After Getting Alzheimer’s, He Wasn’t the Same

I started writing the pieces of what turned into My Father, Humming, not as poems about Alzheimer’s, but as journal entries. I was trying to understand: “What is going on here?” This is a person who once was brilliant. Is that still there, inside, and we just don’t know how to get access to it? Or is it gone, now that dementia has set in?

My father humming along with me showed that, no matter how much he seemed to have declined with Alzheimer’s disease, he was still there, and that gave me new respect and appreciation: the person who had been my father was still there. He wasn’t the same, but he had not disappeared.