the Mediterranean, and explore the cultures that had long fascinated him -  Malta and Crete and the far-flung Aeolian islands.

Dad was a champion swimmer and diver, priding himself on his ability to stay submerged, once for two minutes, Houdini-like, to the amazement and delight of his grandchildren.
My father pretty much only ate fish, and he stopped smoking on the day my older sister was born. Nicorettes didn’t exist then; there was just his force of will.
For someone who claimed not to have a love of healing, Dad became a sought-after anesthesiologist.  His colleagues would call him to their operating rooms for him to perform the most difficult techniques in their specialty, spinal anesthesia and pediatric intubation.  At his retirement party, the staff gave him a gold chain, on which hung a charm in the shape of a laryngoscope, and he wore this around his neck, as a talisman, for the rest of his life.
So, my father was this many-splendored thing. He reminded me of that mythic hero Odysseus, whom Homer characterized as polytropos,  the multifaceted Odysseus.
Yes! That was my Dad ! This complex crystal.
I thought that I knew him. 

And then it happened.
It was a September day in 1998, and Dad was in his study writing a check. Suddenly, he called out for my mother. It seemed that he had forgotten how to sign his name. Mom was stunned, and quietly sobbed. She didn’t need a residency in neurology to know that Dad had the beginnings of Alzheimer Disease.

Oh yes, of course, he went through the gauntlet – neurologists, psychiatrists, internists – hoping for a diagnosis, any diagnosis, except Alzheimer Disease.
But there was no other diagnosis. 

Slowly and inexorably, my father slipped into the tenebrous branches of that unutterable disease. My mother and sisters came to his aid even as I pulled away, unable to bear the pain that Dad, our dad, My Dad, was losing his amazing and beautiful mind.
I couldn’t deal with what was happening to him, and I felt this gnawing guilt about all the chances I had lost over the years to know him better. 

How many times did Dad call me at home late at night, to talk about politics, American politics and Italian politics, and I had cut him off. How many weekends did I have something else to do with our kids or with friends, instead of driving down to Long Island to visit him. How many times did I tell him, Yes, Dad! I will go with you on a trip, to one of your psychic spaces, to Italy or the Galapagos. But I never did.

How many opportunities did I squander, precious moments to be in the present moment with my father, before he started to disappear?
At first, he railed against his disease, but he gradually accepted it. At the rest home, as they were placing the identification bracelet on his wrist, he looked at it quizzically for what seemed an eternity, and then announced to me and Mom,  “Alzheimer! That’s it ! That’s mine!”
I wept uncontrollably in front of him and a woman whom I had never met before; it was his caretaker.
Over the years, a glacially slow decade, Dad continued to fail, dissolving away. Finally, with my father not much more than a little man curled up into a ball clutching a stuffed monkey, in bed at home (Mom had taken him back, better to care for him she said), and after a number of hospital admissions for pneumonia, our family requested hospice.
Shortly thereafter, Dad died.
Without rage. Peacefully.

About a year after my father’s passing, on my 58th birthday, I and my family were on vacation in Palm Beach and went to a wonderful restaurant to celebrate.
As we were leaving, the maitre d’  spotted an elderly well-dressed man, a long-time customer of his, who was also exiting at the same time, and for some inexplicable reason, he decided to introduce us. 
The elderly man asked my name, and I told him, "Vincent de Luise."
He stared at me. “I know that name,” he said.

“Where did you grow up?” he asked. 

“Garden City, Long Island,” I responded. 

The gentleman, out of the wondrous mystery of the universe, seemed to be having a revelation. His eyes brightened, he came close to me and in a hushed voice, whispered in my ear, “Vincent, I knew your father. We were classmates in medical school right after the War. I will never forget how proud he was to become a doctor.”

And at that moment, I realized that I did know my father very well.
I was just a little bit too late.

Copyright 2011  Vincent de Luise MD