When my mother died a few years ago, my father was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. He still lived alone, with the help of a housekeeper and me, and he was still driving. Then a friend called to say she had seen someone who looked like him hitchhiking near the mall. That was the moment I decided to spend even more time with him, and the way to do it was to help him finish his book.
He had been writing a memoir before his illness began, called "Chasing Steam in Mexico." It recounts his years in Tlaxcala in the late 1950s and 1960s, when he served as a conscientious objector building roads and drilling wells, and his travels to photograph steam engines and the crews who ran them. An avid rail fan since boyhood, he loved the drama of the dark smoke, the wild landscapes, and the generosity of the engineers who welcomed him into their cabs.
We began meeting several times a week at his desk, with a fire in the wood stove and Mexican folk music playing. We read his manuscript aloud and edited as we went, and we chose the photographs to accompany each story. Studies suggest that making art can ease anxiety and improve mood and focus, and I saw this firsthand. Even when he arrived in a foul mood, a few hours of reading would lift his spirits and sharpen his memory as he talked about wheel arrangements and a sweltering dinner party in Yucatán.
The project changed me as well. Working on the book felt like entering a time capsule, free of news and social media. I stopped focusing on what was going wrong and concentrated on what we were creating. It gave us a new way to connect, let me help without hovering, and gave him a role in his own care. Above all, I got to know the man he was before I was born. When he later developed sepsis and stopped driving, we were racing the disease to finish the book, but the project kept our focus on something larger than his decline.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing