Memory is not an exact,
camera-like, permanent process. “Neuroscience,
which has undergone extraordinary breakthroughs over recent years, tells us
there are reasons to distrust what we are certain we remember,” Jonathan Kozol
writes towards the end of his new memoir, The Theft of Memory: Losing my Father One Day at a Time (Crown, 2015). Age and
illness often have their way with us. The
worst is the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease which robs its victims of their
memories and decimates their personalities while caregivers must bear witness
to the destruction. In spare, clear
prose, Kozol takes us through the final years of caring for his parents, one of
whom, his father, suffers from Alzheimer’s.
It is a heartbreaking, yet unfortunately not uncommon, story.
Kozol is best known for his chronicles of poverty and educational deficiencies, especially for
children of color, in American society.
His books Death at An Early Age (Plume,
1985), The Night Is Dark and I Am Far
From Home (Touchstone, 1990), Rachel
and Her Children (Broadway Books, 2006), and Savage Inequalities (Broadway Books, 2012) all are classic
sociological texts that excoriate a system rife with injustice and discrimination. However, this book is a departure for him,
and in its pages, we see another side to this tireless advocate for children and
their educational future.
Kozol’s father was a
well-known neurologist in the Boston area.
Over the years, he had been involved in, and provided key testimony for,
a number of high profile cases, including the Patty Hearst trial and the Boston
Strangler murders. He also treated
playwright Eugene O’Neill for many years.
So it was with great trepidation that in 1994 at the age of 88, he faced
a diagnosis of a debilitating and eventually fatal brain disease. He knew something was wrong for some time, so
like the good researcher-doctor he was, he began to document his decline. He was familiar with the common symptoms he
experienced: getting lost on walks
through the neighborhood where he had lived for many years; the intense
restlessness that gradually destroyed his ability to concentrate; the falls and
resulting injuries that limited his mobility and independence. He eventually sat his son down for a
heart-to-heart discussion of his advancing disease. Through the onset of symptoms, his father
kept records of his own decline. He
studied himself as a patient or research subject and recorded everything in
memos and notes, all of which he turned over to his son as well as his patient
files from his years of private practice.
The disease robbed him of his clinical observational powers, but he made
every effort to document the crime.
What follows in the
book is a story not uncommon for those caring for elderly parents. Yet, the well-worn narrative path the elder
Kozol’s disease takes never lacks emotional punch. This is a story many of us have seen play out
in frustrating and tragic loss. We live
longer now, but do we not suffer more in this longevity? His father lived another fourteen years to
the age of 102, most of it in child-like oblivion and shadow. The decline of a parent or loved one in this
situation becomes a piece-by-piece, slow motion dismantling of a life as the
patient slips further and further away.
Death, I dare say, comes with a mixture of sadness and yes, relief. For nothing can assuage the growing confusion
and terror of the patient as his perceptions become scrambled and language
fails him. Nothing can console the
family in their grief and loss. Once
robbed of memory, of character and personality, who is this person we once
called grandfather and father, wife and mother?
Kozol renders all of
this so poetically. When his father
struggles to remember his own name in Yiddish, he tells his son, “It’s been a
good trip, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, Daddy,” Kozol
responds. “It’s been a beautiful
trip. You made it good for all of us.”
Kozol must also deal
with the decline of his mother in a parallel narrative but she remains lucid to
the end. For some of those years, while
his father was still in the hospital and nursing home, his mother continued to
occupy the family apartment. Kozol must
find a way to pay for his parents’ care as their financial resources dwindle to
nothing. Eventually, after many
heartbreaking pleas to take him out of the nursing home, Kozol gives in to his
father’s requests and brings him home to the apartment. His father and mother live in separate rooms,
sleep in separate beds, with separate professional caregivers who become like
family. These men and women in
particular are singled out by Kozol as his staunchest allies in the care of his
parents; they give heroically of their time and effort, more than any monetary
reward could ever compensate. He
portrays them as heroes in a narrative that will end tragically, and they
perform with unflinching sacrifice and dedication.
As in all his other
work, Kozol is a passionate writer and chronicler of injustice, in this case
the injustice of old age and disease.
Gone is the edge of anger and rage he has when railing against failing
schools and institutions that should safeguard children, their education and
their future. Here, there is only somber
reflection, a softer, more introspective side to a man who has devoted
everything to the crusade for social justice.
Here, his adversary is death, and he knows there is no victory. He can only bear witness to his father’s
life, his work, his character. In the
end, the memoir is the tender story of a father and son. The relationship, as is true in most
families, is not easy, and Kozol must come to terms with the times when he
might have disappointed his parent by pursuing a life of advocacy for the
marginalized. But his prose is
clear-eyed and for the most part, avoids overwrought sentimentality. He is never maudlin or hagiographic when analyzing
his parents and their familial relationship, their marriage, their lives. He is the consummate chronicler, a writer of
poetic grace and detail. The story of
his parents’ decline, especially his father’s, is told with love and
honesty. His rumination on the substance
of memory, its fallacies and reconstructions, is cogent and enlightening.
I did have one
persistent thought after finishing The
Theft of Memory. Jonathan Kozol is a
man who has fought for the well-being and education of thousands of children,
yet he has none of his own. Who will
stand up for this man in the gloaming of his own life? Who will chronicle his story and bear witness
when it comes to his untimely end? Having
no children or close family members of my own, I worry about such things. In Kozol’s case, every page of this book
validates him as the good son. As he is
for disadvantaged children in this world, he is an advocate for his parents as
they slip into the next. In his quiet,
dignified writing, Jonathan Kozol again speaks for those without a voice (in
this case, his father). There are many
heroic caregivers who do this every day.
They are all heroes. In the fall
of this life, they stand, human and true.
Through grief and loss, they stand.