A Parting Thought
My father was blind. But there was one thing he saw clearly.

By Gene Weingarten
Sunday, May 24, 2009

No one accepted physical deterioration with greater grace and humor than my father. Over the last two decades of his life, his eyesight clouded into a soup -- at first, a nice consomme, but eventually minestrone, and a hearty one.

He was effectively blind, but remarkably cheerful about it. He read The Washington Post front to back every day, all day, on a device that magnified each letter to the size of a fist; polysyllabic words required three screens' worth of letters and a nimble short-term memory. My father understood the absurdity of it. He said that using this machine was like putting on mittens to tie your shoes.

At his assisted-living facility, my father dined with the same man every day for years. They became good friends, sharing observations and the genteel sort of intimacies consistent with two gentlemen who addressed each other as "Mr. Williams" and "Mr. Weingarten."

One day my father told me that Mr. Williams had died. He was sad, but smiling.

"I read his obituary in the paper today, and I learned something about him I never knew. Everyone else here knew it, but I didn't." He wanted me to guess.

"He was rich?"

"Nope!"

"He was famous?"

"Nope!"

"I give up, Pop."

"He was black!"

Fifteen years a widower, at 85 my father found a girlfriend. Jeanette was another resident at his complex; her age and the thermostat setting in her apartment were both in the mid-90s. I liked her but could hardly bear to spend five minutes in her place.

My father never seemed to mind at all. Then one day after a visit to Jeanette, he laughed and said, "It's like the woman lives on the surface of Mercury." My father remained mentally sharp until two years before his death, when he fell under the thrall of a particularly insidious form of dementia. His gaps in cognition were unpredictable; the fog came and went. Analytical as always, my father liked me to test his mind from time to time with questions for which he ought to have known the answers. Sometimes he was perfect, sometimes less so. Nothing was worse than the day I asked him for the first name of my mother's only sister. He couldn't remember it. I had to ask one more question. It was followed by a long, painful silence. "Oboyoboy," was all he said. No, he could not remember my mother's first name, either.

The look on his face was as hopeless as I'd ever seen. Scouring the room for anything to change the subject, my eyes fell on the sports section. "Hey," I blurted, "the Yankees have picked up Al Leiter!"

My father brightened. "Oh, he's really good! Lefty, used to be with the Mets!"

He started laughing even before I did.

For the final few months of his life, as he sank into rambling incoherence, my father needed round-the-clock nursing. My visits became less frequent: What was the point? My father was gone, and the babbling person in that bed did not know who I was, or even that I was there.

Not everything that hap-pens in a writer's life is appropriate to publish, and you would not be reading this column except for one fact. When I came to visit my father one day in September 2006, a few weeks before his death, the nurse had unexpected news:

"He said something."

She meant he had said something that made sense. One sentence had fought its way through the swirling, toxic churn and came out intact. My father was an uncomplicated man; in a way, that was his genius. He taught me that only a few things are important in life, and that those are the only things that matter at all. I never really got a chance to thank him for that.

My father's last coherent words were: "My grand-daughter is going to be an animal doctor."

She graduates from vet school today, Pop.

Gene Weingarten can be reached at weingarten@washpost.com. Chat with him online Tuesdays at noon.