“Why do you let people walk over you?”
He stared at the ceiling.
“Because the alternative is worse.”
“What alternative?”
He looked at me.
For a moment, I saw something old and frightened behind his eyes.
“Becoming my father.”
Then he rolled over and turned off the light.
I had met his father, Frank, only a handful of times before Owen and I married.
Frank was a large man.
Louder than everyone around him.
His temper could change the atmosphere of a room instantly.
At one barbecue, he shouted at a grill because the charcoal wouldn’t light.
At a restaurant, he berated a waitress because his coffee wasn’t hot enough.
Another time, he yelled at Owen’s mother because she had parked too close to the curb.
At our engagement party, he drank too much and spent part of the evening angrily arguing about politics with nobody in particular.
Afterward, Owen drove home in silence.
Finally he said,
“He wasn’t always this bad.”
I looked at him.
“No?”
His hands tightened around the steering wheel.
“No.”
A pause.
“He used to be worse.”
Four years ago, Owen’s mother died suddenly after a stroke.
For a while, Frank managed on his own.
Then he started forgetting things.
Keys.
Meals.
Appointments.
Eventually, the problems became more serious.
One night he called Owen at three in the morning asking why his wife hadn’t returned from the store.
Another time he left the stove on.
Then he got lost driving to a grocery store he had visited for thirty years.
A stranger found him sitting in a gas-station parking lot, confused and terrified.
The diagnosis was dementia.
It progressed quickly.
Lisa lived across the country and said she couldn’t take him.
She had children.
A demanding job.
A long list of reasons.
So Frank moved in with us.
Our office became his bedroom.
We installed alarms on the doors.
We locked away certain kitchen items.
We hid the car keys.
Some days he was almost the Frank Owen remembered.
He watched old westerns and complained that television had gone downhill.
Other days he wandered through the house asking where his wife was.
Sometimes fear turned into anger.
