Racing to Retake a Beloved Trip, Before Dementia Takes Everything

Before we begin, would you repeat these three words? Apple, penny, table. I had my dad do something like this, too.

The evening before he was supposed to catch a cross-country flight to me, in Providence, R.I., my 72-year-old father said he didn’t need to set an alarm because he always wakes up at 6 or 7, a statement I knew to be untrue — or, at the very least, unreliable. He lives near Half Moon Bay, Calif., and now that he is retired, he usually rests in bed until 10:30 or 11. I suspected he no longer remembered how to set an alarm, and I couldn’t stop myself from asking him.

“I don’t need an alarm!” he bellowed. And so I set mine for 10:30 a.m. my time, 7:30 a.m. his, to allow him a fat hour and a half to get ready. When the bells startled the silence of my office the next day, I called him, and he sent me to voice mail. I dialed again.

“I’m up!” he snapped, panicked. Then he hung up. Ten minutes later, he phoned: “Why didn’t you give me any information? I don’t know the flight number or anything. I’m flying blind here.”

I had texted and emailed him his itinerary several times and discovered, with surprise, that he had lost the ability to open emails and text messages on the phone he’d had for years. He lives alone. His wife, my mom, was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 7 and died when I was 10, and he never remarried. I have no siblings. He has no nearby friends on whom I felt comfortable imposing to help him. I decided that I should just instruct him to check in at the ticket counter. The only thing he really needed was his passport and a credit card.

“We have a problem,” he said, calling me again. “My passport is expired.”

“We only applied for your passport in 2018,” I said. It would be good until 2028, I told him.