Tuesdays in Dad’s Old Aisles

The diagnosis came in August. Vascular dementia, said the neurologist in Springfield, with the kind of careful face doctors keep for those moments. She said it would come in steps, not a slope. Good weeks and then a drop.

She said routine and familiar places were the best medicine we had. I wrote that down in the margin of a pamphlet, and I underlined it twice.

So when Neil banned him, I did what I think a daughter does. I tried everything else first.

I called the district office. A pleasant young woman in Peoria said she would pass my concern to Mr. Keene. Mr. Keene never called back.

I looked into the day program at the senior center in Pittsfield. It was clean and the staff was kind. They had a sign-in sheet and a puzzle table and a woman named Dottie who played the piano after lunch.

Dad lasted two mornings.

The second morning, the center called me at work. He was sitting in a plastic chair by the door with his jacket zipped to the chin. He had asked a volunteer eleven times when they were going home.

When I came to get him he stood up and said, “Meredith, I don’t know these people.”

I could have called a lawyer, I suppose. People told me to. My coworker Karen said Neil could not keep a customer out for no reason. But he had a reason, a real one, with a memo behind it.

And a letter from a lawyer would not give my father back his place. It would give him a fight he would not understand and a cousin who would never forgive him for it.

There was a simpler fact under all of it, and I could not get around it.

The store was the last place in the world where my father still knew exactly who he was.

At home, he forgot where the bathroom was twice a week. He forgot that Mom was gone and I had to tell him again, and each time he took the news like it was brand new. That is a grief I would not wish on anyone.

But in the store, his feet knew the way. His hands knew the shelves. People said his name and he said theirs.

I could not bear to take that from him. I could not take the one room left in the house of his mind where the lights still worked.

So the second Tuesday in September, I made a decision. I did not call Neil. I did not ask permission.

Tuesday mornings I have off. The dental office is closed, because Dr. Haas golfs. I got Dad up at six, fed him oatmeal, found his tan jacket on the hook and put it on him.

I told him we were going to check on the soup.